50 Disney references in Epic Mickey

A couple of folks bitched about my Epic Mickey review score, but I prefaced my “immensely biased” review by saying I’m a drooling Disney dork. Obviously, I enjoyed the gameplay too, but after that, Epic Mickey set about winning me over in several billion other ways. I may as well have called this 50 Reasons I Love Epic Mickey.

The intro contains several near shot-for-shot remake sequences from the famous 1936 short “Thru the Mirror”

I’m going to start out by showing you stuff from the opening of the game, which has been available for viewing for some time. After that, you’ll head into what’s technically SPOILER territory. However, you’ll only be seeing what I played and saw.

Disneyland! Epic Mickey’s levels and the Wasteland’s design are all based on Disneyland

In case you didn’t know, the player’s actions as Mickey yield different rewards and quests, so what you’ll find below won’t necessarily be what you see when you play. And that’s part of what makes the game great, and certainly not me just bragging about my keenly nerdy eye for old shit.

Yensid - Obviously, he’s Mickey’s boss from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice portion of Fantasia, but perhaps you didn’t know that his name is Disney backwards

A dickload of hats align Yensid’s shelf, but the only one I can directly attribute is a duplicate of the one he’s already wearing and the Mad Hatter’s. Although, I do see a cowboy hat… Woody perhaps?

The paint jar looks almost exactly the same as the “Hunny” pots from Winnie the Pooh

The game also marks Oswald the Lucky Rabbit’s first performance under the Disney banner EVER! Oswald was Walt Disney’s popular creation made while working under Universal Studios. The character was later stripped from him creatively and Walt left to start his own studio. Disney only just, quite hilariously, reacquired the character after eighty years by trading sportscaster Al Michaels

The man behind Epic Mickey’s fiendish plot is the titular character of the 1933 Mickey Mouse cartoon “The Mad Doctor”

Look to your immediate left at the start of the game and you’ll see a statue of the Beast of “Beauty and the” fame

The stained glass windows in the Dark Castle reveal Scar from The Lion King, Captain Hook of Peter Pan, and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty

It’s reasonable to assume that these knights are based on Winnie the Pooh, but I’d like to think that they’re a direct reference to Humphrey the Bear…

However, the Duck Knights statues are pretty unmistakable, as they seem inarguably fitted exclusively for Donald