Is House of Mouse explicitly stated to take place in Toontown?
In the German dub, the city is the same as in the comicbook universe, Entenhausen (Duckburg, but it also includes Mouseton, they're the same here). The name is even mentioned in the intro scene at the start of each episode.
The Disney Wiki says that House of Mouse takes place in "Disneyville", but provides no source for that.
It's a wiki. Everybody can edit wikis and write something there... that's what they're about.
True, but large wikis like the Disney Wiki are generally patrolled by serious users — fans of the type found on this forum and others like it — who root out trolls. It's unusual to still find deliberately-inaccurate info like that. I'd like to think the same is true of the Scrooge McDuck Wiki.
It's a wiki. Everybody can edit wikis and write something there... that's what they're about.
True, but large wikis like the Disney Wiki are generally patrolled by serious users — fans of the type found on this forum and others like it — who root out trolls. It's unusual to still find deliberately-inaccurate info like that. I'd like to think the same is true of the Scrooge McDuck Wiki.
Well, I wouldn't say it's deliberately-inaccurate. That would suggest that (a) the setting for House of Mouse is a city other than Disneyville, and that (b) the user who posted the information knew otherwise. I don't think the city that House of Mouse takes place in has ever been revealed on the show itself in English (or has it? That was my original question), so neither condition appears to be true. But you're right, the idea that House of Mouse is set in Disneyville seems to be fan theory, so should probably be removed from that wiki (or put in a separate "popular fan theories" section of the page). But I personally like it better than the alternate fan theory, that these characters live in Toontown. Again, I'm talking about the animated versions of Mickey and Donald, not the comics versions (who of course live in Mouseton and Duckburg respectively) which are separate in my headcanon. Such an explanation makes it easy for me to accept Sleeping Beauty, Simba and Cruella DeVille watching Quack Pack versions of HD&L singing on stage. "Disneyville" is a perfectly fine name for the city that all these animated Disney characters (whom I don't care as much about as the comics versions) to cohabitate in, IMHO. Call it a subsection of Toontown, if you want to bring the Roger Rabbit universe into it.
Well, I wouldn't say it's deliberately-inaccurate. That would suggest that (a) the setting for House of Mouse is a city other than Disneyville, and that (b) the user who posted the information knew otherwise. I don't think the city that House of Mouse takes place in has ever been revealed on the show itself in English (or has it? That was my original question), so neither condition appears to be true. (1) But you're right, the idea that House of Mouse is set in Disneyville seems to be fan theory, so should probably be removed from that wiki (or put in a separate "popular fan theories" section of the page). But I personally like it better than the alternate fan theory, that these characters live in Toontown. (2)
(1) Well, even if the city where the House is located is never named, then whoever decided it was called Disneyville made that up and included it on the page, which I would consider "delibrate inaccuracy". Although —
(2) — concerning where the House of Mouse is: I like to think it may be located in Burbank, but there is a specific hint in the show. Specifically, the opening line is that it's "on the corner of Main Street". With no other context, this being a Disney thing, one is left to assume they are referring to Disneyland's Main Street, placing House of Mouse within the same strange continuity as the Disneyland Parks themselves', with all those characters hanging around the same city/land/??? and talking to fans, yet not behaving as if their films were just fictions in which they "acted" as would be the case in a Roger Rabbit scenario.
The data for S 71305 and S 76053 present in Inducks comes from the internal indexes of various European publishers. Disney (in Burbank) would sent them S-coded stories regularly. I can confirm that for those stories we don't have any more information, and although I can find out who indexed it in Inducks, it would be a quite complex and useless research. Since one or two years ago, we've started to log information about who created or modified an entry. For instance for "lost in the Andes" (https://inducks.org/story.php?c=W%20OS%20%20223-02) we now have "Entry edited by: HF (June 8, 2017), PHm (June 27, 2017; June 10, 2017)" in small sized text. There is no hope that we can do show this information for years 1995-2015 however...
The entry S ? 625 was created when the scans surfaced. The title of the story in the scans is different from S 71305/S76053. It's possible that the scans, are, after all, not related to S 71305/S 76053, although the contrary seems likely.
For now, I've removed S ? 625 and move the scans to S 76053 (with an explanation of where they come from). Thank you!
I've finally begun to catch up on reading my FantaGraphics Gottfredson books, and I realized there was something I don't think we've ever discussed before ... what does everyone think of the editorial decision to repeatedly refer to Mickey's hometown as "Mouseton"? True, the name "Mouseton" is universally accepted now (there's less of an agreement about the state it's in), but Gottfredson never really used that name, and while its use in the FantaGraphics books is limited to the editorial pieces and promotional materials (rather than being retroactively inserted into the reprinted material itself), it somehow strikes me as jarring. In the spirit of fidelity to history, I personally would have preferred that Mickey's hometown go unnamed in these books, as was the practice until the early 1990s.
Looking again at the first volume, I see that at least they give an explanation of when the Mouseton name was created and which were the earlier names for the town (though Silo Center was first used in 1931 rather than 1932):
I remember it appearing once or twice in 1950s strips. Unfortunately, I can't recall a specific one right at the moment. It is in lots of S-coded stories—like dozens. S 80006 is one example.
But were those S-coded stories ever published in English? The one referenced above doesn't seem to have been. I would assume the name of Mickey's hometown would have been translated into the relevant language in all non-English stories.
EDIT: (Does double-take) Wait! Scarpa did S-coded stories? I never knew that! How did that come about? And why would he use "Mouseville"?
The Inducks list of S-coded mouse universe stories with an American publication is here. It includes 62 stories, but some of them aren't really from the mouse universe and are just there because Induck's algorithm can't exclude them. Anyway, I saw no city name in the American version of the stories from this list that I have checked, though there are many that I haven't read yet. Of course, if the name is in some story that was printed after 1990 I guess it would have been changed from Mouseville to Mouseton.
And yes, Scarpa drew 72 S-coded stories, though he only wrote 15 of them, while the other 57 were written by other people.
I confirm the name Mouseville is used in the original script for S 80066.
I have no access to the full script of S 80066, but Inducks has two scans of the script's first page:
I don't know where the second image was put there: I knew about the first one, but I hadn't noticed the second one until a few minutes ago. Anyway, the first image says "Mouseville Amusement Park", while the second one, which hasn't been inked yet, says "The Greatest City's Fun Fair", without mentioning the city's name. The Italian version says "Luna Park di Topolinia", which matches the first image above rather than the second:
So I checked with Alberto Becattini and below is what he says.
[...]
So ... As far as I know, from 1963 until at least 1974 the Studio Disney sent to Italy only typescripts (from Kinney, Davie, Brightman and others), usually on a single page, which were translated and developed in Italy. So Scarpa or others (Gentilini, Dalmasso, Chendi, etc.) actually wrote the full scripts, in Italian, which were then translated into English at Mondadori to be sent back to the Studio. Things changed after 1974. Carl Fallberg provides scripts in the form of detailed storyboards that were then turned into stories by Carpi, Rota and others. Since 1976 Scarpa continues to collaborate with the Studio on his own and when he wrote the scripts he wrote them in English (the translations, I think, made by her daughter Sabina), inserting the dialogues in pencil directly on the drawings. The texts were then "cleaned up" in the US by Tom Golberg, because English often left something to be desired (an example: Scarpa called a story The One Million's Chase, with a genitive Saxon who does not belong there). Even The Infuse of Chika-Chika does not sound very good, in English. But this is certainly not the reason why the story was "lost". When it was not him who wrote the scripts and the dialogues (always in English), they came from the USA, still in the form of detailed storyboards, by Carl Fallberg, Pete Hansen, Ed Nofziger, etc. Also here, Scarpa then rewrote the English dialogues in the balloons.
So, applying what is explained above to the case in study, what do we get?
The story was first published in 1981 in Italy, and from the production code we know it was created in 1980, which is after 1976. So, Scarpa must have written the story in English, possibly helped by his daughter, and in this first version he wrote "The Greatest City's Fun Fair", possibly because he didn't know how to call Mickey's city in English. He wrote that into the image just like he wrote the dialogues into the balloons. The text was sent to the USA, and Tom Goldberg re-wrote the dialogues, and he was the one who wrote "Mouseville Amusement Park", since he was aware of the internal rule among the Disney Studio Program that Mickey's city had to be called Mouseville. Since Scarpa never wrote an Italian script from the story, the people in charge of doing Italian translations of foreign stories created an Italian script based on the rewritten version, with "Mouseville Amusement Park" translated as "Luna Park di Topolinia" since Topolinia was a long-established name used in Italy for Mickey's city. A clue for the fact that the Italian version is based on the rewritten version rather than the original version is Mickey's line in the first panel: "Anch'io, Pippo!" is the literal translation of "Me too, Goofy" from the rewritten version rather than "O.k., Goofy! Let's go there!"
Is House of Mouse explicitly stated to take place in Toontown?
According to another thread, in the House of Mouse episode "Clarabelle's Big Secret" Clarabelle says she's "tattling the tales of Toontown!" and she is later called "Toontown's biggest blabbermouth".
The Disney Wiki says that House of Mouse takes place in "Disneyville", but provides no source for that.
They are probably drawing a conclusion from the fact that the character's houses in Mickey Mouse Works/House of Mouse are the same that we see in the 2000 videogame "Mickey Saves the Day 3D Adventure", which uses the name Disneyville. Here is an image from the videogame:
As we saw in another thread, the name Disneyville comes from a series of storybooks published since the 1930s, and was also occasionally used in comic books. A letter writer from Mickey Mouse #235 claimed it's the former real-life name of Disneyland, but I never found any confirmation of that.
Out of universe, the name "Mouseville" was created by Gottfredson in the late 1930s and catched on since then, but only a bit, he and others used it a few times until Disney comics died out in the US in like the 70s.
When Disney comics were rebooted in the late 80s, another comics series by another publisher, Terrytoons' Mighty Mouse, was created and become very popular, and had its main setting called Mouseville too. Even though Mighty Mouse came later, the name Mouseville was mentioned much more often in those comics and toons than in Disney comics before, so the name was slightly altered to Mouseton to avoid confusion.
In-universe, I believe that Mickey's home was once a rural town called Silo Center in the past, until it grew and industrialized and the city council changed the name to the more serious sounding name "Mouseton".
In the German dub, the city is the same as in the comicbook universe, Entenhausen (Duckburg, but it also includes Mouseton, they're the same here). The name is even mentioned in the intro scene at the start of each episode.
The Disney Wiki says that House of Mouse takes place in "Disneyville", but provides no source for that.
It takes place in Toontown. The Disneyville stuff is a fabrication.
Well, I wouldn't say it's deliberately-inaccurate. That would suggest that (a) the setting for House of Mouse is a city other than Disneyville, and that (b) the user who posted the information knew otherwise. I don't think the city that House of Mouse takes place in has ever been revealed on the show itself in English (or has it? That was my original question), so neither condition appears to be true. (1) But you're right, the idea that House of Mouse is set in Disneyville seems to be fan theory, so should probably be removed from that wiki (or put in a separate "popular fan theories" section of the page). But I personally like it better than the alternate fan theory, that these characters live in Toontown. (2)
(1) Well, even if the city where the House is located is never named, then whoever decided it was called Disneyville made that up and included it on the page, which I would consider "delibrate inaccuracy". Although —
(2) — concerning where the House of Mouse is: I like to think it may be located in Burbank, but there is a specific hint in the show. Specifically, the opening line is that it's "on the corner of Main Street". With no other context, this being a Disney thing, one is left to assume they are referring to Disneyland's Main Street, placing House of Mouse within the same strange continuity as the Disneyland Parks themselves', with all those characters hanging around the same city/land/??? and talking to fans, yet not behaving as if their films were just fictions in which they "acted" as would be the case in a Roger Rabbit scenario.
It is located in Toontown. Several segments make reference to the fact. The corner of Main Street is just a mythology gag.
It is located in Toontown. Several segments make reference to the fact.
Ah, but do they? Remember that ‘Mickey's Toontown’ is an area of Disneyland. And, indeed, Donald's house as seen on the show matches that of the ‘Mickey's Toontown’ house of Donald. If Toontown is only referred to as the home of the characters, but not necessarily the place they're in right now, then it would make complete sense to continue placing the House on the corner of the Disneyland Main Street — with the Ducks & Mice living in the Disneyland version of Toontown.
The Toontown of 1990s Disney media (whether it be the character's homes as seen in House of Mouse/Mickey Mouse Works shorts, the Toontwown Online video game, or the Mickey's Toontown park area) is a much smaller, suburbian sort of place than the skyscraper-filled metropolis of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Visually, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to try to construe the "big city avenue" seen in the opening credits, and in outside shots, as the location of the House, as being part of that Toontown.
It is located in Toontown. Several segments make reference to the fact.
Ah, but do they? Remember that ‘Mickey's Toontown’ is an area of Disneyland. And, indeed, Donald's house as seen on the show matches that of the ‘Mickey's Toontown’ house of Donald. If Toontown is only referred to as the home of the characters, but not necessarily the place they're in right now, then it would make complete sense to continue placing the House on the corner of the Disneyland Main Street — with the Ducks & Mice living in the Disneyland version of Toontown.
The Toontown of 1990s Disney media (whether it be the character's homes as seen in House of Mouse/Mickey Mouse Works shorts, the Toontwown Online video game, or the Mickey's Toontown park area) is a much smaller, suburbian sort of place than the skyscraper-filled metropolis of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Visually, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to try to construe the "big city avenue" seen in the opening credits, and in outside shots, as the location of the House, as being part of that Toontown.
Clarabelle's gossip segment in "Clarabelle's Big Secret" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GZKmBstUs0) specifically mentions the tales of Toontown.
It is quite clear from the source material along with the ancillary campaigns of the time that House of Mouse is set in Toontown.
Any other conjecture is just overthinking it and unnecessarily pedantic. As for the inconsistent visuals, it is easily explained as the characters themselves live in a more residential suburban of Toontown while the club is located downtown.
