Walter Benjamin first mentions Mickey Mouse in 1931, in a note written in light of a conversation with Kurt Weill and Benjamin's close friend, the banker Gustav Gluck, drafted under the title ‘Zu Micky Maus’. From this point until 1936, when he mentions Disney films for the last time in the second version of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, Mickey Mouse occupies a significant, if secondary, position in Benjamin's writings on cinema and experience. This short-lived presence mirrors the general fascination of intellectuals with this popular figure, which soon waned. Only Sergei M. Eisenstein would continue to defend Disney until the early 1940s. During the 1930s, Benjamin collected a number of German and French newspaper clips on Disney, which aided his argument around Mickey Mouse in ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933) and in the ‘Work of Art’ essay. Disney often appears in Benjamin's work alongside Charlie Chaplin, since both are associated with the therapeutic function of laughter. He was not alone. The journalist Harry Carr quoted Walt Disney in a 1931 article for the American Magazine in which he acknowledged his debt to Chaplin on the creation of Mickey Mouse: ‘We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin […] a little fellow trying to do the best he could.’ Although both characters constantly struggle with authority, their approach to reality and to the problems they face are at odds.