Disney+ has several exciting releases like the Beatles documentary Get Back and Disney+. Hawkeye(which follows Clint Barton’s next adventure with Jeremy Renner). Another Disney+ original will soon join the fun, and new episodes will be released. According to CBRThe streaming service has ordered the second season of The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse.
Season 1 was a Disney+ original title that received high ratings and featured 20 episodes (shorts). Season 2 will have fewer episodes but longer installments. It will only air four episodes and be season-themed (as it is winter, spring, summer, and fall). Those episodes are however described as “extended-length.”Although no release date has been established, winter 2020 will be the window of opportunity for the content.
CBRI spoke with Paul Rudish (executive producer/supervising Director) about the decision to alter the show’s traditional format. This show dates back to its predecessor on the Disney Channel. Mickey Mouse. It was simply a desire for change, paired with Disney+’s propensity to release content slates every quarter.
“Well, we had done our first season of The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse for Disney+, which is available now. When they wanted to do a second season, [Disney] wondered if there was a way that they could put a spin on it,”Rudish. “They felt like we’ve got a huge library of shorts now and [wondered] if there was a way we could do something that they could billboard, or point to and say, ‘This is something different?’ They talked about the holiday specials that we had done previously, the Halloween and the Christmas specials. They were talking a little bit about programming ideas and stuff. They told me, ‘We usually air things in the four quarters. We like to have these four quadrants throughout the year. We’d like to do something that we could wave a flag around.’
“They wanted something more than just dropping a bunch of shorts in a bucket and telling everyone, “Hey, everybody! Go look in my short bucket!” They could use the phrase, “Hey, get ready to air this new thing.” I thought that they had their four quadrants and their four seasons. How about The four seasons? Although it doesn’t sound very clever, I thought of the holiday specials and decided that instead of doing holidays, the four seasons would provide us with a nice thematic framework around which to build stories.
“To look into what’s the magic of winter, what’s the fun of spring, and so on… I literally leaned into that. It was cool that this time they didn’t really have the set format that they wanted us to follow. It was up to us to pitch what we thought we wanted to do. And so each of the four seasonal specials is all slightly different constructions and different kinds of storytelling… It was really fun to be able to explore different formats of storytelling and try some different things that we haven’t really done with the seven-minute shorts.”
The Wonderful World of Mickey MouseSeason 1 is streaming on Disney+ at the moment Mickey Mouse. Two holiday specials are also available: Scariest Story Ever: Mickey Mouse’s Halloween Spooktacular Duck the Halls: Mickey Mouse Christmas Special.
