Mickey Mouse Short: Entombed

Season 3, Episode 17: “Entombed” 5/13/16
Starring: Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse
Setting: Luxor, Egypt

Plot: Mickey and Minnie embark on an adventure to find lost treasure in a spooky Egyptian tomb.

Short Stuff:

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit can be seen in both the Hieroglyphics on the title card and on the walls inside the tomb.

We can only assume the city they pass through on camel is Luxor since it sits just outside the Valley of the Kings. However, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, along with the Sphinx, can be plainly seen in the background of the city shots while, in reality, a scant 400 miles separates the Pyramids from the Valley of the Kings. Let’s chalk this up to artistic license.

Little did I know, the streets of Luxor are littered with Fast Food joints (then again, why wouldn’t they be?). While on their camel, Mickey and Minnie pass a Yum Eats, a Big Burger, a Pharoh Fries and a Turkey Chicken Bucket (not real restaurants).

King Ought-n-Not-n’s Lost Tomb is clearly a play on King Tutankhamun’s Lost Tomb which was also discovered in the Valley of the Kings fairly recently in 1922.

The golden bust of Goofy that Minnie finds is fashioned after King Tut’s famed Death Mask.

Minnie’s headdress and tunic make her look like an Elizabeth Taylor-esque Cleopatra.

During the sequence where Mickey is getting smashed by falling sandstone, he first morphs into the Tom Oreb design of which famously appeared in a series of 1955 commercials for Nash Motors and then a Picasso-like rendering done by legendary Disney Artist Ward Kimball for the 1995 book The Art of Mickey Mouse.

DYK all those gigantic anthropomorphic statues Mickey encounters are gods? Well, they are and they all have names!
- Sobek the crocodile (god of the Nile/military/fertility of crocodiles)
- Anubis the jackal (god of funerals/death)
- Thoth the ibis (god of knowledge)
- Hathor the cow (god of feminine joy/motherhood)
​- Taweret the hippo (god of fertility/childbirth) - Ra the eagle (god of the sun)

It’s almost impossible to do anything with ancient tombs and treasure without blatant references to Indiana Jones but this short kinda pulls it off. Unless you count Mickey’s foray into the snake pit, using those aforementioned snakes as whips, his mine-car-evoking chariot ride or his dalliance with spiders.

Either ironically or appropriately, the mummy of King Ought-n-Not-n was wearing boxers with golden Ankh symbols (the ancient hieroglyphic character for “life”).

Final Grade: A-
This short offers a fun and new dynamic where, not only are Mickey and Minnie equals, but she appears as the more competent one while Mickey is the buffoon who suffers one pratfall after the next. It’s a huge improvement over Minnie’s semi-regular role as capable yet still-needs-to-be-saved damsel. I also love the shorts that force me to really delve into some history and geography. I just figured that the Valley of Kings and Pyramids of Giza were all just in one big centralized place and not 400 miles apart… who knew???