Mickey Rooney in YOUNG TOM EDISON (1940) & LIFE Magazine Photo

YOUNG TOM EDISON is a 1940 biographical film about the early life of inventor Thomas Edison, with Mickey Rooney in the title role.

Reception

Upon the film's release Rooney had his picture on the cover of the March 18, 1940 issue of Time; Time called Rooney "a rope-haired, kazoo-voiced kid with a comic-strip face, who until this week had never appeared in a picture without mugging or overacting it." The magazine said the film featured Rooney's "most sober and restrained performance to date, [of someone] who (like himself) began at the bottom of the American heap, (like himself) had to struggle, (like himself) won, but a boy whose main activity (unlike Mickey's) was investigating, inventing, thinking."