Review: Mickey Mouse”Mumbai Madness”

Spoilers Below

A couple of months ago, we had a Mickey Mouse episode that was entirely in Portuguese. “Mumbai Madness” is entirely in Hindi. I love that this series isn’t afraid to put all of the dialog in a non-English language. It just goes to show what an international superstar Mickey is.

In this episode, Mickey is a cab driver in Mumbai. An elephant tourist disembarks from a bus, asking to visit a mountain. Mickey agrees to drive him, claiming that he doesn’t need a map.

This is where the best part of the episode comes in. The city is perfectly characterized with crazy traffic and zooming around random cows. Every time Mickey thinks he is on the right track, a cow is lazily hanging out in the middle of the street. Since cows are sacred animals, he must drive around each and every one. Eventually, he comes to a square where a bevy of cows take up the entire road. He cannot go around them so he chooses to turn on a Bollywood song and dance them out of the way.

Unfortunately, he is still on the wrong road. He drives for hours before asking the elephant for the map. Just as they run out of gas, Mickey notices the mountain behind them. He fills his tank with some super hot curry and jumps the car to the top of the mountain. Sadly, his taxi landed in the temple’s pond, sinking to its inevitable death.

Standing in front of the temple doors, the elephant hands Mickey a lotus, basically revealing himself as Ganesha, the Hindu elephant god. The lotus flower floats out of Mickey’s hand. It floats across the surface of the pond to the center. The petals open and a winged golden taxi appears. Mickey happily flies off in his new vehicle.

I thought this was an amazing episode. Everything came together perfectly. The animation of the packed city along with the beautiful Bollywood music almost made it seem almost real. Now if only they could make these episodes come out more than once a month.