WEDNESDAY, JULY 31 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C9
official “Disney Legend” a decade
ago. “You knew it was Wayne talk-
ing to Russi.”
Taylor and Allwine also liked to
head to the Disneyland theme
park in Anaheim and spread joy in
character.
“You know how kids have a
meltdown? They’re overtired or
overstimulated? Every once in a
while, Wayne, as Mickey, would
say, ‘Aw, what’s the matter, little
fella?’ And the kid would stop
crying, his eyes would get big, and
he’d look around, and the parents
would say, ‘What just hap-
pened?’ ” Taylor told Farago in
2015 for his book “Totally Awe-
some: The Greatest Cartoons of
the Eighties,” for which Taylor
wrote the foreword.
“And Wayne and I would look
around and say: ‘Did you hear
Mickey? He was here just a second
ago!’ And that made them so hap-
py. The meltdown went away, and
the smiles came back.”
Taylor and Allwine shared their
generous spirit with the world for
nearly two decades, until he died
in May 2009 — the year after they
were inducted together as Disney
Legends. He had voiced Mickey
for 32 years.
At that time, Roy E. Disney, who
was director emeritus and consul-
tant to the Walt Disney Co., called
Allwine and Russi “wonderful
friends” who “gave generously of
themselves for many charitable
causes, especially when it came to
working with children.”
“After Wayne passed away, she
would constantly talk about him,”
Dempsey says of Taylor. “He was
in her heart till the day she died.”
Taylor voiced many characters
during her long career, including
Strawberry Shortcake, Baby Gon-
zo for “Muppet Babies” and the
nephews for “DuckTales.” Yet she
once said that Minnie “actually
enhances who I am — she really
does. In a sense Minnie makes me
better than I was before ’cause
there’s a lot to live up to,” accord-
ing to the site D23.
And Taylor and Allwine made
each other better, say some col-
leagues.
“When they were together, like
Laurel and Hardy, they were just
meant to be together as a team —
and as a lifelong team,” Farmer
says. “If you looked in Webster’s
and saw the word ‘marriage,’ it
should have a picture of Wayne
and Russi.
“They were just so in love and
so wonderful together. I think
that love came through in their
performances, and gave it a little
something extra.”
[email protected]In some joint interviews, All-
wine, who was also an Emmy
Award-winning sound and
sound-effects editor, would sere-
nade Taylor in character. “Wayne
would bring a little ukulele to riff
and do little songs, and quite of-
ten, he would sing a little love
song to Minnie, as Mickey,” says
Farmer, who was inducted as anto share their romantic story with
his “The Rest of the Story” listen-
ers, Farmer recounts. They re-
fused. That would have drawn the
spotlight away from their charac-
ters.
Yet Taylor and Allwine loved
playing out their chemistry
through Mickey and Minnie as
public performance.in love.”
Taylor and Allwine were mar-
ried in 1991 in Hawaii.
The couple, though, kept their
personal romance private. They
did not want their marriage to
color how Disney fans viewed
Mickey and Minnie, who have
never officially married. Once, ra-
dio host Paul Harvey asked themsweet way” in sessions, says Rick
Dempsey, head of Disney charac-
ter voices, adding: “When Russi
would get to laughing at Wayne,
you couldn’t stop her. She would
lay on the floor [laughing so hard]
because Wayne was such a fun-
loving guy.”
“I got a front-row seat,” he says,
“to watch the two of them just fallBY MICHAEL CAVNAThe romance between Mickey
Mouse and Minnie Mouse was
more than just an act. For two of
their real-life voice actors, it was
magic, and soon love, at first
sound bite.
Russi Taylor, who died Friday in
Glendale, Calif., won the role of
Minnie Mouse in 1986, beating
out more than 150 other actors
with her high, pitch-perfect
sound. The next year, she was on
the voice-over stage for the Disney
special “Totally Minnie” when she
met Wayne Allwine, who had in-
herited the role of Mickey about a
decade earlier — only the third
person, including creator Walt
Disney, to officially inhabit the
role.
As soon as Taylor and Allwine
began working together, they
could make theatrical sparks fly.
“They were Mickey and Min-
nie,” Bill Farmer, then newly cast
as the voice of Goofy, told The
Washington Post on Monday. “It
was typecasting.”
Taylor, who was then in her
mid-40s, is remembered by
friends and acquaintances as a
sweet person with a great sense of
humor. “She was outgoing and
warm and always a joy to work
with — always taking joy in her
work,” says “Simpsons” dir-
ector-producer David Silverman.
Taylor voiced the recurring char-
acter Martin Prince on “The
Simpsons” and in “The Simpsons
Movie.”
“I got the feeling that Russi and
Wayne were Minnie and Mickey
Mouse, in all the ways that mat-
tered,” says Andrew Farago, cura-
tor of San Francisco’s Cartoon Art
Museum. “Good-hearted, gener-
ous, kind to everyone they met....
I think they really embodied those
characters.”
When they began working to-
gether, voicing two of the most
famous animated characters on
the planet, they were leading very
separate private lives.
“They were both in bad mar-
riages when I started doing the
voice [of Goofy] back in 1987,”
Farmer says. “But over a couple of
years, they just kind of became
Mickey and Minnie. They got di-
vorced from their respective
spouses and then fell in love.
“Everyone saw it coming,” he
says, referring to the Disney voice-
acting “family.” “Just watching
them work together, I could see
their relationship develop into
something deeper than just a
working relationship.”
“They kind of built up a rapport
with each other in a real fun,
Mickey and Minnie voice artists
only had ears for each other
ily that’s embarrassed to be asso-
ciated with Thompson’s slimy pol-
itician character. It turned out so
much better, and more affecting,
than that.
My praise for the show is not
unqualified, however, as Davies(whose previous work includes
the British version of “Queer as
Folk” and a successful revamp of
“Doctor Who”) stumbled greatly
with Monday’s series finale. The
ending got away from him, as the
Lyons family members find them-
selves front and center in an in-
stant rebellion — driving through
barricades, liberating a concen-
tration camp and uploading the
classified information that leads
to public backlash. Rook is arrest-
ed and her regime crumbles. For
all the inexorable events that al-
lowed her rise, her downfall
comes all too easy; and after living
all these years at a symbolic re-
move, the Lyons family is sudden-
ly the key to saving England.
A hokey epilogue is heavy on
Davies’s affinity for technological
sci-fi uplift: Edith, who has been
slowly dying from the fallout of
the nuclear explosion she wit-
nessed in Episode 1, becomes the
first of the Lyons clan to experi-
ence an afterlife in the cloud,
where she vows to digitally haunt
Rook and her backers. It’s a bit
much. Yet, given the general tone
of topically dystopian TV, viewers
must take happy endings wher-
ever we can get them.
[email protected]Years and Years (six episodes) is
available on demand at HBO and its
streaming platforms.children that they all took part in
the global economy that brought
them, for example, that nice T-
shirt that only cost a pound, disre-
garding the environmental re-
sources and human labor it cost to
make.
“We can sit here all day blaming
other people,” Muriel says. “It’s
our fault. This is the world we
built. Congratulations. Cheers,
all.”
“Years and Years” is one of the
best shows of 2019 so far — worth
going back and experiencing it in
your own way. While remaining a
deeply absorbing family story, as
good or better than any season of
“This Is Us,” “Years and Years” is
depressing on top of depressing,
which may explain why so many
viewers took a pass. It’s hard
enough to cope with the daily
news cycle we have in 2019, much
less imagine how much worse it
could get. I also think HBO erred
slightly with an ad campaign that
made “Years and Years” seem
darkly comedic and vaguely
“Veep”-ish, perhaps about a fam-Daniel (Russell Tovey), who works
for the government’s housing au-
thority, falls in love with a Ukrai-
nian refugee, Viktor (Maxim Bald-
ry), leading to a series of heart-
breaking developments after Vik-
tor is arrested and deported.
Rosie (Ruth Madeley), the young-
est of the Lyons siblings, miscal-
culates the extent of the political
revolution around her and winds
up living with her children and
boyfriend in a barricaded ghetto
with a strict curfew and limits on
commerce.
Along with all this, we see the
collapse of Britain’s parliament
and the complete shutdown of the
BBC; ultimately, Stephen finds
himself working for Rook’s opera-
tives and taking a morally repre-
hensible opportunity to punish
someone he knows.
Complicity isn’t always as obvi-
ous as Stephen’s. “Years and
Years” is unsparing in its message
that we all share blame for the
state of the world. As the situation
worsens, Muriel reminds her
grandchildren and great-grand-tants (dubbed “Signor”), are at
first merely befuddled by the rise
of Vivienne Rook (Emma Thomp-
son), an entrepreneur turned pol-
itician who is celebrated for her
brash and even profanely nation-
alistic and xenophobic opinions.
Initially, the Lyons clan is too
busy with everyday life (raising
kids, having affairs, celebrating
milestones) to pay politics much
mind — save for the family radi-
cal, Edith (Jessica Hynes), an ac-
tivist and writer who happens to
be within viewing distance of Chi-
na’s strategically man-made is-
land, Hong Sha Dao, on the night
President Trump destroys it with
a nuclear bomb.
Watching the horror unfold on
TV in Manchester (and listening
to sirens blare across the city), the
Lyonses at first believe they’re
witnessing the beginning of glob-
al annihilation.
It doesn’t come. One of the
ingenious aspects of “Years and
Years” is how it taps into today’s
alarming lack of expected conse-
quences, particularly where polit-
ical leadership is involved. Davies
turns our everyday anxieties into
a telescoped haiku poem of gall-
ing new realities, where outrages
tend to pile up instead of leading
to retribution.
The Lyonses are a wired, well-
informed family of citizen/con-
sumers with mostly moderate to
left-leaning views. They neverthe-
less get incrementally swept up in
the insidious revolution of
Rooks’s Four Star Party and her
rise to prime minister, replete
with a swastika-esque logo.
(Meanwhile, in the United States,
Vice President Pence is elected
president after Trump’s second
term.)
To assuage their worries about
the job market, financial adviser
Stephen Lyons (Rory Kinnear)
and his wife, Celeste (T’Nia Mil-
ler), sell their posh home at a
significant profit, only to lose the
proceeds when their bank goes
under. Their elder daughter, Beth-
any (Lydia West), comes out with
what her parents expect will be a
declaration of transgender identi-
ty; instead Bethany professes her
desire to transition into a fully
digital existence, with hopes of
one day uploading her brain to the
cloud.
Stephen and Edith’s brother,
NOTEBOOK FROM C1
In the dystopian ‘Years and Years,’ the end is nigh and then it all goes awry
MATT SQUIRE/HBOSTEPHEN SHUGERMAN/GETTY IMAGES
Wayne Allwine and Russi Taylor were the voices of Mickey and Minnie Mouse and in real life were husband and wife.One of the ingenious
aspects of “Years
and Years” is how
it taps into today’s
alarming lack of
expected consequences,
particularly where
political leadership
is involved.
ROBERT LUDOVIC/HBO
TOP: A glum gathering of the Lyonses (including, from right,
Ruth Madeley, Rory Kinnear, Anne Reid and Jessica Hynes) in
“Years and Years.” ABOVE: Emma Thompson as the xenophobic,
nationalist prime minister of Britain.