Mickey McGuire (film series)

Mickey McGuire was an American comedy series of short subjects from 1927 to 1934. Produced by Larry Darmour, the series was notable for essentially launching the careers of Mickey Rooney and Billy Barty.

The series was based on Fontaine Fox's popular comic strip series, Toonerville Trolley. In 1925 Fox placed a newspaper ad for a dark-haired child to play the role of "Mickey McGuire" in a series of short films. This ad attracted the attention of Mrs Nell Yule, the recently separated wife of vaudevillian Joseph Yule, who believed her son Joseph "Joe" Yule, Jr. (later known as Mickey Rooney) was right for the part. Lacking the money to have her son's hair dyed, Mrs. Yule took her son to the audition after applying burnt cork to his scalp. Joe got the role and became "Mickey" for 78 of the comedies, running from 1927 to 1934, starting with Mickey's Circus, released September 4, 1927, and ending with Mickey's Medicine Man in 1934. These had been adapted from the Toonerville Trolley comic strip, which contained a character named Mickey McGuire.

Yule briefly became Mickey McGuire legally in order to trump an attempted copyright lawsuit (if it were his legal name, the film producer Larry Darmour did not owe the comic strip writers royalties). His mother also changed her surname to McGuire in an attempt to bolster the argument, but the film producers lost. The litigation settlement awarded damages to the owners of the cartoon character, as well as compelled the twelve-year-old actor to refrain from calling himself by the name Mickey McGuire on and off screen. Rooney later claimed that, during his Mickey McGuire days, he met cartoonist Walt Disney at the Warner Brothers studio, and that Disney was inspired to name Mickey Mouse after him, although Disney always said that he had changed the name from "Mortimer Mouse" to "Mickey Mouse" on the suggestion of his wife.

The series was very popular in its day, often rivaling Hal Roach's Our Gang series. In fact, it was the only Our Gang series rival to make a successful transition into the talkies. The films were later distributed well into the 1940s, but were rarely shown on television. Therefore, the series is all but forgotten today.

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