Bringing Mickey Mouse to Life in the Most Terrifying Way Possible

You may have noticed a sudden explosion in the number of movies—horror films, in particular — that feature Mickey Mouse, but which aren’t made by Disney. If you look closely, you’ll see that they all contain the version of Mickey from the original Steamboat Willie cartoon. That’s because the copyright for Steamboat Willie expired and so that version of Mickey is now in the public domain. In honor of the occasion, Jaimie and Jay of Wicked Makers constructed this terrifying Mickey Mouse animatronic head styled after the characters from the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise.

Wicked Makers have experience in this arena, because they built a Springtrap animatronic a few months ago. Like that project, this is a life-sized animatronic robot. But unlike Springtrap, this is just a head. However, that certainly doesn’t make it any less creepy. It still retains the unsettling movements and decrepit styling that makes it look like a forgotten theme park attraction left in storage for decades.

To start the project, they commissioned BeardlessProps to create a 3D model of the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey. That model contains several broken and battered pieces in keeping with the theme. After 3D-printing the head parts, Wicked Makers got to work bringing it to life.

A massive amount of that work went into giving Mickey the right look. Plain 3D-printed plastic wouldn’t cut it. One cool trick they came up with was to stick shredded black fibers to the plastic using Mod Podge. That gave it the appearance of felt and didn’t require any sanding or smoothing of the prints. Other areas got a coat of Bondo body filler to cover the layer lines and create texture. With some paint and weathering, the result was phenomenal. We don’t think that Hollywood prop makers could do any better.

Mickey’s head and jaw movement comes from several small servo motors. An Arduino UNO board controls those. It receives commands from a Sony PlayStation 4 controller connected through a USB host shield. That was a clever idea, because it lets Wicked Makers perform the puppeteering work with a familiar, intuitive interface.

Sadly, the animatronic failed while Wicked Makers was filming it in action. They have some repair work to do before it is back in service and we’re looking forward to seeing that in another video. But what we did get to see before the failure was fantastic. This looks exactly like what we would expect to see if Mickey Mouse existed in the Five Nights at Freddy’s universe.