Steamboat Willie (UNCENSORED DIRECTOR'S CUT 1928 Original by Walt Disney)

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Directed by: Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks
Story by: Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks
Produced by: Walt Disney, Roy O. Disney (co.)
Starring: Walt Disney
Music by: Wilfred Jackson, Bert Lewis
Animation by: Ub Iwerks, Wilfred Jackson, Johnny Cannon, Les Clark (inbetweener)
Production Company: Walt Disney Studio
Distributed by: Pat Powers (Celebrity Productions/Cinephone sound)
Release date; November 18, 1928 (United States)
Running time: 7:47
Budget: $4,986.69

Steamboat Willie is a 1928 American animated short film directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. It was produced in black and white by Walt Disney Studios and was released by Pat Powers, under the name of Celebrity Productions. The cartoon is considered the debut of both Mickey and Minnie Mouse, although both characters appeared several months earlier in a test screening of Plane Crazy. Steamboat Willie was the third of Mickey's films to be produced, but it was the first to be distributed, because Disney, having seen The Jazz Singer, had committed himself to produce one of the first fully synchronized sound cartoons.

Steamboat Willie is especially notable for being one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound, as well as one of the first cartoons to feature a fully post-produced soundtrack, which distinguished it from earlier sound cartoons, such as Inkwell Studios' Song Car-Tunes (1924–1926), My Old Kentucky Home (1926) and Van Beuren Studios' Dinner Time (1928). Disney believed that synchronized sound was the future of film. Steamboat Willie became the most popular cartoon of its day.

Music for Steamboat Willie was arranged by Wilfred Jackson and Bert Lewis, and it included the songs "Steamboat Bill", a composition popularized by baritone Arthur Collins during the 1910s, and the popular 19th century folk song "Turkey in the Straw". The title of the film may be a parody of the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), itself a reference to the song by Collins.

The film has received wide critical acclaim, not only for introducing one of the world's most popular cartoon characters but also for its technical innovation. Animators voted Steamboat Willie as the 13th greatest cartoon of all time in the 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons, and in 1998, the film was selected by the United States Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry. The cartoon entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2024.

While Walt Disney would become a household name, less is commonly known about Ub.

Ubbe Ert Iwerks (March 24, 1901 – July 7, 1971), known as Ub Iwerks, was an American animator, cartoonist, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician, known for his work with Walt Disney Animation Studios in general, and for having worked on the development of the design of the character of Mickey Mouse, among others. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Iwerks grew up with a contentious relationship with his father, who abandoned him as a child. Iwerks met fellow artist Walt Disney while working at a Kansas City art studio in 1919.

After briefly working as illustrators for a local newspaper company, Disney and Iwerks ventured into animation together. Iwerks joined Disney as chief animator on the Laugh-O-Gram shorts series beginning in 1922, but a studio bankruptcy would cause Disney to relocate to Los Angeles in 1923. In the new studio, Iwerks continued to work with Disney on the Alice Comedies as well as the creation of the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit character. Following the first Oswald short, both Universal Pictures and the Winkler Pictures production company insisted that the Oswald character be redesigned. At the insistence of Disney, Iwerks designed a number of new characters for the studio, including designs that would be used for Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar.

One of Iwerks' most long-lasting contributions to animation was a refined version of a sketch drawn by Disney that would later go on to become Mickey Mouse. Iwerks went on to do much of the animation for the early Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons, including Steamboat Willie, The Skeleton Dance and The Haunted House, before a fallout with Disney led to Iwerks' resignation from the studio in January 1930. Iwerks' final Mickey Mouse cartoon would be 1930's The Cactus Kid. Following his separation with Disney, Iwerks, operating under Iwerks Studio, would go on to create the characters Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper along with the ComiColor Cartoons series as part of a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but the new studio failed to rival its competitors. Iwerks would go on to direct two Looney Tunes cartoon shorts for Leon Schlesinger Productions and several Color Rhapsody cartoons for Screen Gems before joining Disney again in 1940, after which he worked with special visual effects on productions such as 1946's Song of the South.

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