Mickey Mouse: The Forgotten Affair
The most famous gay rodent turns 80 today, and it’s a good opportunity to explore some of the less known, but still interesting facts about Disney’s relation to the region.
In 1937, Mickey was censored in biggest Belgrade daily, Politika, because of the comic “The Monarch of Medioka” and it’s vague similarity to events in the old Yugoslavia at the time. Beside the similarities between the Medioka Kingdom and the real life Kingdom of Yugoslavia, what really triggered the censorship was the plot. In the comic, a duke tries to take over the place of the Medioka King, and with all the rumors going around that one of Yugoslavia King’s cousins, the archduke Pavle is planning to do the same thing in real life – to take over instead of the King Petar, the comic was temporarily banned. Disney sent a letter of apology to Politika later and the cooperation resumed.
Mickey is translated as Miki in Serbian, so no big name change there. But Goofy and Donald are translated as Šilja (pron: SHI-lya) and Paja (PA-ya), respectively. They got their Serbian names after two guys who worked in the Politika printing house as typesetters.
In the beginning of the nineties, Disney characters vanished from Serbian media because of the sanctions imposed by the UN. We could however continue watching the old Disney cartoons on various illegal TV stations who didn’t have to pay for license and didn’t really care about the sanctions.
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