Short story I probably read in the 70’s. Civilization is wiped out, but a robotic Mickey, Donald, and Goofy which were intended for theme park use wander the desolation and have philosophical discussions. I recall that Goofy spouts Marxist ideologies because he was intended for Disneyland in China.
Answer
This may be a duplicate of Trying to identify a short story about Disney characters in a post-apocalyptic world where the answer of "Heirs of the Perisphere" by Howard Waldrop, published in 1985 in Playboy, was put forward.
A sample is available for free currently on Baen Books.
The custom-order jobs were animato/mechanical simulacra. They were designed to speak and act like the famous creations of a multimillionaire cartoonist who late in life had opened a series of gigantic amusement parks in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Once these giant theme parks had employed persons in costume to act the parts. Then the corporation which had run things after the cartoonist’s death had seen the wisdom of building robots. The simulacra would be less expensive in the long run, would never be late for work, could be programmed to speak many languages, and would never try to pick up the clean-cut boys and girls who visited the Parks.
These three had been built to be host robots in the third and largest of the Parks, the one separated by an ocean from the other two.
And, as their programming was somewhat incomplete, they had no idea of much of this.
All they had were a bunch of jumbled memories, awareness of the thunderstorm outside, and of the darkness of the factory around them.
The tallest of the three must have started as a cartoon dog, but had become upright and acquired a set of baggy pants, balloon shoes, a sweatshirt, black vest, and white gloves. There was a miniature carpenter’s hat on his head, and his long ears hung down from it. He had two prominent incisors in his muzzle. He stood almost two meters tall and answered to the name GUF.
The second, a little shorter, was a white duck with a bright orange bill and feet, and a blue and white sailor’s tunic and cap. He had large eyes with little cuts out of the upper right corners of the pupils. He was naked from the waist down, and was the only one of the three without gloves. He answered to the name DUN.
The third and smallest, just over a meter, was a rodent. He wore a red bibbed playsuit with two huge gold buttons at the waistline. He was shirtless and had shoes like two pieces of bread dough. His tail was long and thin like a whip. His bare arms, legs, and chest were black, his face a pinkish-tan. His white gloves were especially prominent. His most striking feature was his ears, which rotated on a track, first one way, then another, so that seen from any angle they could look like a featureless black circle.
His name was MIK. His eyes, like those of GUF, were large and the pupils were big round dots. His nose ended in a perfect sphere of polished onyx.
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