The story of the Mickey Mouse sneakers...

I found out a little bit of trivia the other day that blew my mind. I’m a fan of sneakers as you probably know. I also like all things Disney, and specifically the classic cartoon characters. I picked up a Converse sneaker magazine from the Japanese bookstore the other day. It was a history of the company, and most of their iconic sneakers. In the early days they actually had the first licensed cartoon shoes. They were called Skoots, and they featured Mickey Mouse.

I had to look up these sneakers online, and I found they were released in the ‘30s, following the runaway success of Mickey, and his friends. They would have come out around the time of the famous Ingersoll watches. Which was one of the genius business moves of Walt to license his character on all sorts of products. The Skoots were canvas, and rubber like traditional Converse shoes. Instead of the star, or Chuck Taylor logo on the ankle there was a Mickey graphic. His name also appeared on the toe cap.

It might be hard to imagine that some of the rarest, and most expensive sneakers of all time had nothing to do with Michael Jordan. Finding out about these shoes reminded me of one of the gems I got for the missus in our early days. I’ve been collecting Disney Fan magazine from Japan for years. I saw what looked like Mickey sneakers in one issue and had to check them out online. Belle Maison’s Fantasy Shop offers a number of household, and fashion items featuring the Disney characters. I’ve no doubt that if we lived in Japan then most of our apartment would be Belle Maison products.

Anyhow as I was looking up the sneakers I found out that they were actually rain boots. They were designed to look like canvas sneakers. They even went to the trouble of adding functional laces to complete the illusion. The hard part for me was figuring out how I would be able to order these, and get them to the US. There weren’t a lot of companies that offered international shipping. Thankfully I was able to find a third-party vendor that offered purchase, and shipping for overseas customers.

The other thing I had to figure out were the international sizes. I knew that the Japanese sizes were going to be smaller than US sizes, but I didn’t realize by how much. My wife doesn’t have big feet so I thought that it would be easy to get these rain boots. The opposite was the case. Our relatively small size turned out to be the XXL size in Japan. Also the majority of the boots had already sold out. The only ones that were available were the olive green, or leopard print ones. Thankfully the missus loved leopard print designs so that would be her choice. A few weeks later we got a shipment from Japan.

The funny thing was that we went almost a decade without heavy rain in Southern California. Suddenly in the past couple of years we’d gotten more rain than we had in a decade. Of course her Mickey rain boots were buried somewhere in the garage. I would eventually clear out enough space, and find them. Hopefully before we get more rain. Anyhow that’s the story of the Mickey Mouse sneakers. Did you ever own any cartoon character shoes? I’d like to hear about it on the comments section. As always if you would like to sponsor me please visit my Patreon page and consider donating each month, even as little as $1 would help make better blogs and even podcasts!