Mickey On The Railway Picking Up Stones

Submission 1,801

About

Mickey On The Railway Picking Up Stones refers to parodies of a 2013 YouTube Kids animated video that shows an unlicensed Mickey Mouse animation being hit by a train after collecting rocks from a railroad. Parodies of the video began to appear on YouTube in 2021 and on TikTok in 2023, with people reanimating the clip to highlight its absurdity.

Origin

On November 22nd, 2013, Indian children's nursery rhyme YouTube^[1] channel PebblesRhymes posted the earliest known animation depicting a Mickey Mouse character being hit by a train while he is picking up stones from the train tracks. The video gathered over 640,000 views in 11 years (seen below).

Lyrics:

Mickey on the railway picking up stones
Down came an engine and broke Mickey's bones
"Ah!" said Mickey, "That's not fair."
"Oh," said the engine driver, "I don't care."

Spread

Parodies of the video began appearing online in 2021, with YouTuber^[2] Xxhenrys GachasxX posting a parody video on August 6th, 2021, gathering over 200,000 views in three years (seen below, left). On November 7th, 2022, YouTuber^[3] TheAnimator gathered over 140,000 views on their parody video in roughly a year and a half (seen below, right).

On October 7th, 2023, TikToker^[4] @frost.fairy's repost of the original video gathered over 11.9 million plays and 1 million likes on TikTok in seven months (seen below, left), On January 8th, 2024, TikToker^[5] @junpei.zaki posted a video referencing the nursery rhyme, gathering over 1 million plays and 89,000 likes in five months (seen below, right).