Mickey's House and Meet Mickey

Mickey's House and Meet Mickey
Park	Tokyo Disneyland
Land / area	Toontown
Type	Walk-through and meet-and-greet
Opened	April 15, 1996
Designer	Walt Disney Imagineering
Status	Operating

Mickey's House and Meet Mickey is a walk-through and character greeting attraction in Toontown at Tokyo Disneyland in Urayasu, Chiba, Japan. Guests tour Mickey Mouse's cartoon home at their own pace — through his living quarters, out past Pluto's doghouse in the backyard, and into his Movie Barn — and finish by meeting Mickey in person in his dressing room, for photographs and autographs. It is the one place in the park designed to guarantee a meeting with Mickey, and it has anchored Tokyo's Toontown since the land opened.

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History

The attraction format began in Florida. A version called Mickey's Country House opened on June 18, 1988 as part of Mickey's Birthdayland at the Magic Kingdom, a temporary land built for Mickey's 60th birthday that later became Mickey's Toontown Fair. When Disneyland in California built a permanent Mickey's Toontown, its version of the house opened with that land on January 24, 1993, combining the house tour with a meeting in a movie barn at the back of the plot.

Tokyo followed the California model closely. Toontown opened at Tokyo Disneyland on April 15, 1996, the park's 13th anniversary, as its seventh land, laid out as a near mirror image of the California original. Mickey's House was an opening-day attraction of the new land, alongside Minnie's house, Donald's Boat, Gadget's Go Coaster and Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin. A separate, short-lived version of Mickey's House also operated on Main Street at Hong Kong Disneyland from 2008 to 2009, while the Florida original closed with Mickey's Toontown Fair on February 12, 2011, leaving the California and Tokyo houses as the surviving full versions.

In Tokyo, Mickey is known for appearing in the greeting room in outfits that refer to his classic cartoons, changing the costume while keeping the setting — the star's dressing room at the back of his own barn — the same.

Experience

The house itself is built as a cartoon made solid: oversized furniture, rounded architecture and everyday objects scaled and coloured as if drawn for an animated short. The self-guided route winds through the rooms of Mickey's home, which are dressed as a lived-in star's residence, with personal details and memorabilia from his film career worked into the décor for guests to spot as they pass. There is no ride system and no time limit inside the house portion beyond the flow of the queue behind.

From the house the route continues into the backyard, past Pluto's doghouse, and into Mickey's Movie Barn. The barn is presented as Mickey's private studio building, decorated with sets and props recalling his best-known shorts, among them Steamboat Willie, The Band Concert, Thru the Mirror and Fantasia. While guests wait in the barn they watch trailers and clips from Mickey's cartoons, in Tokyo drawn from his classic shorts.

The meeting itself takes place in Mickey's dressing room off the barn. Guests are admitted in small groups, usually one or two families at a time, which keeps each meeting brief and personal but also makes the attraction's line slow-moving and often long; cast members have traditionally limited photography to keep the queue advancing. For many families the wait is the accepted price of certainty — unlike the park's roaming greetings, this Mickey is always in, at home, and expecting visitors.

See also

• Tokyo Disneyland
• Mickey's Toontown
• Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin
• Chip 'n' Dale's Gadget Coaster
• List of Tokyo Disneyland attractions