the best

I think the concept for this short was very clever, but it was too cutting edge for Disney's image. Since so many little kids saw Mickey Mouse as being essentially pure good, the idea of seeing him as a monster would freak them out.

It reminds me of an episode of Animaniacs where Slappy Squirrel took her nephew Skippy to see "Bumbi". The joke was that he cried thinking that Bumbi's mom died, so much that Slappy had to take him all the way to the trailer park in California, where the actress who played Bumbi's mom lived, so he could see Bumbi's mom was still alive.

Frankly I find some of the shorts, like the Happy Birthday short with Donald Duck, where he thinks the nephews went to buy cigars for themselves. Then after teaching them a lesson by making them smoke the cigars till they got sick, he realized the cigars were for his birthday. Much more disturbing than Mickey Mouse as a monster. Then again, I thought Donald's nephews were really cute, so it might be a personal bias on that account.

I noticed searching for information about the short, that Hot Topic is now selling a Disney Couture Runaway Brain t-shirt, with a picture of monster Mickey on it. So I guess they figured, well they might as well try to target the counter-culture crowd, since the short was re-released.