The main premise of the show is that Mickey runs a kind of dinner theatre and plays short cartoons. There are some very short shorts with characters like Pluto and Donald. An adaptation of "The Nutcracker" is also done with Mickey and Minnie as the main characters. These are pretty sad in quality, like the rest of the show, and lack the heart and spirit that made Disney cartoons great in the early days and even up to the mid-eighties. Thankfully, there are a couple of these classic cartoons mixed in with the "new" shorts. The quality comparison is just jarring, and you'll probably wish this was simply a collection of the old classic stuff.
As a bonus, the first episode of "House of Mouse" is included. Unfortunately, the quality is right on the same level as the Christmas episode, so there's not much to look forward to here. Another bonus feature is a live action short hosted by Wayne Allwine, a foley artist (and also one of the more recent voices for Mickey Mouse) for Disney. It's an entertaining little production, especially for kids who aren't familiar with sound production. He takes a group of kids and shows them how they made sounds like the crackling sounds of fire (smashing together a group of bamboo sticks) and a creaking wooden floor (twisting an old leather wallet). This DVD is not the first release of Mickey's Magical Christmas: Snowed In at the House of Mouse, but these bonus features aren't new either. About the only thing that is distinctly new to this release (versus the original DVD release) is the inclusion of subtitles for the hearing impaired.
In addition, two sing-along songs included as bonus features are "Deck the Halls" and "Sleigh Ride." Both are sung with a backdrop of the classic Christmas cartoons that were shown in the main feature. Lyrics are displayed with a karaoke-style bobbing Mickey head. If anything, this feature could make this a nice DVD to pull out on Christmas Eve with the family, but the most of the rest of this DVD is probably best reserved as background noise.
