Imagine an alien species or a person from a thousand years from now walking around the remains of what used to be human civilizations. They’d see a lot of statues, monuments, and pieces of art that they could easily confuse for places of worship. Their reaction results in the “All Hail the Great God Mickey” trope.
Human beingssure build a lot of statues, don’t we? Art, advertising, decoration, ironic appreciation, roadside attraction, and a wide variety of other occasions will warrant a statue or two. When society as we know it comes to a bitter end, they’ll be a lot of monuments left over and a lot of questions raised about them.
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A more relevant example would be Arthur C. Clarke’s1949 short story"History Lesson." This brief tale follows a small tribe of nomadic humans, braving the elements of a world without the sun. These people struggle to survive the frozen wasteland, carrying a handful of their most important historical relics. They specify that the function of their items has long been forgotten. The movement of two glaciers spells out the writing on the wall, humanity is doomed, and the survivors are forced to come to terms with that. Resigned to their death, the final humans hide their precious relics away with a radio beacon with the hope that someone may someday find them. Luckily, lizard people from Venus actually benefited from the shuttering of the sun, allowing them to invent interplanetary travel and find the human relics. At the story’s end, the most important relic of them all is revealed to containa Walt Disney cartoon. No word is given on whether they were carrying “Ferdinand the Bull” or “Goofy Gymnastics.”
Modern examples of this trope tend to either play it for comedy or use it to further a message. Ralph Bakshi’sWizardsfeatured priests who worship a familiar eye logo that would be easily recognized as the CBS logo. The 1985 filmEnemy Minefeatures a running gag in which a man quotes Mickey Mouse as a beloved Earth philosopher, leading others to mock the mouse in an attempt to hurt his feelings.Babylon 5features G’Kar noticing a poster of Daffy Duck that he immediately assumes is a deity. There’s aStar Trekepisode called “The Omega Glory” which focuses on warring clans, one of which worships the US Constitution without really understanding it. One of the most interesting examples comes inMad Max: Fury Road, which plays with this trope repeatedly. Immortan Joe’s War Boys worship the V8 engine as a deity, call water “Aqua Cola,” and describe their eventual meeting with the gods as a McFeast.
It’s pretty easy to make jokes out of the “All Hail the Great God Mickey” trope. A person mistaking Daffy for a deity is always funny. By picking aslightly more serious elementof modern culture as a focus, the trope could be much more serious. Fictional beings have worshiped everything from old comic books to the nuclear bomb. Religion is a scary concept in the world of science fiction, and a lot of human activities look a bit like worship. One couldn’t blame an alien or a future person believing that we spent all of our time bowing toward Orlando and praising the mouse.
