When Mickey Mouse made his screen debut in Steamboat Willie on November 18, 1928, the world went mad for the mouse.
Never before had audiences seen animated characters who could talk and sing, and the effects of the cartoon created and directed by Walt Disney were electrifying.
It's a great American success story, except little of it is true. Steamboat Willie wasn't the first Mickey cartoon made (he'd already appeared in two other cartoons), he didn't talk, and Disney turned most of the directing duties over to Ub Iwerks.
As for sound, Max Fleischer and Paul Terry had already produced cartoons with either spoken dialogue or synchronized sound effects.
Regardless of the facts, there's no disputing something was in the combination of Mickey's personality and those sound effects that soon made him an international superstar.
By 1932, more than one million
children had joined the Mickey Mouse Club and his grown-up fans ranged from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Benito Mussolini. Maybe Mickey was just a heck of a whistler.
Suggested Sites...
- Steamboat Willie - watch the film that made Mickey Mouse a star.
- Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse - the complete run of the comic strip that was far better than the cartoons.
- Don Markstein's Toonopedia: Mickey Mouse - biography of the world's favorite rodent.
- Wikipedia: Steamboat Willie - traces the history and influence of the groundbreaking cartoon.
- Nat Falk's How to Make Animated Cartoons - scans of a 1941 how-to classic.
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