On a rain swept night Mickey Mouse is sleeping in his bed while his dog Pluto is out in his dog house. Suddenly Mickey awakens when he hears the cries of Pluto. Racing out to Pulto’s dog house he finds that someone has kidnapped his dog. Following the footprints of the perpetrator Mickey ends up at an old haunted house.
The kidnapper is the evil Doctor XXX. Doctor XXX wants to use Pluto in one of his experiments. He plans on transplanting the head of the dog onto the body of a chicken. He then hopes to have eggs from the dog/chicken hatch puppies.
In the meantime Mickey is looking for Pluto and trying to overcome a plethora of spooky skeletons and a demonic house that is out to get him.
“The Mad Doctor” was released in 1933 and was directed by David Hand. It is a Walt Disney production animated short based on the Mickey Mouse character and is a horror cartoon. It was the 52nd Mickey Mouse animated film and is only about six and a half minutes long. It is one of the few Mickey Mouse cartoons that are in the public domain.
The voice of Mickey was done by Walt Disney. The voice of Pluto was done by Pinto Colvig and the Mad Doctor was voiced by Billy Bletcher.
Some theaters refused to show the cartoon due to its horror elements. The cartoon was banned in Great Britain and even in Nazi Germany because of its violence and gore. It was approved in the U.S. I can understand why it was banned, even in Germany. It is action packed full of scary images and near death scenes. It is not really geared for children but adults. I can only assume that it the U.S. didn’t take issue with it because it was a pre-code cartoon that just squeaked by before the Production Code was put into effect.
The cartoon was basically buried and forgotten for years. That's probably the reason why the copyright was never renewed.
There are two scenes in particular that are actually rather scary. At one point Pluto is manacled to a chair and his reaction when the evil doctor tells him his plans is actually frightening. The other is when Mickey is bound to a table and a buzz saw descends threatening to cut him in half, similar to a “Pit and the Pendulum” style scene. In some ways the cartoon is just as gruesome as any horror film out there.
The Super Nintendo game, "Mickey Mania: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse" contains a second level based on the cartoon short. In it Mickey attacks human skeletons, spider skeletons and bats by jumping on them or throwing marbles at them.