Uncovering The Secrets of Hidden Mickeys

When I went to Disneyland over the weekend, Alex asked me if I could take some shots of the hidden Mickeys around the park. I knew there is supposedly at least one on every ride, so I agreed, thinking it was an easy project. Little did I know just how difficult hidden Mickey spotting can be and how much debate goes in to the definition of a hidden Mickey. So on top of sharing some hidden Mickey images with you, I'd like to open the floor to your interpretations and ask if any of you readers have photos of the phenomenon. Let me start off by saying just how difficult it can be to spot hidden Mickeys (let alone photograph those of them on the rides). On our first day in the park, my boyfriend and I spent about an hour in The Golden Horseshoe eating ice cream and enjoying the musical stylings of Billy Hill and the Hillbillies. While in the saloon, I looked ceiling to floor to find a Mickey. Eventually, I decided there must not actually be one in The Golden Horseshoe. When I got back to the hotel though, I thought I'd check the internet just to make sure. That's when I discovered that the only one in the building is one tiny Mickey in the central vent under the stage. That's when it started to strike me just how hard this project was really going to be.

That's also when I started to realize just how hard it is to define a hidden Mickey. While it seems like a basic concept, the definition of "hidden" is quite open. I read a few forums where people argued about this idea and even as we started spotting our own hidden Mickeys, my boyfriend and I started debating over what was too obvious to be considered hidden. For example, I thought these Mickey rivets should be considered hidden because they weren't something you'd expect and you certainly wouldn't notice them on first glance. On the other hand, he felt they were simply decorations and too in-your-face to be hidden.

Mickey's House in Toon Town proved to be an excellent example of this concept as everything is already Mickey themed. Do the obvious music notes and metronome count?

And if those are considered to be too obvious, then what about the tiny Mickey heads on the book backs of both Mickey and Minnie's favorite titles?

Were these lights in the movie theater too obvious?

The matter only became more problematic from that point on. While some Mickey's were very obvious and intentional, like the rock formation below, it's sometimes hard to determine if any given arrangement of three circles beside one another would count.

Did the Disney gardeners intentionally clip the cactus so it would form a Mickey head?

Does a hidden Mickey have to be completely closed and circular to count?

And what about the layout of the three umbrellas in this billboard seen in California Adventure?

On our final day, we thought our questions may finally be answered when we ran across a book titled Disneyland's Hidden Secrets: A Field Guide to Disneyland Resort's Best Kept Secrets. Once we started browsing through the book though, we soon realized that it was not written by an imagineer or someone else with a definitive authority on the subject, but simply an avid Disney fan. In fact, the book had many of the questionable hidden Mickey examples that we also saw on line. For example,can Smee's eyes and nose on this wood carving really be considered a Mickeyface?

And is this decoration on the stalls in Downtown Disney really secret enough to be considered hidden?

I guess that like so many other things in life, there is no definitive answer as to what is, or is not, a hidden Mickey (at least not until the imagineers come forward and list off every one they intentionally embedded in the rides and shops.) So rather than speculating, let's just step back and appreciate the pictures of the following "subtle Mickey" images from around the park.


I'm leaning to a fairly loose interpretation of hidden. I would consider the rivets and the scrolling on the stalls a hidden Mickey. I would also guess if working there and given any amount of freedom, in order to spice things up, you'd try to make a Mickey face in anything you were doing. So the cactus and almost everything should all be classified as possibles.

I didn't notice the movie theater stair lights until my 3rd or 4th trip up them.
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I was just at Disneyland, CA last weekend and rode the Lily Belle (Walts caboose/train for his wife) with my bf. A conductor joined us and I had the thought to ask about the "hidden Mickeys" He defined them as something that was put intentionally in the park by an imagineer. It has to be permanent. So the cactus wouldn't count. The book you stumbled across was his suggestion at finding some of them but that might be b/c Disney makes it.
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Did anyone hear the story how Disney stole a PA toy manufacturer's Mikey Mouse? It has it's own wikipedia page, so that's how I found it. Anyway, a neighbor of my parents, a 90 year old man who was just taken out of his home and put into a not-so-great nursing home, is the son to the man who created Mikey. I just found out about this, and I am not so eloquent, but I thought that was really interesting. My mom is upset that they could have all these riches towards Mickey, but he has to go to a bad nursing home and sell all his belongings to afford it.
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Great article. My favorite thing about Neatorama is the variety of subjects you cover. Where else could I read about hidden Mickeys and then read about earthworms moving in herds? Nowhere, that's where!
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We were at Disney World 2 years ago. We were invited down by a good friend of ours who works there. She gave us a tour of all the parks and pointed out the hidden mickeys as we passed them. It was crazy...there were tons! Some could not be seen unless you were standing at a certain angle...like the spectacles on the table once you get inside the tower of terror.
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I always thought hidden Mickey's were more of a Disneyworld thing. Disneyland wasn't built to have hidden Mickeys in fact there were not even any characters walking around during the first few years of operation. For opening day hey had to borrow the characters from ice capades, which is why they looked so bizarre.
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I'm a former Disney World cast member, and a current Disneyland cast member. Here's how I, and most of my Disney friends, break down Hidden Mickeys to be:

A hidden Mickey is a Mickey Mouse-shaped (logo, actual Mickey head, body, etc) that was purposefully put into the park by Imagineers, excluding Mickey Mouse/Disney themed decoration or theming.

In Laymon's Terms; if you see a Mickey shape, and it's being used as decoration in a store window or on the FastPass dispenser, it's probably not a HIDDEN Mickey. Don't forget you're in Disneyland when you see Mickey Mouse logos and theming, of course it's going to be everywhere.
This goes for Mickey's Toontown and like areas. I hate that Disneyland’s Hidden Secrets book because it was not written by Imagineers. It was written by a guy who collected OTHER people's findings and catalogued them. Of coure Mickey's house is Mickey themed, why wouldn't it be? It thinks every Mickey shaped vegetable in his garden is a Hidden Mickey. No, it's not. It's right there.
HOWEVER, I would say the Mickey-shaped female symbol and the Mickey-profile on the books are Hidden because they are pretty inconspicuous, and because they are parodies.

Hidden Mickey's tend to be things arranged to the Mickey logo (one big circular shape, with two appropriately proportioned circular shapes in the correct placement, ie, the rocks or the cactus in the shooting range) or a shape of Mickey Mouse himself (ie, the lying down Mickey shaped cloud in Splash Mountain) placed somewhere where everything around it is not done in the same way.
You know the hole in the vent below the stage is a Hidden Mickey, cuz it's the only one. The rivets on the gate are all Mickey's so that's probably Mickey theming.

Last thing I'll say is this, the Hidden Mickeys are placed everywhere. They're in the rides, they're in the fireworks, they're in the films, there are even Hidden Mickeys at Universal's Islands of Adventure (bonus round). Imagineers found opportunities to place them Everywhere. Some are hard to find, some are not, and some are damn near impossible to see unless you already know where and when to look. And they did it for fun, not because they had to. They didn't need to stretch to fit them in.

General rule of thumb: You'll know it's a Hidden Mickey when you finally see it.
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Before I thought it was just a logo design but they said it has a purpose and i know why, to still entertain kids and kids at heart. Good Job Disneyland!!

http://www.whattravel.com/how-to-visit-disney-in-the-spring/
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