Album Review: ‘Music from Mickey’s Toontown’ brings deep cuts

From movies to concerts to theme parks, music sets the atmosphere. This sentiment is evident in “Music from Mickey’s Toontown,” a new album showcasing the background loop from Disneyland’s newly reimagined area.

Music from Mickey's Toontown cover art
Images courtesy of Disney

Sounds and music shape how an audience interacts with art. Is the mood light or heavy? Is the ambience inviting or foreboding? The exact same product, space, or experience can be perceived entirely differently based on what the observer hears.

A New Vision for a Familiar Space

The basic shell of 2023’s overhauled Toontown at Disneyland remains the same as its original 1993 iteration, but the new music on this official album, and within the land, indicates how Imagineers might want guests to approach the area differently than before.

The former Toontown presented itself as a bustling cityscape, its background music boisterous, wacky, and often loud. This reflected the explosive world the land emulated, inspired by early Mickey Mouse cartoons from the 1930s (and to some extent the 1988 film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and the Disney afternoon TV programming block, both big hits at the time). Sight gags abounded within the architecture, music cues suggested chaotic moments from the heyday of cartoons, and a functioning trolley (now long gone) bustled through the street.

Mickey's Toontown 1993 opening
The grand opening of Mickey’s Toontown in 1993

While Toontown is still where Mickey and his pals live and thrive, its new music is calmer, warmer, and at times zen-like. It’s easy to imagine some of the tracks playing in a local coffee shop. On paper, this seems at odds with Toontown’s inherently zany vibe; however, it indicates the shift in what Imagineers instilled into the reimagined land.

Popcorn Park in Mickey's Toontown
Popcorn Park in the reimagined Toontown offers a calm space that contrasts with the hustle and bustle of the land’s former reputation
Photo by Melanie Gable

Toontown is still hyper-sensory by nature, but now invites guests to take a breather with new play elements and decompression zones. The music contributes to that invitation. It prompts visitors to experience many of the same areas with a different lens, less as a metropolis and more as a hometown neighborhood. In its least-hectic moments, the new Toontown music even feels like it could belong in Camp Minnie-Mickey, the defunct land at Disney’s Animal Kingdom known for its laid-back atmosphere (and replaced by Pandora – The World of Avatar).

Track Listing

“Music from Mickey’s Toontown” has 15 songs totaling just over 25 minutes. Most are instrumental, save for “My Happy Place.” Guests can hear the tune, performed by Chantry Johnson and Jessica Freedman, emanating from the newly constructed fountain of Mickey and Minnie in CenTOONial Park.

Fountain of Mickey and Minnie in CenTOONial Park
Photo by Melanie Gable

“Music from Mickey’s Toontown” tracks:

  • My Happy Place from Toontown’s CenTOONial Park Fountain (2023)
  • Hot Dog! from “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” (2006)
  • The Spectrum Song from “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” (1961)
  • Strolling Along
  • Walking and Whistling
  • Playtime Shuffle
  • Mickey Mouse Club March from “The Mickey Mouse Club” (1955)
  • Lazy Bounce
  • I2I from “A Goofy Movie” (1995)
  • Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Theme from “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” (2006)
  • Happy Days
  • Our Homespun Melody from “Mickey Mouse” (S5 E12, 2019)
  • Afternoon Sun
  • Nothing Can Stop Us Now from “Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway” (2020)
  • Mousin’ Around
Mickey's Toontown

An Audio Trip Through Mickey’s History

As you can see, the songs on “Music from Mickey’s Toontown” represent a big-picture view of Mickey’s vast filmography over the decades. This is a welcome change of pace. For a long time, Disney revered the Mickey of Walt’s era and basically nothing beyond that. Despite Mickey’s history continuing in significant ways post-1960s, many Mickey retrospectives, books, and merchandise stuck to the character’s beginnings. It’s nice the new Toontown acknowledges more recent moments while still including tunes from the past. Projects like “A Goofy Movie” or the “Mickey Mouse” Disney Channel series have become just as iconic to new generations as Mickey and pals’ more frequently celebrated projects were to previous generations. It’s great that Disney seems to know this.

Homespun Melody Mickey Mouse cartoon
In the 2019 short “Homespun Melody,” Mickey gleefully showcases his prize-winning singing pig

Equally, though, it’s fun to hear new spins on old favorites like “Mickey Mouse Club March.” A surprising deep cut is “The Spectrum Song,” initially sung by Mickey’s go-to scientific expert, Professor Ludwig Von Drake who performed the number when “Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color” debuted as a revamped version of the formerly black-and-white weekly Disney television program. Identifying its instrumental version on the album was a fun discovery.

Professor Ludwig Von Drake and Walt Disney
Professor Ludwig Von Drake’s earliest appearances were on Walt Disney’s weekly television series.

Admittedly, any song not attributed to an existing production in the track listing above is a mystery to me. Disney didn’t provide accompanying context when the album debuted, leaving listeners to guess where the songs originate. Either these are original tracks composed just for Toontown, or they’re so obscure within the Disney songbook that they have little to no trace of history online.

Hopefully a Sign of Things to Come

Despite the many wonderful background loops that guests hear throughout Disney theme parks, the company seldom publishes the music as official albums. The fact that it did so for Toontown — the same week the land reopened, to boot — is hopefully a welcome sign for the future.

Disney occasionally releases a song or two from a new Imagineering project, but stops short of the entire composition. For example, it dropped “You Are the Magic” from “Disney Enchantment,” but not the full fireworks soundtrack. Similarly, when “Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway” — which just made its Disneyland debut several weeks prior to the new Toontown — opened in 2020 at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, Disney released the main song, “Nothing Can Stop Us Now,” but not the full ride-through audio. The most complete audio libraries in recent memory were full albums for the music and attractions of Pandora – The World of Avatar at Disney’s Animal Kingdom and ambience music from the Carthay Circle restaurant at Disney California Adventure. The whole Toontown loop being accessible on streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music is a positive step forward.

Mickey's Toontown play area
A new play area within the reimagined Mickey’s Toontown

The Verdict

“Music from Mickey’s Toontown” falls within a difficult to describe category. Its calmness is perhaps more vanilla than expected, but its tone aligns with the new vision for the land it serves, and that’s what matters most. Music for theme parks should be composed with the in-park experience in mind first and foremost, rather than any supplemental at-home listening experience.

That being said, “Music from Mickey’s Toontown” is a little too distracting for casual listening or studying — for that, the recent “Lofi Minnie” albums might do the trick. It’s also probably not the preferred choice for families with young kids who want to sing along with something — most of these tracks are instrumental, whereas plenty of sing-along Mickey albums already exist.

Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse in Toontown

This loop is quirkier than “real world” music, but not quite as in-your-face as many other background loops that have a specifically Disney theme park feel designed to fit their niche genre. This perhaps makes the album less appealing for longtime parks fans, but could broaden the album’s reach to a wider audience. Regardless, an entire soundtrack of new theme park background music is never a bad thing, and “Music from Toontown” is a pleasant audio escape into a new moment in Disneyland history.

You can listen to “Music from Mickey’s Toontown” now on Spotify and Apple Music.

For more of our coverage from Mickey’s Toontown, click here.

Mickey's ToonTown 2023 Rededication Ceremony at Disneyland with Mickey, Minnie, Pete and Pals
Imagineering Tour of Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway Queue and Easter Eggs at Disneyland Park
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One Comment

  1. Impressed with the artwork on the album cover esp since it has a child using a wheelchair on it 😍