“There’s only one Mickey.”
In my prior article on Disneyland, I wrote about an interaction I had with a backstage Cast Member. I asked him how many Mickeys can be in the park at the same time without running into each other. He looked me in the eye and said, “There’s only one Mickey.”
So apparently, this is a line that a lot of Disney Cast Members have been trained to use. And they are doing it for a reason—not to be antagonistic or needlessly adherent, but out of an abundance of caution, for a child that might be in earshot. This is known colloquially as the ‘Rule of One’—the guiding principle that Mickey Mouse is ‘real,’ and that every costumed performer, for the time that he is onstage, is the ‘real’ version of the character—not a person playing the character. It’s also why a lot of Cast Members will not say they played a character role; they will say they are a ‘friend of Belle,’ or a ‘friend of Ariel.’
