1928: Steamboat Willie - The Surprising Origin of Mickey Mouse

Mickey has been a cultural icon since his first film in 1928, Disney believes the mouse has a recognition rate of between 97 and 98 percent in America. But how did this cartoon mouse become so influential? This week we are looking at the history of Mickey Mouse and Walt Disney studios, starting all the way back with Walt's very first cartoons with laugh-o-gram films in 1926.

[beamis]

Mickey Mouse has been in everyone's childhoods for the past 100 years.

[TheMightyPika]

Your channel is painfully underrepresented. You deserve much more attention.

[nowherebound]

Max Fleischer invented the bouncing ball, as well as rotoscope (live action filmed and traced for realistic motion) along with his brother. Walt “borrowed” that technique for Snow White. Unfortunately, Max had been trying for years to do a feature-length sound cartoon, but the studio only green lit Gulliver’s Travels after Snow White’s success.

[JewelRiders]

Great video. I especially appreciate the creator taking care to state on many of Disney's proclaimed firsts as "one of the first". Fans who truly love animation should take a deeper dive into the history of animation, the film advancements, and discover the true milestone (non-Disney) firsts.

[stevensampson]

Mickey Mouse is my favorite cartoon character.

[keithfulkerson]

Disney's success owes so much to Ub Iwerks. It's a shame that he's not as well-known, given all that he accomplished.

[StoryMemories]

You know I think the move to change the name of the studio from the Disney Brothers studio to the Walt Disney Studios shows walt’s egotism. Of course he wanted to make a marketing statement; and he would continue to take credit for people’s work for decades to come.

[MiaMooreVibes]

Great video! I always enjoy your stuff, man.

As for my favorite vintage cartoon, I really love the Fleischer Superman shorts. They look amazing and are really fun. My favorite is probably "Mechanical Monsters" or "The Arctic Giant".

Superhero media owes so much to that show for bringing flight into the standard powerset.

[yohannbiimu]

I think that there was a point when Mickey Mouse ceased to be so much an animated character as simply being the face of the whole Disney animated franchise. And, I think it happened at about the time when Disney decided to put him into the Sorceror's Apprentice section of Fantasia. The Mouse's earlier cartoons had the character carrying the shorts himself very well, but in time he was taking the backseat to other characters like Donald Duck and Goofy, where they'd eventually take the limelight off of Mickey, and he began being a stagnant straight-man character.

Disney knew that Mickey Mouse's popularity was waning, or had even waned as far as being a substantial draw in the box office. So, he decided to fiddle with his design, give him more prominent roles in his shorts and in Fantasia. However, other animation studios were already creating more fresh, brash, and funny characters by this time, such as Bugs Bunny at Schlesinger's "Termite Terrace" and Tom & Jerry at MGM, and the Mouse's popularity had long since plateaued. Mickey Mouse's 15 minutes of fame were up.

For whatever reason, Mickey had ceased being the somewhat anarchistic trouble-maker he had been in his earlier incarnation. He'd become a boy scout and rather milquetoast compared to characters from other studios. And, it turned out that even the other Disney animated creations became more popular and profitable than the Mouse. However, it seems as though Walt Disney, through a force of will, kept the Mouse as the symbol of his empire, and kept churning out tiresome Mickey shorts until making shorts completely became a thing of the past.

My point is that Mickey Mouse isn't so much a "great character" that people love due to his excellent performances on the screen, although there are some good examples of this, but rather that Mickey is what he is in people's minds because they identify it with the whole of the Walt Disney product. Our response to the "character" of Mickey Mouse is a knee-jerk response to something that never ceases to cross our paths anywhere we go. We see the Mouse everywhere, and we are conditioned to adore it. He has become a form of corporate propaganda.

I think that if most people were to see what Mickey Mouse WAS when he was first discovered by the world, they'd be rather shocked at how violent and cruel he could be. But, that was the comedy style of the time, and even a few years later, with some refinement, the Mouse was still quirky and rather exceptional. Now, when we see newer adaptations of Mickey, he's stripped of everything that he had been in the past, even down from when he was the milquetoast boy scout. There is no longer any consistency with the Mouse. He is no longer "a character." It is simply a logo that Disney animators are forced to bring out of the closet every so often to remind the public that he still exists.

[stephenholloway]

Actually, it was his distributor, Charles Mintz who came up with the deal and took over the Oswald shorts when Walt refused the offer and quit. Universal later fired Mintz and Walter Lantz took over from there.

[RayPointerChannel]

Your passion on this subject is evident. However, in your summaries, there are a number of distortions of many documented facts. First, It was Charles Mintz, husband of Margaret Winkler, the discoverer of Walt Disney who secured the Oswald contract with Universal. And It was Mintz and Universal who took Oswald from Walt and hired away Walt's Animators. One of them Hugh Harmon and convinced Mintz and Universal that he was responsible for the success of Oswald. So Walt did not "quit." This was what forced him to create Mickey Mouse and ensure that from that point on, anything he created would be owned by him.

There is no evidence that Walt's motivation to produce a sound cartoon was based on seeing THE JAZZ SINGER, but it was obvious that sound was coming in. The clip from MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME is not the Fleischer version in sound. That was a reissue by Alfred Weiss. Max Fleischer produced 18 of the Ko-Ko Song Car-tunes using the deForest Phonofilm sound process between 1926 and 1927. The authentic sound Song Car-tunes include HAS ANYBODY HERE SEEN KELLY, MY DARLING NELLIE GRAY, COMIN' THROUGH THE RYE, BY THE LIGHT OF THE SILVERY MOON, and several others.

[hamburgareable]

Ha! Universal, along with its executive, Charles Mintz, responded by taking away Walt Disney's animators and acquiring the rights to the character of Oswald with some sort of a "f off" rudeness (excuse my language!). Meanwhile the creator himself, losing his beloved creation, had to start from scratch and thus came up with a new one, Mickey Mouse, because nobody could grab that mouse away from him. So he finally got it in his possession. He owned it and he went through successful things along with Mickey, feature-length animated & live-action films and as anybody'd say, the rest is history!

[LakeGameCreepr]

in 2024 Steamboat WIllie will enter public domain. the mouse will finally be ours

[Austinator]

These days, Steamboat Willie is known for being briefly seen on the Walt Disney Animation Studios logo which was first introduced in the opening for Meet the Robinsons.

[Bigbadwhitecracker]

There's just something about Walt's black and white

[DUMPGG]

Did you find how they synchronised image with the music?

[zahirsookoor]

@3:35 This is the stuff I live for..the actual accounts of those who were there

[nightdrive]

I am here from Imgur and am a huge cinephile, I love your channel!

[xway]

I just wanted to say that I really like your channel. Your videos are always interesting and well done. I hope you see a lot of success in the future.

[spins_um]

Anybody watching this cause steamboat is public domain?