By BROOKS BARNES


LOS ANGELES - For decades, the Walt Disney Company has largely kept Mickey Mouse frozen under glass, fearful that even the tiniest tinkering might tarnish the brand and upend his $5 billion or so in annual merchandise sales.

Now, however, concerned that Mickey has become more of a corporate symbol than a beloved character for recent generations of young people, Disney is taking the risky step of reimagining him for the future.

The first glimmer of this will be the introduction next year of a video game, Epic Mickey, in which the formerly clean-cut character can be cantankerous and cunning, as well as heroic, as he traverses a forbidding wasteland.

At the same time, Disney has embarked on an even larger project to rethink the character’s personality, from the way Mickey walks and talks to the way he appears on the Disney Channel and how children interact with him on the Web - even what his house looks like at Disney World.

“Holy cow, the opportunity to mess with one of the most recognizable icons on Planet Earth,” said Warren Spector, the creative director of Junction Point, a Disney-owned game developer that spearheaded Epic Mickey.

The effort to re-engineer Mickey involves the top creative and marketing minds in the company, all the way up to Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive.

The project was given new impetus this month with the announcement that, after 20 years of negotiations, the company has finally received the blessing of the Chinese government to open a theme park in Shanghai, potentially unlocking a new giant market for all things Mickey.

While Mickey remains a superstar in many homes, particularly overseas, his static nature has resulted in a generation of Americans that knows him, but may not love him. Domestic sales in particular have declined: of his $5 billion in merchandise sales in 2009, less than 20 percent will come from the United States.

“There’s a distinct risk of alienating your core consumer when you tweak a sacred character, but at this point it’s a risk they have to take,” said Matt Britton, the managing partner of Mr. Youth, a New York brand consultant firm.

In Epic Mickey, designed for Nintendo’s Wii console, the title character still exhibits the hallmarks that younger generations know: he is adventurous, enthusiastic and curious.

“Mickey is never going to be evil or go around killing people,” Mr. Spector said.

But Mickey won’t be bland anymore, either. In many ways, it is a return to Mickey at his creation. When the character made its debut in “Steamboat Willie” in 1928, he was the Bart Simpson of his time: an uninhibited rabble-rouser who got into fistfights, played tricks on his friends and was amorously aggressive with Minnie.

Consumers will not be able to buy the game before fall of next year. Anticipation is intense. “Wow! This is amazing,” said Eli Gee on GameInformer. com. “I’m really … REALLY excited.”

Other observers are less impressed. “The approach warrants a lot of caution given the difficulty that publishers have had gaining traction on the Wii,” said Doug Creutz, a media analyst at Cowen and Company.

Disney has big video game ambitions, spending at least $180 million on their development this year alone. It has had successful spinoff titles, but no true self-published blockbusters. Disney generated about $86 million in retail sales from January to September in the United States, according to NPD data. Nintendo of America, the leading seller of games, had about $1 billion in sales.

Mr. Spector has struggled with the correct 3-D model of the mouse, consulting with animators and John Lasseter, the Pixar co-founder.

Considerable effort has gone into instilling a backdrop of choice and consequence. Players can either behave in an entirely happy way and help other characters - and have an easier go of it in the wasteland - or choose more selfish, destructive behavior with a harsher outcome, including a Mickey that starts to physically resemble a rat.

“Ultimately,” Mr. Spector said,

“players must ask themselves, ‘What kind of hero am I?’ ” When it comes to Mickey, Disney is asking it, too.




In the coming Epic Mickey video game, the mouse tries to conquer an evil overlord while revealing his own darker side. Above, Mickey with his creator, Walt Disney. / THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY; LEFT, DISNEY INTERACTIVE STUDIOS