Disney's Steamboat Willie Didn't Just Revolutionize Mickey Mouse — It Revolutionized Cartoons

(Welcome to 100 Years of Disney Magic, a series examining the history, achievements, and legacy of Disney Studios over the last century. Part 3, "Walt Disney Hits The Jackpot With Oswald The Lucky Rabbit" summarized the dramatic rise and fall of Disney's first hit. In Part 4, we look at the creation of an even bigger icon: Mickey Mouse.)

On February 15, Disney100: The Exhibition — the celebration of The Walt Disney Company's history at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia — debuted a lifelike hologram of Walt Disney, fittingly brought to life by none other than Sorcerer Mickey. The video was shared by the D23 Twitter account. Social media took note: Some users made comparisons to imagineers famously "reanimating" assassinated president Abraham Lincoln at the 1964 New York World's Fair; others made jokes about Walt Disney's allegedly frozen corpse (untrue, by the way). The point is, most people respond by focusing on the hyper-realistic depiction of Uncle Walt — impressive regardless of how uncanny it may or may not be. I personally find it unnerving — he's too snappy and happy, like a pod person pretending to be an old man without knowing what arthritis is.

I'm far more interested in the overlooked beginning of the video with Sorcerer Mickey. The character first appeared in the 1940 commercial failure "Fantasia." The third feature film from Walt Disney Studio was highly ambitious, experimental, and expensive — and thanks to World War II (and other factors that I'll get into in a later article) did not make back nearly enough to cover its costs until many many years later. Regardless, I find it telling that of all the framing devices that could have been used to unveil the Disney100 hologram, we get Sorcerer Mickey literally conjuring up the image of his "pal."  

When Walt Disney went to New York to discuss his Oswald the Lucky Rabbit contract with Charles Mintz in 1927, he was confident. As Neal Gabler writes in his biography "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination," Walt even brought his wife Lillian along for the trip, hoping to enjoy a "second honeymoon." As we learned last week, however, those negotiations were disastrous for the young businessman: not only did he fail to get the increased budget he was hoping for, but he lost the project entirely and failed to land any other business deals — despite New York City being the capital of cartoons. Universal's hit Oswald series would continue on without Walt Disney Studios, being produced in-house by Winkler Pictures — and to add insult to injury, Mintz's company was staffed with animators he'd poached from Walt. 

Riding home with Lillian on his preferred mode of travel — the train — Disney must have felt gutted. His big trip to New York was a bust. He was facing his third major setback since launching his Laugh-O-gram animation studio in 1921. His first taste of real, meaningful success had lasted just a year before he lost control of the hit character he created. Here he was with his wife, heading back to a home he had just bought, facing an uncertain future. His studio had everything riding on the Oswalds. Yet, Walt refused to return empty-handed; he was nothing if not determined. By the time he landed in Los Angeles, he had a brand new character to unleash on the masses: Mickey Mouse. 

Or at least, that's one version of the story.  

In 1955, Don Eddy wrote "The Amazing Secret of Walt Disney," published in the August edition of The American Magazine (published in the book "Walt Disney: Conversations"). Unsurprisingly, we get a flattering portrait of the American icon, one that feels uh ... let's say incongruous with the biographies by Neal Gabler and Bob Thomas. Eddy writes, for example, that "Few workers who become established ever leave, voluntarily or otherwise" — something we know from Part 3 to be untrue. Yet, even in this celebratory profile, we see the Mickey Mouse origin story coming undone:

 A widely credited myth has it that Mickey Mouse was inspired by a real live mouse which lived in Disney's attic studio when he was a starving young artist. The story is apocryphal. There was never such a mouse nor such an attic studio. Mickey was an invention of necessity, dreamed up out of thin air on a railroad train carrying despondent young Walt Disney and his bride to California from New York after a crushing, disillusioning defeat in his first hand-to-hand encounter with Big Business."

This is the version of events that Walt himself would later tell Tony Thomas in a 1959 interview (also in "Conversations"). He briefly outlines how he lost the rights to Oswald (without naming Mintz) and explains he used the three-day train ride with his wife to brainstorm ideas. Given that he had previously had mice as supporting characters, and in the cartoon industry at this time "they'd been used, but never featured," it seemed like a smart bet for a new breakout icon. 

Walt would confirm this story again in another 1959 interview, this time with David Griffiths ("Conversations"). In this version though, he did add a possible inspiration for the apocryphal origin story:

"Yes, I had [a pet mouse] during my grade school days in Kansas City. He was a gentle little field mouse. I kept him in my pocket on a string leash. Whenever things seemed to get a bit dull between classes, I would let him rove about on his leash under the seats to get laughs from the other kids. And he got laughs — until the teacher rather sharply disagreed with my sense of extracurricular activities and made me keep the little beastie at home. Perhaps it was the fond memory of him — and of others of his clan who used to pick up lunch crumbs in our first cartoon studio, the family garage, that came to mind when we needed so desperately to find a new character to survive ... Mickey Mouse's country forefathers, you might say."

Even when setting the record straight, Walt seems unable to hold back his natural storytelling instinct.

Once the men had settled on a mouse, Walt himself drew up a model. It was too skinny — not appealing enough. Ub reworked the design, giving the mouse similar proportions to Oswald: a pear-shaped body, round features, and a distinctive elongated nose. Obviously, Oswald — who himself was modeled on the Pat Sullivan style of cartoon animals (Felix the Cat) — served as an inspiration for Mickey Mouse's general aesthetic. More importantly though, Oswald's movement was a major factor in Mickey Mouse's design; Ub wanted the character to be appealing as well as easy to animate. 

The Oswald shorts often mined the comedy of the day — taking bits from Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charlie Chaplin — but part of the character's appeal was the novel melding of animation comedic convention with live-action filmmaking techniques. Walt was experimenting with camera angles and different framings. What's more, the Oswalds emphasized characters expressing broad emotion, demonstrating their feelings with exaggerated, playful gestures and posture — what we might today label as "clowning."

As Russell Merritt notes in his essay "From Alice to Mickey" (published in the collection "The Walt Disney Film Archives: The Animated Movies 1921—1968"):

Oswald himself is a forerunner to Mickey Mouse, built on circles and arcs that had an inherent graphic appeal and were easy to animate. The emphasis was on a more flexible kind of movement and a rounded design [...] But his most important quality was his soft pliability. [...] When Oswald's body is twisted, stretched, or tweaked, Oswald hurts. His mouth opens wide, his eyes roll or squint, his face squeezes. When he is tickled, he giggles. He is, like his predecessors, made up of crazy parts that will bend and detach, but the crucial distinction is that he responds to physical stimuli in humanly recognizable ways.

Walt Disney suggesting the Mickey Mouse cartoons needed sound was simultaneously forward-thinking and predictable. After the massive success of "The Jazz Singer" in 1927, Hollywood was changed seemingly overnight: that film raised the bar significantly for all the studios, which were now in a race to produce the next hit "talkie." For cartoons, however, the transition was less clear. This is because the idea of animation was still tied to drawings — a concept I explored back in Part 1 of 100 Years of Disney Magic. In its infancy, animation was thought of as "cartoons that moved"; even in Walt's own early forays in the medium, the Newman Laugh-O-grams, he approached the content from the perspective of a cartoonist drawing the action. 

Essentially, as Neal Gabler writes, in his Walt Disney biography, 

"... there were psychological hurdles to overcome in the very notion of talking animations. Though audiences expected to hear people talk or sing, they were not initially accustomed to hearing voices from drawings." 

This "psychological hurdle" is essentially what gave Disney an edge. Walt's competitors either already had a sound cartoon produced or had such a project in the works by the time he got started on the third Mickey Mouse short — but none of these made even close to the impression as "The Jazz Singer" or "Steamboat Willie."  Take "My Old Kentucky Home," a sound animation by the Fleischer Brothers that came out in 1926. It's amusing enough, but not really remarkable, and this is partially because it struggles to actually embrace using sound as part of the story. It may feature synchronized sound, but the way it is used feels like a silent film. 

The path to actually producing "Steamboat Willie" was fraught. Walt first had to figure out how they would package the film with sound. After wisely deciding against the phonograph method (which relies on the projectionist to sync up the film and the record), Walt set about finding a person who could put sound on the film. RCA had a system, but Walt was unimpressed with the audio quality. He went with Pat A. Powers, who had a licensing deal with Cinephone, a system that printed the audio onto the side of the film, which was then read by the projector. With Powers' help — and money that Walt Disney Studio really didn't have — Walt set about recording the music for "Steamboat Willie."

Being a trailblazer is expensive. Walt learned this the hard way (especially after ruining a take by accidentally coughing into a mic). Powers helped on the technical side and set up the recording session. The first attempt was, to put it lightly, a trainwreck. The 17-piece orchestra just couldn't play in sync with the animation. Walt provided a visual guide for tempo in the form of blank film with a line to indicate the beat. This proved difficult to follow, and after spending a whopping $1,000 on the day of recording, he had nothing to show for it. It didn't help that the conductor Carl Edouarde felt that "comedy music was beneath him" (per Gabler). 

Not one to quit, Walt had his brother Roy Disney pursue a bank loan and went ahead with another expensive recording session. Since the conductor had difficulty staying in time with just the quick visual cue, Disney tried a film that had a bouncing ball and a soft audible "click" to indicate the beat. This worked, and after just three hours, Walt had the sound for his first sound picture.

In one evening, "Steamboat Willie" pushed the world of animation into the next age. As Gabler writes,

Just as "The Jazz Singer" had sent shock waves through the film industry a year earlier, rival animation studios immediately recognized that "Willie" had wrought revolution in their art. ... Other studios raced to catch up, but Disney had both a head start now and his special synchronizing system, and it would be a year before competitors were making musical cartoons of their own with anything like the fusion of "Willie."

The trades responded enthusiastically to the press screening, declaring once and for all that yes, cartoons could be talkies. In fact, they should be. This was effectively a death blow to series like Felix the Cat and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Although they continued to be made and shown, both series — formerly major hits, complete with merchandising — would dwindle into obscurity by the early '30s. Even Max and Dave Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell Films declared bankruptcy by the end of the '20s — although they would bounce back under Paramount in the following decade, producing both Betty Boop and Popeye.  

Regardless, Disney finally proved that his ambitious, quality-driven approach to animation would pay off. He had created a character that resonated with audiences, while also establishing Disney as a studio known for its music. Douglas Brode argues in "From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture":

Dance has always been as essential to Disney films as the music itself. His first synchronized-sound cartoon, "Steamboat Willie," featured Mickey, making music with whatever he finds handy aboard ship while dancing wildly. The Mouse does not choose to dance, rather does so because he knows no other way to exist ... The vision looks forward to young people of the rock 'n' roll generation, who likewise didn't merely listen to their music, rather becoming fully at one with it.   

Soon after the short's debut, offers for more Mickey Mouse cartoons came rolling in. Firmly demanding independence as a studio — Walt wanted to avoid the vulnerable position he had found himself in with Universal while making the Oswalds — Walt turned down several offers on his studio. Powers proved invaluable again, sorting out licensing deals with various states and even the foreign market. Finally, Disney's steadfast commitment to quality was paying off, and he was on the road to success.

Little did he know, that by throwing in his lot with Powers, he had signed a deal with the devil.

Join us next week for 100 Years of Disney Magic Part 5, where we'll discuss the experimental "Silly Symphonies."