The night Mickey Mouse entered CHEERS

Here’s a show-and-tell Friday question. I'm being spammed so leave your question but I'm moderating them to keep out the riff-raff.

From Wally:

One day, while falling down the rabbit hole of the Internet I discovered this clip, titled "Mickey Goes to Cheers."

What can you tell us about it, good sir?

This was a special for the Wide World of Disney, aired November 13, 1988 to celebrate Mickey Mouse’s 60th birthday. It was done in a combination live-action/animation format a la WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (which the Disney studio also produced).

Due to some magic spell or something Mickey is transported into real life (if you can call sitcoms real life) and no one recognizes him. He enters the world of FAMILY TIES and CHEERS.

Some writers from Disney wrote the CHEERS scene and it was God awful. They didn’t even write Mickey well. Even Disney CEO, Michael Eisner recognized that. He called James Burrow and asked, as a favor, if we CHEERS writers would take a pass at it?

So a group of about six of us banged out the new scene. Eisner was delighted, Mickey was pleased for the most part, and that was the scene that was shot.

None of us were paid for it, but it was payment enough just to throw out that original scene.

About a week later a messenger from Disney arrived at the office and gave each one of us a giant tote bag crammed with Disney goodies. There were VHS copies of Disney classics, shirts, a letterman jacket, Mickey phone, stuffed animals, a watch, cards, magnetic desk toy, mouse ears, bubble bath, and God knows what else.

All of us had young children at the time and this was the greatest gift ever! If they had paid us, our fee would have probably been a couple grand a person and I’m guestimating each bag was worth maybe $500. But so what? There’s not one of us who wouldn’t’ve preferred the bag.

Seeing the scene again for the first time in over twenty years, it wasn’t our best work. But I remember we were very restricted in what we could and couldn’t do. Anyway, here it is. And to answer your next question: I still have the phone and jacket.