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In his first four cartoons, Mickey did not wear gloves. In The Opry House, he put on gloves before playing a piano. Since his sixth cartoon, When The Cat's Away, Mickey has always worn gloves. In Mickey & The Seal, he even left his gloves on while he took a bath!
Writing in Fantagraphics' sixth volume of Mickey Mouse comic strips, Joe Torcivia refers to "the Disney characters' ubiquitous gloves." In Floyd Gottfredson's story involving a hypnotist/jewel thief known as The Gleam, those gloves hide fingerprints and, in one scene, conceal the identity of The Gleam's accomplice. Does anyone know who decided that Mickey should always wear gloves? And is the purpose of the gloves to make it easier for the animators to show what Mickey is doing with his hands? Or is part of the reason for the gloves to help distinguish Mickey from Walt's earlier character, Oswald Rabbit? Was Mickey the first cartoon animal to wear gloves? I'm better at coming up with questions than answers.
Since 1973, Cecil Adams has written a syndicated question-and-answer column called The Straight Dope. (In the US and in the column's title, "dope" means "inside information.") Adams has also published several books and maintains a website. Here is his explanation of why so many cartoon animals wear gloves:
"Many early animation characters were crude portrayals of black people, often based on the characters in blackface minstrel shows. The minstrels wore gloves, so their cartoon equivalents did too. When these racial stereotypes became unacceptable, animation studios switched to using animals instead."
One of the responses is from a man who thought it was hilarious that one of Max's college buddies in An Extremely Goofy Movie asked, "Did you ever wonder why we always wear these gloves?"
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=350148

In 1927, Disney animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising created a "black boy" character named Bosko. He was a sterotypical (for that era) Negro, except for the "dog nose." In 1929, Harman and Ising produced a film showing Ising creating Bosko and then talking with him. The film was not shown in theaters. It was presented to studio executives in the hope that someone would be interested in producing a cartoon series starring Bosko. Warner Brothers was.....and did. Bosko's first words were: "Well, here I is an' I sho' feels good." And Bosko, like Mickey, did not initially wear gloves.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pn7XvTDM-gk

Quote from user: Robb_KBark's Beagle Boys wore globes (so as not to leave fingerprints).
Wouldn't gloves be more practical than wearing globes on your hands? :)

Quote from user: Robb_KBark's Beagle Boys wore globes (so as not to leave fingerprints).
I'm not sure it necessarily had anything to do with fingerprints; sometimes Barks' non-Duck dogface background characters seem to wear gloves, and sometimes they don't. I think he was a little inconsistent with the Beagle Boys; at times they are clearly wearing gloves...

http://i.imgur.com/kYV9CPJ.jpg

... and at other times they seem not to be. For example, in the Holiday in Duckburg lithograph, they aren't.

http://i.imgur.com/vkA31u5.jpg

Rosa's Beagle Boys, though, are quite explicitly not glove-wearers.

http://i.imgur.com/ioZh1P9.jpg

I somehow personally prefer that the Beagle Boys not wear gloves, but in general, it isn't something I think of a lot (unlike the color of Scrooge's coat, for example, which to me is far more important).

Quote from user: Thomps2525It doesn't seem odd to see the Beagle Boys with human hands but it seems very odd to see those hands with only four fingers instead of five. Most animal characters in cartoons and comics have only four fingers on each hand, even characters such as Donald Duck and Porky Pig, who shouldn't even have hands. We are so used to seeing four-fingered hands and four-fingered gloves, we probably think it looks strange if we see an animal character with five fingers on each hand, even though five fingers is normal.
A lot of early Mickey Mouse publicity art (and a few dolls) that originated outside of the Disney studio featured Mickey Mouse with five fingers!

The Mickey doll you have pictured is the standard type sold by Dean's Rag Book, a UK-based firm, in the 1930s. Dean's "innovations," like five-fingered hands, big teeth and whiskers, were deliberately added by designer Richard Evans Ellet as a means of making the design unique to Dean. Dean apparently didn't have exclusive rights to Mickey in the UK, but they could take action against other Mickey manufacturers if those others imitated Dean-specific features like the teeth and whiskers. (In November 1930, they took a rival to court for copying the whiskers!)

Quote from user: Thomps2525Wow, I never knew that! I found a picture of a five-fingered Mickey doll by doing an image search on Google. The year of manufacture and the country of origin are not given. The Mickey Mouse page on the OMG Facts website quotes Walt Disney as saying that Mickey would look strange with five fingers on each hand: "Five digits are too many for a mouse. It would look like a bunch of bananas."

http://www.omgfacts.com/lists/337/9-Facts-About-Mickey-Mouse-You-Never-Knew

*gasp* This Mickey Mouse doll looks very very weird :O! Isn't this Mickey Mouse doll a knock-off or something? I have a Mickey Mouse shirt where Mickey has five fingers and wearing sunglasses. I agree that Mickey would look strange with five fingers. I always prefer anthropomorphic animals with four fingers.