When Mickey Mouse makes his triumphant return to the world stage in Disney Epic Mickey, he'll do so without his trademark squeaky voice. The mouse will still speak in the game, but all speech will be rendered as text bubbles. And it's not a technical limitation, but an artistic one.

"I made the creative decision that characters wouldn't talk in the Cartoon Wasteland," Warren Spector explained to The Cut Scene. "It was entirely a creative decision because [he begins speaking in a high-pitched Mickey voice] As soon as I start doing this, I've lost most of my potential audience. [resumes natural voice] If I'm trying to re-introduce this character to an audience, there are certain connotations with that voice that I'm going to have a hard time overcoming." When he does speak in a future game, he'll probably be an affable Everyman voiced by Nolan North (our guess).

Oswald, Spector said, won't need much consideration, due not only to his relative unfamiliarity to modern audiences, but also due to the properties of the character itself. "If you watch the existing cartoons," Spector said, "he's such a special character. In many ways, he's a funnier, more cartoon-y, more modern guy than Mickey is."