Mickey Mouse, one of the world's most identifiable characters, is the star of a new video game for the Wii entitled Disney's Epic Mickey. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Walt Disney claimed that it all started with a mouse, but it actually started with a rabbit. Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit, not Mickey Mouse, was the animator’s first character design. (Oswald was created for another producer, and Universal owned the rights until Disney secured them in 2006.)

Mickey Mouse may be ubiquitous, but he's lost his pop culture cool, having been supplanted in our collective imagination by hyperactive sponges and moustachioed Italian plumbers.

In the new video game Disney’s Epic Mickey, Oswald drags his younger brother into the Wasteland, a place for forgotten and rejected Disney characters. Miffed that Mickey became so famous, Oswald is looking for payback. What Oswald doesn’t understand is that Mickey hasn’t enjoyed popularity for some time. He may be ubiquitous, but he doesn’t have the pop culture cool he once had, having been supplanted in our collective imagination by hyperactive sponges, superheroes and moustachioed Italian plumbers.

Like all good cartoon characters, Mickey Mouse was initially a vehicle for comedic entertainment and parody. In his first three shorts, all released in 1928, Mickey was a roguish pilot resembling Charles Lindbergh (Pilot Crazy), a Douglas Fairbanks-like swashbuckler (The Gallopin’ Gaucho) and a Buster Keaton-type character (Steamboat Willie). Mickey Mouse ended up capturing the imagination of American culture just as sound and images were being combined in interesting new ways.

In the midst of the Great Depression, he was the upbeat, smiling hero, a joyful character at a time when the world needed one. His personality was quickly established: he was smart, resourceful and persistent; mischievous, yet a friend to everyone. He embodied the characteristics revered by American society at the time. And he appealed to both adults and children.

A Chinese vendor sells Mickey Mouse bags and other products at the Disney flagship store in Shanghai. (STR/AFP/Getty)

As Mickey’s popularity – and the Disney empire – grew, his duties expanded. He became the company’s focus, beloved by the other cartoon characters as well as the society he reflected. He’s since been featured in film and on television, in comics and books, in ice shows and theme parks. His likeness is used for clothing and jewelry and housewares, as dolls and toys and collectibles.

“If you see Mickey at the park, he’s one thing,” game designer Warren Spector explained during an interview at the E3 conference in July. “If you see Mickey on Mickey’s Clubhouse, he’s clearly something different…. And when Wonderful World of Color was on TV, he was something different there. Mickey is a lot of different things in a lot of different media.”

Spector was the lead designer behind Epic Mickey, a Wii exclusive released on Nov. 30. The general manager and creative director at Junction Point Studios (a division of Disney Interactive), Spector is something of a legend in the gaming industry, having developed titles like Ultima Underworld (1992) and Deus Ex (2000).

Mickey has appeared in video games before — for example, he’s the king of Disney Castle in Square Enix’s Kingdom Hearts series. Spector thinks Castle of Illusion (1990) and Mickey Mania (1994) were “pretty good,” but in those games, the mouse could have easily been replaced with a plumber or a blue hedgehog.

Epic Mickey, however, would be nonsensical without Disney’s mouse. And he’s never been portrayed quite like this before. In Epic Mickey, he’s like the star of Fantasia, meddling with awesome power and having to deal with the consequences. In the Wasteland, he uses a magic paintbrush to either create or erase objects in the environment; whether this Mickey is friendly or mischievous depends on the player.

In recent years, Mickey Mouse has been on something of a hiatus. He hasn’t starred in anything since two direct-to-video productions released in 2004: The Three Musketeers and Twice Upon a Christmas. Spector wouldn’t speculate as to why Mickey has been laying low – Disney has been known to rest its properties. Spector says his primary goal in making Epic Mickey was to remind gamers that the mouse could be a video game hero.

“Mickey has touched everyone in some way or another,” claims Spector, who still has the plush Pluto his father purchased to celebrate his birth, as well as a pair of personalized mouse ears he got when he was five. In developing Epic Mickey, Spector knew that he had his work cut out for him — because for each and every one of us, the Mouse comes with some baggage.

For me, Mickey has always been more of a spokesmodel than a character. On Sunday evenings he introduced the Wonderful World of Disney on CBC Television — he was the host at the happiest place on earth. But Mickey never appeared in original stories that were interesting to me. In recent decades, a post-modernist viewpoint began slipping into cartoons, infecting characters with a new wit, but also with self-awareness and cynicism. Mickey, with his wholesome outlook and aw-shucks demeanor, just didn't fit in anymore. He became a character that only appealed to kids.

Animator Walt Disney in 1935, alongside his most famous creation. (General Photographic Agency/Getty Images)

More recently, Mickey ceased to be a character for me. The mouse ears came to represent a corporation that had grown large and powerful. For example, the Walt Disney Company lobbied for longer copyright terms to prevent Mickey from entering the public domain, despite the fact that so many of its successful projects – Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid and even the recently released Tangled, a retelling of Rapunzel – are themselves based on stories from the public domain. The LA Times has called Mickey Mouse “the ultimate symbol of intellectual property.” The character has become the personification of a company that uses its considerable influence to further its own agenda, instead of curating creativity.

Regardless of how you feel about Mickey Mouse, Spector said he created Epic Mickey with us in mind. “If you’re a kid and you spend six hours a day watching the same half-hour episode of Mickey and His Pals on TV, I’ve got to respect that. If you’re a Hollywood star who wears couture Mickey clothing on the red carpet, I’ve got to respect that. And if you’re someone from Europe who still reads and loves Mickey adventure stories, I have to respect that,” he said. “There is a great sense of responsibility, about wanting to be true to the heart of the character.”

Mickey may be context-dependent, but his heart – his affection for Minnie, his anger at Pete, his loyalty to Donald and Goofy – has remained constant. Which is why the plot in Epic Mickey revolves around Oswald trying to steal Mickey’s heart. The Lucky Rabbit believes it will help him escape the Wasteland.

Spector said that, as with the best of Disney’s products, he wants his game to have broad appeal, to be interesting to girls and boys, kids and adults. A few elements of Epic Mickey – problems with controlling the character and the fact that all dialogue is presented as text – make it unsuitable for young children. But it will interest adolescents and adults who expect a certain sophistication in their entertainment.

If Spector hasn’t exactly made Mickey cool again, his game has at least transformed the character from a symbol back into a worthy cartoon protagonist. The mouse in Epic Mickey is more interesting than he’s been in years.

Blaine Kyllo is a writer based in Vancouver.