A little unkempt blonde hair, golden cheeks, sky blue eyes and a very sweet smile: when you find it in front, you cannot fail to lose your head; Admiring him in his intense thirty -six centimeters (including ears), instinct is only one: scramble it with cuddles!
He is the most famous puppet in Italy, or it would be more correct to say, more famous in the world, because Topo Gigio is much more than what most people think, he is an international star in all respects, complete with duets and sketches with Louis Armstrong, quotes and cinematographic cameos from John Malkovich to Sir Ridley Scott, and a trusted friend of Micheal Jackson, just to mention some curiosities.
The mother of Topo Gigio is the artist Maria Perego, Born in 1923, television author and woman with a tenacious and delicate character, because to create the first animated puppet and free from threads, a creative mind is needed, but above all an out of the ordinary sensitivity.
For thirty years, Topo Gigio has also has a dad: It is his patron Alessandro Rossi, who for more than three decades, has been carrying out the work started by Maria Perego (who disappeared in 2019), and carries on him just as Mrs. Perego would have done, following the same furrow he traced.
How was your relationship with Maria Perego?
“For me Maria Perego was like a second mother; after Topo Gigio, I was her second child: anywhere in the world I found myself, she passed day that between 19 and 9 pm, she did not receive my phone call.”
Alessandro Rossi’s blue eyes (slightly clearer than those of Topo Gigio, and who probably, in addition to his entrepreneurial skills, contributed to making Maria Perego decrees her commercial heir) tell all the affection and enormous esteem for that woman who, in a world still mainly male, has managed to give life to an iconic, empathic and loved character!
In addition to being a woman for whom she feeds a very strong admiration, how would Mrs. Perego describe?
“Maria was an exceptional woman, of an inexhaustible culture: she lived all over the world, she has gone through two wars; a woman with an extraordinary wealth of experience. Luggage that she made available without a filter, and without double purposes. It is wonderful to relate to a person who lived everything she lived, a woman, among other things, of an incredible physical form and an incredible lucidity. ninety years), I never even had the impression of speaking with an elderly person for a moment.
So ahead that Walt Disney offered her to work with him in America (knowing that in Italy it would still be misunderstood). Walt Disney himself, who however breathed a means of relief when she decided to return to their homeland, because in the USA, she was well aware of it, she would become a fearsome competitor.
Not everyone knows the immense international fame of Topo Gigio: can you tell us some curiosities?
“If he looks on his profiles, he will find movies in which the Musino di Topo Gigio is projected on the mega touches of Times Square, where it is a face so well known that tourists from all over the world, as soon as he overlooks the screen, make the choirs. But this is only a small detail: he is the character with more apparitions in the world at the ED Sullivan show -Storico American television program. Lio MessiThey always celebrate their most beautiful goals, mimicking the big ears of mouse Gigio. This gesture in South American football is known as “Topo Gigio Golazo”.
Another grandiose peculiarity made by Maria Perego, it was to make Topo Gigio maintain the same name all over the world, and spoke in the same identical way. Gigio was the first puppet who became a cartoon, in 1988, the first puppet to become an Italian ambassador to Tokyo, the first puppet to sing in Sanremo.
Speaking of Sanremo, how was the idea of making him duet with Lucio Corsi?
“I really like the artistic and pure nature of Lucio Corsi: he has that ingenuity as a goblin, that spontaneity and that full genuineness that unites him to Gigio. The song could only be” flying “, because that of Domenico Modugno was the first voice of Topo Gigio”.
She is a mine of ideas, after the duet Sanremo proposed to the Sugar the shirt “I wanted to be a tough” with the image of Topo Gigio, I went sold out three times less than a day. And now, the musical is producing “Mamma Maria. The true story of Topo Gigio” which will debut next year.
“I wanted to create a show for families, and I entrusted myself to two of the most valid professionals in the sector: Franco Fasano for the music, and above all Maurizio Colombi for the drafting and direction. Maurizio managed to create a story where all the characters who have really been part of the life of Topo Gigio, from Walt Disney to Raffaella Carrà, up to Mago Zurlì, are represented as an icon of fairy tales, Sublime transfers on the stage, the link between Maria Perego and Topo Gigio, considered by her as her own Daimon, her soul.
Why do you think Mouse Gigio has this enormous success and likes it so much?
“Because it passes through the eras, but we always like it because it is true, it likes for the emotions that moves: it is an eternal child who uses irony, it is a messenger, but then it makes it, has the art of making itself, free from ideologies or political contaminations. There is a magic in gigio that makes the public move and passionate when it comes out of its briefcase, which is not a feeling that can be described and combined with a puppet.
