The Mickey Mouse Project
(This story is either loosely based on real events, or it was one fuck of a massive hallucination I had that week! Either way, it took place at a different time in my life when I was a very different person. I'm still a dickhead - I just don't take as many drugs now.)
At some point in everybody’s life, they think up something so incredibly stupid and misguided, that it is simply laughable in hindsight that the concept was ever deemed worthy of attempting in the first place. And yet, you did it anyway.
This is one such story.
During the ‘Spring Break’ week in my third year at the University of Waterloo, studying Medieval History & Classics, I happened to be living with four other equally dysfunctional freaks at 130 Albert Street.
It was there that a particular fiendish plot was hatched, soaked in continuous Mescaline doses, to foul up the very purist essence of one, Mickey Mouse – on his home turf no less! The disastrous plot would forever go down in the annals of asinine student pranks gone wrong, as the infamous “Mickey Mouse Project”.
The original concept of the ‘Mickey Mouse Project’ began as a ludicrous dare, from one roommate to another while lying bug-eyed on the living room couches after a few too many bong hits and chemically laced Mimosa’s and watching Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ – our usual Sunday house ritual.
And so it began. The gauntlet had been thrown down.
It was agreed upon by the members of our house that together we would spend our weeks holiday away from our studies, planning and carrying out the perfect caper – to get a posed photograph of Mickey Mouse being bent over and violated by one of us degenerate jagoffs.
Imagine THAT photo on the front of a t-shirt! We’d be hailed as gods among our peers, and ensure us a due reputation as the undisputed kings of debauched student debacles for years to come on campus. We’d all become folk heroes for future generations of students, slackers, and jackasses alike.
Or so we thought.
It was settled. We spent the next three days gobbling down hallucinogens by the bucketful and craftily planning out our master plan with ‘Dirty Dozen’ style meticulousness.
And under these preposterous pretenses, we departed on a long, adrenaline fueled two-day car journey to the Sunshine State and the Magic Kingdom. Come to think of it, in our haste to launch our hastily prepared MO, we left with only our toothbrushes, a carton of smokes, jars of instant coffee, our trusty ATM cards, and enough hidden hallucinogens to keep Hunter S. Thompson wired until the year 3000. All set to the soundtrack of Primal Scream’s animated classic acid album ‘Screamadelica’:
““Just what is it that you want to do?
We wanna be free
We wanna be free to do what we wanna do
And we wanna get loaded
And we wanna have a good time
That’s what we’re gonna do.”
The road trip itself was a blur of road signs and roadside fast food burgers. By the time we arrived at our staging base of operations, “Foxbase Alpha” as we likened to call it (also known to the locals as the ‘Kississimee Comfort Inn’) just ouside Orlando, there was a virtual waft of toxic fart that emanated from the opened car doors so thick that you could spread it on toast.
But what did we care? We hadn’t slept for 48 hours and were higher than Rosie O’Donnell’s cholesterol count after a Denny’s ‘All-U-Can-Eat’ dinner buffet. Our eyes burned red with a crazy intensity as our focus immediately began to shift to the task at hand:
To besmirch Mickey!
That night, we hunkered down in our hotel room with a case of Corona and more doses of Mescaline, and carefully ran through our mission plan in preparation for our attack first thing at dawn the next morning.
“One: down to the road block we've just begun - Two: the guards are through - Three: the Majors men are on a spree - Four: Major and Waterslaw go through the door - Five: Pinkley stays out in the drive - Six: the Major gives the rope a fix - Seven: Waterslaw throws the hook to heaven - Eight: Mayonnaise has got a date - Nine: the other guys go up the line - Ten: Sawyer and Gilpen are in the pen - Eleven: Posey guards points Five and Seven - Twelve: Major and Waterslaw go down to the delve - Thirteen: Franco goes up without being seen - Fourteen: Zero hour, Mayonnaise cuts the cable Franco cuts the phone - Fifteen: Franco goes in where the others have been - Sixteen: we all come out like it's Halloween.”
Except in this mission’s operation count-off, Donald Duck was not on the bridge with a sub-machine gun, he was in position along Main Street with a high-speed shutter camera.
How could we possible fail? Yeah right!
The next morning, after an early complimentary Continental Breakfast at the hotels restaurant that was in itself, a scene right out of Animal House (clearly the hotel staff were not prepared for the likes of four sweaty, twitchy, stinky, malnourished freaks such as ourselves buzzing like a hive of bees), we set about putting our dastardly plan into action.
The initial idea was to locate our target, and then set in motion the sequence of events that would ultimately lead Mickey into a particularly precarious body position, bent over forward, from which he could be taken advantage of from behind with a daftly planted pelvic thrust into the mouse’s costumed ass for the benefit of a waiting camera.
Voila! Instant prankster immortality!
We'd make the Merry Prankers look like a bunch of faggy street mimes.
The entire success of the mission of course, relied on the actual finding of Mickey Mouse in the first place. A task, that for four tripping thrill seekers, proved to be much more difficult than that which was initially believed. For those of you church going smarty pant’s who may never have had the opportunity to experience the Magic Kingdom on numerous doses of mescaline, Walt Disney World is the center vortex from which all things trippy emanate and radiate outward through the universe. This only becomes clear after a few hundred viewings of Fantasia on psychedelically charged Sunday afternoons, but you can take my word on it.
Hard as it was in our condition to focus on the goal, we searched out Mickey Mouse for hours. We practiced our aim at the Frontierland Shootin’ Arcade, were lured into a hypnotic state with the incessant “Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room” song in Adventureland, literally warped through time on Space Mountain in Tomarrowland*, and giggled for hours over the ‘Dumbo the Flying Elephant’ amusement ride in Fantasyland**; but still no Mickey Mouse!
Day One ended in defeat. Sure we saw the opportunity to wage our scheme upon other unsuspecting Walt Disney characters – but we wanted the Mouse. To truly capture the triumphant lunacy of the whole shameful event, we wanted the big kingpin over all the Disney characters.
Pluto or Tigger would just not do!
We reluctantly returned to our “Foxbase Alpha” with more Corona’s and a few more handfuls of mood adjusters, and proceeded to settle into a more serious debate on how to locate our prime directive in a more efficient and expedient manner the next day.
Day Two began in much the same way, one near ejecting from a local Lum’s restaurant, and one insane objective. We arrived at the Disney World gates promptly at 8:00AM, pure exhaustion and dementia brewing in our bloodstreams like a virus. The search for Mickey Mouse continued.
Luckily, we did not have long too look on this particular day, since as luck would have it, Mickey happened to be strolling up and down Main Street USA as soon as stepped off the park monorail.
“BINGO - YOU RAT BASTARD!”
Like a well-oiled machine***, our band of brothers spread out and prepared themselves for action.
Our originally conceived plan called for me to approach our mark under the false pretenses of having his photo taken with me by my unassuming “companion” friend. The third member of our posse would be in charge of temporarily distracting Mickey’s partnered liaison, while the last fourth member of of team of misfits, the anchor, positioned himself off to the side of the action prepared to snap the prize the second the pigeon takes the bait.
Looking back, I now recognize the major fault in our Modus Operandi: that Disney characters are not likely to just simply bend over on their own; coaxed or otherwise. Chances are, the person inside the Mickey suit never even saw my lame attempts to casually persuade him to bend over facing our anchorman with the camera.
I dropped my wallet at his feet hoping Mickey would just chivalrously bend over to retrieve it for me, but instead he never even flinched – he just beamed and waved obliviously.
I tried bowing to him in Japanese fashion hoping that he, being the culturally diverse cartoon debutante that he is, would reciprocate my gesture with his own polite bow giving me the chance to leap behind him in a lurid thrusting gesture – but still no dice.
And then my chemically altered universe and the complete futility of what I was trying to do began to implode in on me like dark matter on a collapsing neutron star. That is to say, I panicked.
Our decoy had successfully distracted Mickey’s attendant by pretending to be a lost Armenian looking for Peter Pan shoelaces, the anchor with his prepared camera in hand, my “companion” was becoming antsy knowing that our window of opportunity was closing – and still the mouse refused to cooperate!
So, in a moment of extreme toxic anxiety, I decided to proactively take matters into my own hands and gently persuade this fucking dipshit rat to bend over one way or another – that is, I tried to bend him over physically.
I quickly turned on Mickey suddenly while his attendant was still occupied, spun him around and then attempted to force him over a garden railing so that I could take my position pumping at Mickey’s backside like a horny German Sheppard for the camera lens.
Unfortunately, just at that moment, our anchor became distracted by a blonde Swedish tourist in denim short-shorts, just as Mickey managed let out a cry of fright that happened to regain the attention of his attendant who quickly called in the reinforcements on his walkie-talkie.
“Kfft! We have a mouse fucker on Main Street – Over! Kfft!”
The gig is up!
From that moment on, it was total chaos! In mere seconds, Mickey’s army of incognito lily-printed Disney G-men leapt into the foray and proceeded to round up our drug-addled asses in one foul swoop; me; my “companion”, the decoy, and the anchor.
Our plan had been foiled!
We never stood much of a chance at getting away once the hammer dropped. None of us were capable of running in a direct line without teetering off into walls or bumping into garbage cans and baby strollers; not to mention our stopping to stare at the ground and giggling like school girls every three seconds. The Disney security net dropped on us like a Norwegian deep-sea fishing trawler – we were captured as easily as had the security agents been picking overripe tomatoes.
Minutes later, we were under the bright lights and had the official Disney G-men interrogating us as if we had just perpetrated a holy Jihad on park grounds. In actuality, they had us for the attempted assault of a Disney character and for causing mischief on park grounds – but that little tidbit of information had still somehow managed to elude our taxed out brains.
After some fast-talking and a great shedding of tears, we confessed our whole crazy master plan and proceeded to turn on one another like hungry jackals and set about trying to place sole blame for the catastrophe on each other. Of course, being the actual perpetrator of the crime, I was deemed as the ringleader and therefore focused on by our Disney interrogators.
What can I say – I caved. I didn't have to wait for them to bring out the rubber hoses!
I like to think that it was because of my begging and pleading that we managed to only have ourselves escorted off the Disney grounds in a pair of Shaggy D.A. handcuffs instead of being brought up on charges of sexually assaulting a 5ft. rat.
Take about dodging a bullet!
And so we left Disney World with our tripping tails between our legs in shame – never to return.
We never did get our t-shirt photograph or our promised notoriety. In fact, we barely made it back alive and in one piece the day before classes were to begin.
Our bodies had literally been drained over the last week of sleep, healthy nourishment, and common sense. Luckily, now that class schedules were about to begin we’d have lots of time to catch up on our REM sleep since we were never really the most diligent of students anyways.
So that’s it - my ‘Fear and Loathing’ style road trip where we came within a whisper of being arrested and charged for molesting a beloved Disney character. To this day still, I wonder if the unflattering photographs that security took that day are still posted at all the entrance checkpoints, alerting park guards to be on the continuous lookout for this obnoxious, crazed University miscreant.
* In fact, it was a whole two minutes of prodding by park operators to get me out of my seat afterwards as I had then thought that my ass had been literally fused to the plastic seat cushion as a result of reentering the atmosphere.
** Hey, for what truly dedicated tripper is flying elephants NOT funny?
*** Actually, it was more like a rusty shopping cart in our condition.
At some point in everybody’s life, they think up something so incredibly stupid and misguided, that it is simply laughable in hindsight that the concept was ever deemed worthy of attempting in the first place. And yet, you did it anyway.
This is one such story.
During the ‘Spring Break’ week in my third year at the University of Waterloo, studying Medieval History & Classics, I happened to be living with four other equally dysfunctional freaks at 130 Albert Street.
It was there that a particular fiendish plot was hatched, soaked in continuous Mescaline doses, to foul up the very purist essence of one, Mickey Mouse – on his home turf no less! The disastrous plot would forever go down in the annals of asinine student pranks gone wrong, as the infamous “Mickey Mouse Project”.
The original concept of the ‘Mickey Mouse Project’ began as a ludicrous dare, from one roommate to another while lying bug-eyed on the living room couches after a few too many bong hits and chemically laced Mimosa’s and watching Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ – our usual Sunday house ritual.
And so it began. The gauntlet had been thrown down.
It was agreed upon by the members of our house that together we would spend our weeks holiday away from our studies, planning and carrying out the perfect caper – to get a posed photograph of Mickey Mouse being bent over and violated by one of us degenerate jagoffs.
Imagine THAT photo on the front of a t-shirt! We’d be hailed as gods among our peers, and ensure us a due reputation as the undisputed kings of debauched student debacles for years to come on campus. We’d all become folk heroes for future generations of students, slackers, and jackasses alike.
Or so we thought.
It was settled. We spent the next three days gobbling down hallucinogens by the bucketful and craftily planning out our master plan with ‘Dirty Dozen’ style meticulousness.
And under these preposterous pretenses, we departed on a long, adrenaline fueled two-day car journey to the Sunshine State and the Magic Kingdom. Come to think of it, in our haste to launch our hastily prepared MO, we left with only our toothbrushes, a carton of smokes, jars of instant coffee, our trusty ATM cards, and enough hidden hallucinogens to keep Hunter S. Thompson wired until the year 3000. All set to the soundtrack of Primal Scream’s animated classic acid album ‘Screamadelica’:
““Just what is it that you want to do?
We wanna be free
We wanna be free to do what we wanna do
And we wanna get loaded
And we wanna have a good time
That’s what we’re gonna do.”
The road trip itself was a blur of road signs and roadside fast food burgers. By the time we arrived at our staging base of operations, “Foxbase Alpha” as we likened to call it (also known to the locals as the ‘Kississimee Comfort Inn’) just ouside Orlando, there was a virtual waft of toxic fart that emanated from the opened car doors so thick that you could spread it on toast.
But what did we care? We hadn’t slept for 48 hours and were higher than Rosie O’Donnell’s cholesterol count after a Denny’s ‘All-U-Can-Eat’ dinner buffet. Our eyes burned red with a crazy intensity as our focus immediately began to shift to the task at hand:
To besmirch Mickey!
That night, we hunkered down in our hotel room with a case of Corona and more doses of Mescaline, and carefully ran through our mission plan in preparation for our attack first thing at dawn the next morning.
“One: down to the road block we've just begun - Two: the guards are through - Three: the Majors men are on a spree - Four: Major and Waterslaw go through the door - Five: Pinkley stays out in the drive - Six: the Major gives the rope a fix - Seven: Waterslaw throws the hook to heaven - Eight: Mayonnaise has got a date - Nine: the other guys go up the line - Ten: Sawyer and Gilpen are in the pen - Eleven: Posey guards points Five and Seven - Twelve: Major and Waterslaw go down to the delve - Thirteen: Franco goes up without being seen - Fourteen: Zero hour, Mayonnaise cuts the cable Franco cuts the phone - Fifteen: Franco goes in where the others have been - Sixteen: we all come out like it's Halloween.”
Except in this mission’s operation count-off, Donald Duck was not on the bridge with a sub-machine gun, he was in position along Main Street with a high-speed shutter camera.
How could we possible fail? Yeah right!
The next morning, after an early complimentary Continental Breakfast at the hotels restaurant that was in itself, a scene right out of Animal House (clearly the hotel staff were not prepared for the likes of four sweaty, twitchy, stinky, malnourished freaks such as ourselves buzzing like a hive of bees), we set about putting our dastardly plan into action.
The initial idea was to locate our target, and then set in motion the sequence of events that would ultimately lead Mickey into a particularly precarious body position, bent over forward, from which he could be taken advantage of from behind with a daftly planted pelvic thrust into the mouse’s costumed ass for the benefit of a waiting camera.
Voila! Instant prankster immortality!
We'd make the Merry Prankers look like a bunch of faggy street mimes.
The entire success of the mission of course, relied on the actual finding of Mickey Mouse in the first place. A task, that for four tripping thrill seekers, proved to be much more difficult than that which was initially believed. For those of you church going smarty pant’s who may never have had the opportunity to experience the Magic Kingdom on numerous doses of mescaline, Walt Disney World is the center vortex from which all things trippy emanate and radiate outward through the universe. This only becomes clear after a few hundred viewings of Fantasia on psychedelically charged Sunday afternoons, but you can take my word on it.
Hard as it was in our condition to focus on the goal, we searched out Mickey Mouse for hours. We practiced our aim at the Frontierland Shootin’ Arcade, were lured into a hypnotic state with the incessant “Tiki, Tiki, Tiki Room” song in Adventureland, literally warped through time on Space Mountain in Tomarrowland*, and giggled for hours over the ‘Dumbo the Flying Elephant’ amusement ride in Fantasyland**; but still no Mickey Mouse!
Day One ended in defeat. Sure we saw the opportunity to wage our scheme upon other unsuspecting Walt Disney characters – but we wanted the Mouse. To truly capture the triumphant lunacy of the whole shameful event, we wanted the big kingpin over all the Disney characters.
Pluto or Tigger would just not do!
We reluctantly returned to our “Foxbase Alpha” with more Corona’s and a few more handfuls of mood adjusters, and proceeded to settle into a more serious debate on how to locate our prime directive in a more efficient and expedient manner the next day.
Day Two began in much the same way, one near ejecting from a local Lum’s restaurant, and one insane objective. We arrived at the Disney World gates promptly at 8:00AM, pure exhaustion and dementia brewing in our bloodstreams like a virus. The search for Mickey Mouse continued.
Luckily, we did not have long too look on this particular day, since as luck would have it, Mickey happened to be strolling up and down Main Street USA as soon as stepped off the park monorail.
“BINGO - YOU RAT BASTARD!”
Like a well-oiled machine***, our band of brothers spread out and prepared themselves for action.
Our originally conceived plan called for me to approach our mark under the false pretenses of having his photo taken with me by my unassuming “companion” friend. The third member of our posse would be in charge of temporarily distracting Mickey’s partnered liaison, while the last fourth member of of team of misfits, the anchor, positioned himself off to the side of the action prepared to snap the prize the second the pigeon takes the bait.
Looking back, I now recognize the major fault in our Modus Operandi: that Disney characters are not likely to just simply bend over on their own; coaxed or otherwise. Chances are, the person inside the Mickey suit never even saw my lame attempts to casually persuade him to bend over facing our anchorman with the camera.
I dropped my wallet at his feet hoping Mickey would just chivalrously bend over to retrieve it for me, but instead he never even flinched – he just beamed and waved obliviously.
I tried bowing to him in Japanese fashion hoping that he, being the culturally diverse cartoon debutante that he is, would reciprocate my gesture with his own polite bow giving me the chance to leap behind him in a lurid thrusting gesture – but still no dice.
And then my chemically altered universe and the complete futility of what I was trying to do began to implode in on me like dark matter on a collapsing neutron star. That is to say, I panicked.
Our decoy had successfully distracted Mickey’s attendant by pretending to be a lost Armenian looking for Peter Pan shoelaces, the anchor with his prepared camera in hand, my “companion” was becoming antsy knowing that our window of opportunity was closing – and still the mouse refused to cooperate!
So, in a moment of extreme toxic anxiety, I decided to proactively take matters into my own hands and gently persuade this fucking dipshit rat to bend over one way or another – that is, I tried to bend him over physically.
I quickly turned on Mickey suddenly while his attendant was still occupied, spun him around and then attempted to force him over a garden railing so that I could take my position pumping at Mickey’s backside like a horny German Sheppard for the camera lens.
Unfortunately, just at that moment, our anchor became distracted by a blonde Swedish tourist in denim short-shorts, just as Mickey managed let out a cry of fright that happened to regain the attention of his attendant who quickly called in the reinforcements on his walkie-talkie.
“Kfft! We have a mouse fucker on Main Street – Over! Kfft!”
The gig is up!
From that moment on, it was total chaos! In mere seconds, Mickey’s army of incognito lily-printed Disney G-men leapt into the foray and proceeded to round up our drug-addled asses in one foul swoop; me; my “companion”, the decoy, and the anchor.
Our plan had been foiled!
We never stood much of a chance at getting away once the hammer dropped. None of us were capable of running in a direct line without teetering off into walls or bumping into garbage cans and baby strollers; not to mention our stopping to stare at the ground and giggling like school girls every three seconds. The Disney security net dropped on us like a Norwegian deep-sea fishing trawler – we were captured as easily as had the security agents been picking overripe tomatoes.
Minutes later, we were under the bright lights and had the official Disney G-men interrogating us as if we had just perpetrated a holy Jihad on park grounds. In actuality, they had us for the attempted assault of a Disney character and for causing mischief on park grounds – but that little tidbit of information had still somehow managed to elude our taxed out brains.
After some fast-talking and a great shedding of tears, we confessed our whole crazy master plan and proceeded to turn on one another like hungry jackals and set about trying to place sole blame for the catastrophe on each other. Of course, being the actual perpetrator of the crime, I was deemed as the ringleader and therefore focused on by our Disney interrogators.
What can I say – I caved. I didn't have to wait for them to bring out the rubber hoses!
I like to think that it was because of my begging and pleading that we managed to only have ourselves escorted off the Disney grounds in a pair of Shaggy D.A. handcuffs instead of being brought up on charges of sexually assaulting a 5ft. rat.
Take about dodging a bullet!
And so we left Disney World with our tripping tails between our legs in shame – never to return.
We never did get our t-shirt photograph or our promised notoriety. In fact, we barely made it back alive and in one piece the day before classes were to begin.
Our bodies had literally been drained over the last week of sleep, healthy nourishment, and common sense. Luckily, now that class schedules were about to begin we’d have lots of time to catch up on our REM sleep since we were never really the most diligent of students anyways.
So that’s it - my ‘Fear and Loathing’ style road trip where we came within a whisper of being arrested and charged for molesting a beloved Disney character. To this day still, I wonder if the unflattering photographs that security took that day are still posted at all the entrance checkpoints, alerting park guards to be on the continuous lookout for this obnoxious, crazed University miscreant.
* In fact, it was a whole two minutes of prodding by park operators to get me out of my seat afterwards as I had then thought that my ass had been literally fused to the plastic seat cushion as a result of reentering the atmosphere.
** Hey, for what truly dedicated tripper is flying elephants NOT funny?
*** Actually, it was more like a rusty shopping cart in our condition.
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