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I
was sittin' one night talkin' to this guy and I told him, "Look. Mickey
Mouse is not something that Disney dreamed up. Mickey Mouse is something that
Disney grabbed hold of from some guy, and he was just a stick figure. Then he
got some artist to work on him, and they developed Mickey Mouse through the
years ... and I says "If you go back far enough, you can trace Mickey
Mouse to this stick figure, with a circle on it, and you can also imagine,
here's Mickey Mouse's father, he'd be something like a real ratty lookin'
thing, and so since Superman had the 'S' on his thing, I put 'R.F." on his
chest". So this guy comes around the next day "You know what, that
Rat Fink you drew last night, I want a T-shirt with that on there." O.K.,
so I made him one, made his friends one, and their friends all wanted one, so
pretty soon, I'm drawin' this Rat Fink on everything . And in 1963 I
copyrighted it. But it was still supposed to be what Mickey Mouse's father
looked like. I don't know what Disney'd say about that, but that was the
original intent. We're gonna animate him, and Mr. Gasser, Hot Breath, and
Junkyard Dog, these are all his buddies. Nobody's doin' a cartoon on what's
really goin' on, that's what kills me. That's why I sorta wanta get this done
because they're all super-heroes. I don't wanna talk about that. I want to talk
about skateboarding, and goin' down to the beach, and hot-rodding. There's
never been a cartoon done about "Wild Wheelies", and '57 Chevies skiddin'
around corners and throwin' a shift like Mother's Worry … Nothin'! That's what I
wanna do ... but the big guys downtown with the money, they all say "We
don't want that. We want 'Spiderman' stuff." ... and I says "Well,
that's too far out for me. It doesn't happen. It's not down to earth. It's not
what's happening in the street.