"Mumbai Madness" is the eighth season 2 short of the new Mickey Mouse (2013) series created by Paul Rudish for the Disney Channel and Disney.com. It's the 26th to air on the Disney Channel and put up on Disney.com.
Mickey, a taxi driver in Mumbai, India, must take an Elephant who needs to make one simple stop, even if he must venture through all of India to do so. No English is spoken in this cartoon; Mickey speaks Hindi in this one.
Tropes:
- The Cameo:
- Several characters from The Jungle Book (1967) appear briefly.
- The 4 vultures Buzzie, Dizzy, Ziggy & Flaps appear sitting on a tree branch in the desert.
- King Louie and his monkeys chase after Mickey's taxi during the travel montage.
- Crowd Song: Mickey deliberately invokes this to clear the road of cows by breaking into a Bollywood-style song-and-dance.
- Flying Car: The short ends with Mickey getting an elegant vimāna to replace his destroyed three-wheeler.
- Fun with Subtitles: When Mickey and the elephant are stranded in the desert, the words "17 hours later" appears at the bottom of the screen. A Hindi translation appears under it.
- God Was My Copilot: It's all but outright stated that the elephant Mickey was driving is really the Hindu god Ganesha.
- Shown Their Work: Plenty, enough that knowledgeable viewers would recognize the elephant as Ganesha long before the final reveal: the very fact that the episode is set in Mumbai; the elephant's broken tusk; the elephant chooses to get in a taxi driven by a mouse, and everything that follows - Mickey gets lost and confronts endless and seemingly pointless obstacles before finally getting to his destination with the elephant's help, after which he is rewarded. Ganesha has a broken tusk, is the god who places obstacles and removes them for the faithful (and occasionally tests them that way), and rides on a size-shifting mouse - oh, and the annual festival honoring Ganesha is the biggest religious celebration in Mumbai.
- Snake Charmer: One is seen during the taxi-driving montage.
