A ‘cantankerous and cunning’ new Mickey Mouse

My colleague Brooks Barnes has a great story in tomorrow’s paper, online now, about Disney’s attempts to reboot Mickey Mouse, out of concerns “that Mickey has become more of a corporate symbol than a beloved character for recent generations of young people.”

“Mickey is never going to be evil or go around killing people,” sez the creative director for Epic Mickey, a new video game. But he adds: “I wanted him to be able to be naughty — when you’re playing as Mickey you can misbehave and even be a little selfish.”

Somewhat frightening: “The game also features a disemboweled, robotic Donald Duck and a ‘twisted, broken, dangerous’ version of Disneyland’s ‘It’s a Small World.’ ”

Brooks has been on a roll with Disney stories recently, all of them must-reads.

Johnston clarification: Not really Frogger

Seth Schiesel reviews Hi, How Are You, the new iPhone video game based to some degree on Daniel Johnston iconography. Earlier coverage portrayed it as “a kind of psycho-religious version of Frogger,” but Schiesel sets the record straight:

Frogger is about dodging objects in motion and jumping from one moving platform to another. Hi, How Are You is about tilting the iPhone itself to direct a little cartoonlike figure along pathways suspended in space without falling off. (You can also put your finger on a virtual joystick on the iPhone screen instead of using the motion-sensitive tilt controls.)

So in its game play Hi, How Are You is very similar to Sega’s eight-year-old Super Monkey Ball franchise, a parallel that becomes obvious partway through, when you transition from controlling a bouncing cube with eyes to controlling a rolling ball with eyes.

OK!

Daniel Johnston vidgame: A ‘psycho-religious Frogger’

Wonderful piece by Randy Kennedy today about a new iPhone game inspired by Daniel Johnston, “who has never owned any kind of cellphone, let alone an iPhone, and has no telephone at all in his house in a small town northwest of Houston.”

The game — called “Hi, How Are You,” one of Mr. Johnson’s catchphrases — was created by two designers in Austin, Tex., who said they had always been enamored of Mr. Johnston’s music and wanted to find an entertaining way to use it while bringing to life the characters that people his artwork. They have names like Jeremiah the Innocent (who takes the form of, among others, a frog with eyes on stalks) and Joe Boxer (a pugilist missing the top of his head).

The result is a kind of psycho-religious version of Frogger, the classic arcade game. In Frogger the objective is to make it, unsquashed and undrowned, across a busy highway and a rushing river. In “Hi, How Are You” it is to navigate Jeremiah and other embodiments of the protagonist through a morally fraught three-dimensional world of glowing red demon babies and other malign forces seeking to keep him from the girl of his dreams, a recurring motif for Mr. Johnston, who suffers from severe bipolar disorder.

UPDATE: Here’s a video of the game.

Oh dear God

Stereogum has the story on this horror:

‘UNLOCKED KURT COBAIN SINGS BON JOVI IN GUITAR HERO 5’

UPDATE, where credit is due: Looks like Rolling Stone had this earlier, crediting Agent M Loves Tacos.

Kurt’s Guitar Hero avatar: Cardigan skank or ‘Adonis’?

Rolling Stone has a piece today on the story behind Kurt Cobain’s character in Guitar Hero 5. Getting Nirvana’s music in the game seems to have taken some wrangling with Courtney Love and Universal Publishing, but also apparently with Dave Grohl, the magazine reports.

Not surprisingly, though, it sounds as if Courtney was a particularly difficult negotiation. An Activision executive explains some of her requests, particularly on how buff the digital Kurt would be:

Naturally, Love did have some concerns. Namely, Cobain’s physique, [exec Tim] Riley reveals. “Courtney supplied us with photos and videos and knew exactly what she wanted Kurt to look like,” he says. “She picked the wardrobe and hair style, which turned out to be the ‘Teen Spirit’ look, then we went back and forth over changes — some subtle, some not so subtle.” In column B? Love’s reference to the Greek God Adonis, whose youthful good looks made the male deity an object of desire. “She certainly had a physical image in mind,” says Riley. “She wanted him to have that sort of athletic definition but not overly so.”

Was it Courtney or Dave Grohl who got the Daniel Johnston shirt in there? And does Daniel get any licensing bread from this?

Rolling Stone also has a brief video of scenes from the game’s Nirvana songs, which are “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and a live version of “Lithium.” On this clip, at least, there’s virtually no screen time for any of the rest of the band, but curiously there is another guitarist on stage, and it looks vaguely like Pat Smear. Which might be a slight anachronism: Smear joined for the In Utero tour, when Cobain didn’t look like this anymore.