The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (15 page)

Mickey has a bigger screean nine-tenths of the stars in Hollywood.

— Louella Parsons
Hearst Newspaper Hollywood Gossip Columnist (1931)

In 1933, Mickey Mouse received 800,000 pieces of fan mail, more than any other star in Hollywood.

Plane Crazy
is a simple story of a rural young boy, portrayed by Mickey Mouse without gloves or shoes, who tries to emulate America’s latest hero, aviator Charles Lindbergh, by building and flying his own plane.

In May 1927, “Lucky Lindy” had become a hero with his solo airplane trip in the
Spirit of St. Louis
across the Atlantic from New York to Paris, and Walt hoped to leverage the country’s overwhelming interest in aviation and attract an audience for his new cartoon character.

Although Lindbergh was Mickey’s hero, the aviator took a Felix the Cat doll with him on his flight for luck. Of course, to be fair, Mickey didn’t exist at that time, and Felix was the most popular animated cartoon character in the world.

The first few installments of the 1930 Mickey Mouse newspaper comic strip written by Walt and illustrated by Iwerks told a version of
Plane Crazy
that included a panel of Mickey looking at a picture of Lindbergh for inspiration.

In
Plane Crazy
, Mickey is established as a resident of a barnyard with other anthropomorphic animals who help him achieve his goals. Normally, a cartoon about building and flying a plane would take place anywhere but a barnyard.

The title of the film was Walt’s clever twist not only on the common expression “plain crazy” but also a commentary on the insane excitement young boys had about planes thanks to Lindbergh.

Plane Crazy
was animated by Ub Iwerks, who was isolated from the rest of the Disney Studio where other animators were finishing up the commitments to produce the final Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons for distributor Charles Mintz. Soon, they would abandon Walt and leave to join Mintz’s new studio.

Iwerks even had drawings of Oswald that he could quickly slip over the drawings of Mickey if someone unexpectedly dropped by his desk. Walt did not want Mintz to know what he was doing, so the work on the first Mickey Mouse cartoon was done with great secrecy.

Universal Studios, not Walt, owned the Oswald copyright. It was a common business practice of the time. In an effort to save money, Mintz, who had been hired by Universal to oversee the cartoons, chose not to renew the contract with the Disney Studio but to make the Oswald cartoons on his own. Mintz hired all of Walt’s animators, except for Iwerks, to produce the cartoons at his own animation studio.

Walt’s only options were to become a salaried employee of Mintz or to create a new character that he did own and produce cartoons that were popular enough to sustain and grow his studio.

Along with Iwerks, Walt developed a character that bore a physical resemblance to Oswald but had some significant personality differences, the appealing Mickey Mouse.

For
Plane Crazy
, Iwerks produced over 8,000 separate drawings, an unheard of numberMinsingle animator to draw for a short cartoon at the time. He began work during the last week of April 1928; by the second week of May, the cels were ready to be inked and painted.

When he pushed himself, Ub could produce between 600 and 700 drawings per day, a tremendous accomplishment matched only by New York animator Bill Nolan who at one time had produced over five hundred drawings per day for an animation short.

Walt put in three benches in the garage at his home on Lyric Avenue for a makeshift studio where Walt and Roy’s wives (Lillian and Edna) along with Walt’s sister-in-law (Hazel Sewell) inked and painted Ub’s artwork onto cels.

Mike Marcus, the cameraman, shot the cel artwork at night at the Disney Studio after the animators had gone home, with Walt personally cleaning up all traces of the work so it wouldn’t be discovered the next morning.

Award-winning animator and historian Michael Sporn pointed out that even the first Mickey Mouse film demonstrated innovation:

This was the first animated film to use a camera move. The POV [point of view] shot from the plane made it appear as if the camera were trucking into the ground. In fact, when they shot this scene, they piled books under the spinning background to move the artwork closer to the camera.

Iwerks was a great technician and experimenter when it came to animation. In one dramatic sequence, Mickey’s plane almost collides with an oncoming car.

According to Disney Legend Frank Thomas, one of Disney’s fabled “Nine Old Men”, Iwerks originally planned an even more innovative ending for the film that would have included a real model.

[Ub] made a little tower of houses and trees and things for the plane to crash into. Combining kind of a live-action device with his cartoons.

But when the film was developed, it “didn’t look too well”, said Thomas. So Iwerks had to quickly substitute an ending with a black background and the words “Crash” and “Bang” with stars like “those things that were used in [the 1966
Batman
television series] later on  —  the words ‘Wham’, ‘Bam’… ”, Thomas explained.

Iwerks said:

Some people got the idea that in
Plane Crazy
, Mickey was patterned after Lindbergh. Well, Lindy flew the Atlantic, but he was no [actor] Doug Fairbanks. He was a hero to boys because of airplanes and what he had accomplished flying the Atlantic. But Mickey wasn’t Lindy  —  he was Doug Fairbanks.

Plane Crazy
was finally completed and previewed at a theater at Sunset and Gardner in Hollywood on May 15, 1928. The title card stated: “A Walt Disney Comic  —  by Ub Iwerks”.

Walt had coached the theater pianist on how to accompany the action and slipped him a little extra money as well to punch up the music. Reportedly, the picture got quite a few laughs and applause from the audience, which Iwerks remembers as almost a full house.

Walt sent a print of the film to New York to be viewed by distributors but received no offers. The novelty of animation was fading in popularity and distributors were becoming intrigued by what impact the recently introduced use of sound on film would have on the industry.

Encouraged by the audience response to Plane Crazy even though they could not find a distributor, Walt and Ub began work almost immediately on the second Mickey Mouse cartoon,
Gallopin’ Gaucho
, a loose take-off on a popular Douglas Fairbanks silent film,
The Gaucho
(1927).

Fairbanks was at the peak of his popularity and, once again, Walt hoped that the audience would be interested in anything having to do with a ntional celebrity.

By this time, the defecting animators had left, so there was no need for secrecy in producing the new cartoon.

At least one major movie studio, MGM, saw
Plane Crazy
but made no offer to finance a series. Reportedly, one executive claimed that a three-foot-tall mouse would frighten women in the audience.

Walt engaged a New York film dealer, E.J. Denison, to find a distributor. He wrote to Denison:

I feel that I can make good cartoons and that they can be placed with a good distributor if the matter is handled right., But the time is short and there would be no second chance this year if we get off on the wrong foot. It is our intention to carry on an advertising and exploitation campaign that should, in a very short time, along with good pictures and a good release, make the name of “Mickey Mouse” as well-known as any cartoon on the market.

Denison made a valiant effort to interest major distributors in Mickey Mouse, but when he couldn’t generate even minor interest in the property, he withdrew. Walt, despite his passionate optimism, was faced with mounting costs on the Mickey Mouse cartoons.

By the time he finished
Steamboat Willie
, Walt had gone through all the money and more that the Disney Studio had made on the Oswald the Rabbit series. Roy O. Disney, in small handwriting, entered into his ledger book the amounts (which included production and prints) for the first three Mickey Mouse cartoons:

PLANE CRAZY: $3,528.50

GALLOPIN’ GAUCHO: $4,249.73

STEAMBOAT WILLIE: $4,986.69

When
Steamboat Willie
began to attract attention and it appeared that Mickey Mouse would become the star of a series of cartoons, Walt had Kansas City theater organist Carl Stalling write musical scores for both
Plane Crazy
and
Gallopin’ Gaucho
so he could release more Mickey Mouse shorts quickly to take advantage of public interest in the cartoons.

Plane Crazy
was released theatrically March 17, 1929, at the Mark Strand Theater in New York after a new soundtrack had been added in December 1928. Minnie Mouse (voiced by Walt himself) also utters the only line of dialogue in the cartoon: “Who? Me?” when Mickey offers her a seat in his plane.

So Minnie spoke actual words rather than just sounds long before Mickey did.

Walt Disney filed for a copyright on
Mickey Mouse in Plane Crazy
on May 26, 1928, as an unpublished work. That copyright was never updated. On August 9, 1930, Walt Disney copyrighted the sound versions of the first two silent films (
Plane Crazy
and
Gallopin’ Gaucho
).

There are a lot of physical gags in
Plane Crazy
, especially since it was originally a silent cartoon. For example, Mickey grabs the udder of the cow and it sprays him with milk. The same gag re-appears in
Steamboat Willie
. Especially during the early years, Walt was notorious for recycling successful visual gags from his previous cartoons.

In an article entitled “I Live with a Genius” in
McCall’s
magazine (February 1953), Walt’s wife, Lillian, wrote:

Not long ago Walt brought home the first Mickey Mouse film he ever made,
Plane Crazy
. We were screening another picture in our projection room that night.