Walt! Say it Ain't So! Mickey was a Knockoff??

"Micky Mouse vs Mickey Mouse" raises the possibility that Mickey Mouse was copied from a mouse toy made by the Performo-Toy Company (I hadn't heard of them,either), called - Mickey.

There are a lot of coincidences, but I think there's at least a 50-50 chance that Walt Disney at least thought he had come up with "Mickey" on his own. He may have seen the PTC Mickey, and retained an unconscious memory - or Walt's Mickey may look like PTC's Mickey because both are highly anthropomorphised and abstracted mice, designed by people in the same culture at the same time.

Sadly .... no, I'll let you read it.

(However, before getting boiling mad about Disneyco over this, remember the flap over the Nebraska ETV Network's logo, which they paid a commercial artist to create. Then, in 1975, NBC trotted out a new logo that exactly the same as the Nebraska ETV logo. The last I heard of it, Nebraska ETV was about to be squashed by NBC's legal department.

Happily, NBC decided to pay ETV's expenses for creating and distributing a new logo, and threw in some new equipment.)