Disney+ Just Renewed One of Its Most Beloved Shows

Disney+ is in the midst of several exciting releases, such as the Beatles documentary Get Back and Hawkeye (which chronicles the next adventure for Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton). Before long, another Disney+ original will join the fun and release new episodes. As reported by CBR, the streaming service has ordered a second season of The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse.

Season 1 was a well-received original title for Disney+ and consisted of 20 episodes (shorts). Season 2 will be shorter in episode count but feature longer installments. It will be season-themed (as in winter, spring, summer and fall), therefore airing only four episodes. However, those installments are described as “extended-length.” No exact release date is set, but winter 2020 is the arrival window for the content.

CBR chatted with Paul Rudish, the show’s executive producer/supervising director, about the decision to change up the typical format, which dates back to its predecessor, the Disney Channel show Mickey Mouse. It was simply a desire to change things up mixed with Disney+’s tendency to release content slates quarterly.

“Well, we had done our first season of The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse for Disney+, which is available now. When they wanted to do a second season, [Disney] wondered if there was a way that they could put a spin on it,” Rudish said. “They felt like we’ve got a huge library of shorts now and [wondered] if there was a way we could do something that they could billboard, or point to and say, ‘This is something different?’ They talked about the holiday specials that we had done previously, the Halloween and the Christmas specials. They were talking a little bit about programming ideas and stuff. They told me, ‘We usually air things in the four quarters. We like to have these four quadrants throughout the year. We’d like to do something that we could wave a flag around.’

“Rather than just dumping a collection of shorts and going, ‘Hey, everybody, go look in the shorts bucket,’ they wanted to have something they could specifically advertise. Something they could say, ‘Hey, get ready for the airing of this new thing.’ I quite literally thought, well, they’ve got their four quadrants, their four seasons. What about the four seasons? It doesn’t sound that clever, but I thought about the holiday specials, and in lieu of doing holidays specifically, we thought the four seasons give us a nice thematic framework we could build stories around.

“To look into what’s the magic of winter, what’s the fun of spring, and so on… I literally leaned into that. It was cool that this time they didn’t really have the set format that they wanted us to follow. It was up to us to pitch what we thought we wanted to do. And so each of the four seasonal specials is all slightly different constructions and different kinds of storytelling… It was really fun to be able to explore different formats of storytelling and try some different things that we haven’t really done with the seven-minute shorts.”

The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse Season 1 is currently streaming on Disney+, as is Mickey Mouse. There are also two holiday specials available to watch: The Scariest Story Ever: A Mickey Mouse Halloween Spooktacular! and Duck the Halls: A Mickey Mouse Christmas Special.