Disney's Mickey Mouse Makeover

For decades, the Walt Disney Co. has largely kept Mickey Mouse frozen under the glass, fearful that even the tiniest tinkering might tarnish the brand and upend his $5 billion or so in annual merchandise sales.

Now, however, concerned that Mickey has become more of a corporate symbol that a beloved character for recent generations of young people, Disney is taking the risky step of recasting his image for the future.

The first glimmer of this will be the introduction next year of a new video game, Epic Mickey, in which the formerly squeaky clan character can be cantankerous and cunning, as well as heroic. At the same time, in a parallel but separate effort, Disney has quietly embarked on an even larger project to rethink the character's personality from the way he walks and talks to the way he appears on the Disney Channel and how children interact with him on the web.

Disney executives are treading careful as they discuss how much they dare tweak one of the most durable characters in pop culture history.

Yet keeping cartoon characters trapped in amber is one of the surest routes to irrelevancy. While Mickey remains a super-star in many homes, particularly overseas, his static nature has resulted in a generation of Americans that knows him but may not love him. Of his $45 billion in annual merchandise sales in 2009, less than 20% will come from the United States.

Epic Mickey, designed for Nintendo's Wii console, is set in a "cartoon wasteland" where Disney forgotten and retired creation live.