The Five Billion Dollar Mouse

Eek! Mickey Mouse, the anodyne fixture on night-lights and lunch boxes for generations, is getting the Steve Austin treatment from some Disney imagineers who think they can rebuild him.

According to the New York Times' Brooks Barnes, Disney is currently developing a new videogame called Epic Mickey that would present the 81-year-old cartoon character-turned-corporate icon as "cantankerous and cunning, as well as heroic, as he traverses a forbidding wasteland."

Business observers could be forgiven for assuming that "forbidding wasteland" referred to the current media climate, where all companies, including Disney, are suffering declines in profit.

Disney's profits fell 26 percent in the third quarter as DVD and Blu-Ray sales continue to fall. The company has been trying many things—from acquiring Marvel Entertainment in August for $4 billion to dropping hints about Keychest, a post-DVD cloud-like content-delivery system—so why not attempt to retool the company's original asset?

But Disney needs to proceed with caution. As Barnes reports, Mickey rakes in "$5 billion or so in annual merchandise sales." That's a lot of cheddar for one mouse—one wrong move and Disney might find that it hasn't made a better mousetrap, but rather gotten its neck snapped in one.

Of course, a tougher, more butch Mickey might appeal to boys, the audience whose $50 billion in spending (that's a lot of paper routes!) Disney has been trying to harness for years. As Barnes reported in April, the company even went so far as to employ a "kid whisperer" named Kelly Peña, who uses her background in journalism (and her "headquarter for boys" colleagues' experiences with anthropology and psychology) to delve deep into the meaning of boys' dinosaur bedsheets and stuffed animals.

A more aggressive, multidimensional Mickey could also better fit into the current cultural landscape, where a benevolent, permanently smiling rodent (with no visible teeth) seems like a bland throwback.

Warren Spector, the creative director of Disney's Junction Point, the division developing the game, told the Times' Barnes, "I wanted him to be able to be naughty—when you’re playing as Mickey you can misbehave and even be a little selfish." (Now, if they can only get him to ride a surfboard and rap about being "the kung-fu hippie…from gangsta city" like Poochie, the nakedly pandering "hip" dog character shoehorned into "The Itchy & Scratchy Show" on The Simpsons, his transformation would be complete.)

According to Spector, the idea for Epic Mickey was conceived by "a group of interns" in 2004. Here's hoping those enterprising young people got some college credits and a decent discount on Disney theme parks for contributing an idea that could potentially generate hundreds of millions of dollars for Disney.

Maybe the interns will even get a cut of the profits. Well, probably not: Mickey isn't the only one in this wasteland who can be "cunning" and "a little selfish" sometimes.