This is the limited edition facsimile version of the one-off, in-house studio magazine, The Mousetrap, published by several Disney Studio animators (Ward Ritchie Press) in 1937. Originally, only 500 copies were printed, but in 1975, a small run of limited edition facsimile copies were distributed throughout the studio once again (Carl F. Macek & Associates).

The publication is filled with nearly seventy pages’ worth of insides jokes and gags (both written and drawn), and features artwork by such famed Disney animators as Ward Kimball, T. Hee, and Freddie Moore (including several pages of Moore’s famous pin-up style drawings). Much of the content parodies life at the studio with exaggerated drawings of specific animators, or humorous interpretations of story meetings, project pitches, and of course, taking orders from the Boss himself. A gag advertisement for an in-studio contest on the final page of the magazine lists the names of several studio employees of the time, including Mary Flannigan, Art Babbitt, Ward Kimball, Lee Morehouse, Roy Scott, T. Hee, Gerry Geronomi, Earl Hurd, Paul Hopkins, Steve Basustow, Olga Krick, Gunther Lessing, Peter O’Crotty, Ugo D’Orsi, and John Clark Rose.

This reprint—extremely rare, in and of itself—affords an insider’s view of a young and rapidly expanding Walt Disney Studios. The intimacy, youthful energy, and camaraderie that abounded on Hyperion Avenue—and which seemed never to fully return after the move to the larger Burbank facilities and subsequent animators’ strike—is preserved in this snapshot of the Disney animators hard-at-play…clever, bawdy, and unafraid to poke fun at themselves or their beloved boss.