80 years ago, Mickey Mouse steamed onto entertainment scene
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Tue Nov 18, 4:55 PM



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WASHINGTON (AFP) - Eighty years ago, one of the world's most beloved stars was born as Mickey Mouse whistled his way onto the silver screen with the cinema debut of "Steamboat Willie" at the Colony Theater in New York.

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That day, November 18, 1928, is widely considered the iconic mouse's official birthday. But months before, Walt Disney had dreamt up the cartoon character and featured it in the short animated film "Plane Crazy."


"'Steamboat Willie' is the most famous of the early Mickey Mouse films because it has a soundtrack," Eric Smoodin, a professor of film studies at the University of California, Davis, told AFP.


"Mickey Mouse, within a year or two after Steamboat Willie, becomes the biggest star in the world," Smoodin said.


"So even though it's not the first Mickey Mouse film, it really was the beginning of his great celebrity," he added, speculating that in the 1930s, only Charlie Chaplin came close to Mickey Mouse in terms of global super-stardom.


Mickey Mouse was created almost by accident: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was Walt Disney's first cartoon character, but when Disney lost the rights to Oswald in 1927, he returned to the drawing board.


He came up with "Mortimer the Mouse." Popular legend has it that his wife preferred the name Mickey, and Walt Disney deferred to her choice.


"Steamboat Willie" has a flimsy, politically incorrect storyline and features little, if any, comprehensible dialogue.


But the cartoon marked an animation landmark with its synchronized sound track where Mickey whistles and blows raspberries at the irascible ship's captain, a large tobacco-chewing cat called Captain Pete.


In roughly seven minutes, Captain Pete kicks Mickey Mouse out of the steering room of a riverboat. The hero then hoists Minnie Mouse on board using a crane that grabs her by the knickers, swings a cat by the tail, strangles a goose and plays keyboard on some suckling piglets as the American folk song "Turkey in the Straw" plays from a goat's innards.


"Mickey Mouse was both a great star of Hollywood and the world and a symbol of Disney's technological innovation," said Smoodin.


Walt Disney recorded the "Steamboat Willie" soundtrack with "the bootleg Powers Cinephone process ... using a 15-piece band and his own squeaks for Mickey," according to the Disney website.


"It was an early sound film when there weren't that many sound films being made. Disney committed to making only sound films after that," explained Smoodin.


The Disney studios pioneered the use of color-film cinematography and 3-D films in the 1930s. Disney also made innovative use of stereo sound technology in "Fantasia," a movie starring Mickey Mouse and first released in 1946.


Just over a year after his debut in "Steamboat Willie," on January 13, 1930, Mickey Mouse got his own comic strip, drawn by artist Ub Iwerks.


He made it into the Sunday comics on January 10, 1932, the same year that Walt Disney won a special Academy Award for creating the friendly rodent.


Mickey Mouse has gone on to star in over 120 different cartoons and got his own television show, "The Mickey Mouse Club," in the 1950s. The show's theme song engraved in the minds of a generation of Americans how to spell M-I-C, K-E-Y, M-O-U-S-E.


These days, children watch Mickey on the mouse's eponymous Clubhouse, which airs on Playhouse Disney.

His trademark morphology -- the ears above all -- appears on merchandise items ranging from T-shirts to cuddly toys, most often sporting his white gloves, red shorts and yellow shoes. Mickey has also been featured in museum exhibits from New York to Helsinki and Tokyo.

has it been 80 years already?

LoyalAndTrue said:

Alot of people dont realize how old some cartoon characters are LOL.

Hey thesexofit Nice to see you around.

I love Donald/Gladstone more, but I have those Uncensored Mouse comics with all the politically incorrect Mickey Mouse cartoons in them. Pretty wild to browse through.

thesexofit said:

bugs bunny has been around a while too, just don't know how long.

Mara said:

Yeah, those comics you own might be pretty rare. Not a comic book fan myself, but I can bet they are politically incorrect LOL.

Yeah, I much prefer Donald's cartoons. Mickey became a straight man for Donald and Goofy in the cartoons they appeared in, and later just became the symbol for Disney studio's, aswell as appearing at Disneyland LOL.

thesexofit said:

I got it sometime in the '90s. It's stored away. Got it back when I used to collect Usagi Yojimbo comics 'n stuff.

Donald's cartoons are cool, but Gladstone comics are my personal faves, I was collecting them only about like 10 or so years ago, they're still around here and there.

Fuck Mickey.
Bugs Bunny kix his ass.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MICKEY!

TheMightyCelestial said:

Iam more of a Daffy Duck fan myself.

Fuck Mickey.
Bugs Bunny kix his ass.

TheMightyCelestial said:

thesexofit said:

I always preferred Daffy way over Donald, that's for sure.
I loved the whole Warner's animated cast, especially when compared to Disney*.
They were much more bad-ass.
And I know that Disney's were geared more towards children, but even as a very young kid, I much preferred watching Elmer, Daffy or Yosemite getting their faces blown to ashes or having their heads smashed in by an anvil than the much more innocent adventures of Mickey's world.
I think that the comparisons of these two cartoon worlds is was what helped my young burgeoning mind to understand the concept of being able to distinguish the differences between those individuals who were true bad-asses & those who were just plain pussies.

* With the exception of Fantasia. That was pretty cool.

* With the exception of Fantasia. That was pretty cool.