Return to Blaggard Castle

"The Perils of Mickey: Return to Blaggard Castle" is a Mickey Mouse comic story originally printed in the August and September 1993 issues of Disney Adventures. It is a sequel to Floyd Gottfredson's "Blaggard Castle", written as part of the "Perils of Mickey" branding campaign. It was later reprinted in Mickey Mouse: The Floyd Gottfredson Library - Volume 2: Trapped on Treasure Island, which includes the original "Blaggard Castle" story.

Part 1
The story opens on Mickey, Minnie, and Horace Horsecollar driving up to Blaggard Castle, which has been rebuilt into a museum. Mickey has been invited to be an honored guest at the pre-opening, but he cannot help but think there's something strange about that, since he and his friends are the only ones who knew what happened the last time he came there. As he and his two friends enter the castle/museum, they come upon an exhibit with a series of paintings documenting how the castle was once Professors Ecks, Doublex, and Triplex's hideout, and of Mickey's previous adventure at the castle. The exhibit is also shown to include replicas of the pewter helmet that Mickey built as a defense against the Professors's mind-control ray. As Horace goes to try on one of the helmets, Mickey and Minnie come upon the last painting in the exhibit and suddenly hear the museum's announcer saying that the Professors have actually returned to evil and are now seeking revenge on Mickey.

Horace, now apparently in a trance from putting the helmet on, then pulls a lever that opens a trap door under Mickey and Minnie, but they manage to avoid falling into it. Mickey tells Minnie to go back to town and get the sheriff while he goes to find Horace. She reluctantly does so, but she then falls through a second trap door. Mickey then hears Professor Ecks taunting him over the museum intercom, but refuses to let the villains get away with kidnapping his friends. Mickey finds the controls to the alligator pit and, after narrowly avoiding some poisonous spiders when the pit's elevator goes up instead of down as it did before, makes his way to the Professors' control room (fortunately, the alligators were absent this time). Inside, he finds what appears to be Professor Triplex tying up Horace and preparing to use the rebuilt mind-control ray on him. Mickey kicks the machine at "Triplex", knocking him out.

Accompanied by "Horace", Mickey chisels a hole in the area that Minnie dropped through and heads downward to the room she had dropped in to. However, as soon as "Horace" catches up with him, he then traps Mickey's hands in a pair of handcuffs and then reveals he was Professor Triplex in disguise. Triplex then snares Mickey in a rope trap and pushes up a television, showing that Minnie and the real Horace, both wearing the helmets and tied to chairs, will soon be permanently brainwashed by the mind-control ray as soon as it's repaired.

Part 2: "Shadows of the Past"
Mickey sees Professors Ecks, Doublex and Triplex zapping Minnie and Horace with the mind-control ray on the television, and Triplex then gloats that they're going to get him with the ray next. Fortunately, Mickey manages swing himself onto the television, cut the rope that was holding him up, and then grabs a piece of wire to unchain his hands. He then makes his way back to the Professors' control room, finding the hypnotized Minnie and Horace, still tied to the chairs. Mickey flips the "dehypnotize" switch on the mind-control machine, but then realizes something's not right when he notices the machine is getting warmer. He quickly pushes the machine away as it instead fires a heat ray. Mickey unties the unharmed Minnie and Horace and then removes the pewter helmets, which were actually the things had hypnotized them. Horace then notices Professors Ecks and Doublex behind them, but when he and Mickey attack them, it turns out they're actually cardboard pictures. This leads Mickey to realize that the Professors aren't the ones behind all this, and the real mastermind has been playing with his expectations.

A short while later, we see Mickey, dressed in his raincoat, crying that Professor Triplex tricked him into killing Minnie and Horace. Triplex shortly after appears to him, and gloats about how he has officially turned the tables on the distraught mouse. The villain then removes his Triplex costume to reveal his actual identity - the Phantom Blot. The Blot explains that he'd encountered the Professors in jail a while back, as they'd been locked up because they didn't stay sane from when Mickey previously used their mind-control machine on them. From the Professors, the Blot had learned that the Professors had stashed a copy of their machine, but when he found it, he couldn't get it to work, and instead converted it into a heat ray. Thus, he used the battery-operated helmets on Minnie and Horace, knowing that Mickey would instead try to free them by reversing the machine. Just as the Blot finishes his gloating, though, "Mickey" slaps some handcuffs on him and then removes "his" raincoat, revealing "he" was actually Minnie in disguise. The Blot attempts to escape, but Mickey and Horace trip him with a rope and then tie him up.