Mickey, Oprah, Baby Yoda, and Teddy’s Bear

So here’s my exasperated question of the day: why wouldn’t the New York Times daily game “Spelling Bee” (a honeycomb of seven letters that challenges players to compile a list of legit words), accept neoteny as a solution? I was only one point away from beating the game and so needed to provide just one additional word. The puzzle had happily allowed phenotype and photon. Neophyte passed muster. So did python, honeypot, and toothy. But alas not neoteny, a concept central to understanding play. “Hooey,” I say! Or even “phooey”! (The algorithm accepted both as scoring words.)

What does this have to do with Mickey Mouse, Oprah, Teddy’s Bear, and Baby Yoda?

Neoteny: Where Biology and Psychology Coincide

When juvenile features persist into adulthood, evolutionary biologists have a name for it: neoteny. Youngish faces trigger a fond, nurturing, protective parental feeling in us. Our cartoons and our toy industry make special room for charming puppy-like dogs, smiling pigs, and fluffy bears.

By contrast, in the narrowed eyes of adult foxes or coyotes, you picture classic predators, faced forward, purposeful, poised to leap, ready to pounce. In real life it would be a mistake to test the impulse to pet the nice, real bear.

If while visiting a zoo you happen to watch a polar bear long enough to catch its attention, you will see its nearsighted gaze focus, the ears folding back, and the eyes separating you from the background tourist blur. Cute no longer, the adorable furball will transform. He will appraise you as prey. You are the target. Try not to recoil.

The Story of Teddy’s Bear

Theodore Roosevelt saw this same snarling face when he encountered his quarry on an unproductive presidential hunting trip in 1902. Pressed for results, a guide had caught a bear and tethered it for the president, wounding it in the process. Following principals of good sportsmanship, the president refused to shoot an injured bear. (That proved merely a reprieve, though; the hunting party dined on bear paws that evening.)

But here’s the pertinent part: A newspaper cartoonist soon transformed TR’s routine sporting refusal into an act of pardon, tugged at viewers’ heart strings with the unnaturally sweet image he drew, and as the picture neared viral popularity, spawned an industry that markets the familiar big-eyed big-eared sweet-faced plush toy that our toddlers cuddle to this day.

Mickey Rat Becomes Mickey Mouse

As it happens, Mickey Mouse experienced a similar transformation, evolving from the rat-like and sharp-edged character in Disney’s Steamboat Willie (1928), to the kindly and rounded figure that we know well now. In his classic essay, “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse,” the evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, noted how the early Mickey used the unwilling animals on board to accompany a frantic rendition of “Turkey in the Straw.”

The proto-Mickey tugged the tails of nursing piglets for squeaks, tormented a cat for screams, hammered a cow’s teeth like a xylophone and used her udder as a bagpipe, and then honked an outraged duck in syncopation.

This edgy rodent-play matched the sharp features of the proto-Mickey. But over time in new cartoons both Mickey and Minnie evolved, as Gould pointed out, in a “progressive juvenilization,” a reverse sequence to human development. Their snouts receded, their faces flattened, their heads grew rounder, their eyes stayed disproportionately large, their ears expanded, and the limbs shortened and grew pudgier. You can draw the characters schematically and recognizably using only four circles.

Behaviorally, too, the lovebirds Mickey and Minnie lost their sharp edges, becoming leading examples of the gentler playfulness that audiences came to expect of Disney. In 1947, for example, when Mickey ruined his tuxedo, an indulgent Minnie repurposed him as a cute hobo for a costume party. In 1948, Mickey and Pluto made friends with a bunch of slippery smiling seals who cavorted in their bathtub. In 1951, Mickey and Minnie became the soft touches for a roguish racoon. In 1940 and again in 2000, Mickey appeared as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice who mischievously (and disastrously!) donned the wizard’s hat to cut short his chores.

Theater audiences could not take their eyes off the mice as they became progressively tamer, rounder, and sweeter. The characters became, more like human babies, in a word, neotenous.

Prominent eyes, roundish faces, larger ears, and the benevolent, charming expressions of puppies or babies compel our gaze. And the gaze, when reciprocated by another human or a beloved pet, activates the oxytocin reward system in our emotional neurochemistry, deepening emotional bonds. Perhaps this also helps account for the magnetic visceral appeal of neotenous screen presences like Oprah Winfrey and Baby Yoda.

Play Essential Reads

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The Long Childhood

Compared to most other mammals, we humans experience a lengthened development. After an hour a newborn giraffe can stand and run. At two weeks and two days old a hamster may bear young. Most mammals become more rigid and unplayful as they age.

Instead, we enjoy a protracted childhood that entails prolonged parental care and social nurture. This interval allows for brain development that enables complex learning and fosters creativity and adaptability.

Much of this development hinges on exploration and experimentation, playful trial and error. And thus, through play we learn language. We learn how to navigate our social universe. We learn to use our physical endowments and strengthen them in the process. We find our way largely through the premier juvenile characteristic, play. And to our great fortune, we have the capacity to keep playing.

Stuart Brown, the Dr. Spock of play theorists, noted that we humans are “designed by nature and evolution to continue playing throughout life. Of all animals we are the biggest players of all.”

Coda

I have written before about the happy side effects of distant attention—unbidden recall and spontaneous creativity. The mind solves problems while it drifts playfully. And so, while putting this piece together, the solution to the Spelling Bee dawned. The word that put me over the top? Pontoon!