The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (16 page)

For fun, Walt ran
Plane Crazy
first. It was crude in many ways. When Walt made it he was just 25, and he hadn’t perfected the technique of animation yet. Too, it had been made originally as a silent film, and sound had been dubbed in afterward.

Diane and Sharon [Walt and Lillian’s daughters] were horrified and wanted to forget the whole thing. I reminded them with some heat that if it hadn’t been for that old crude Mickey they wouldn’t be sitting in their own projection room with their own swimming pool outside.

Lillian was probably passionate because she worked as an ink and painter on
Plane Crazy
and probably remembered even decades later how the success of Mickey Mouse was essential for the Disney Studio to survive.

However, Diane and Sharon were also right that
Plane Crazy
is a very raw cartoon that could be used by Disney Human Resources today as a training tool on sexual harassment.

The climax of the story focuses on Mickey Mouse trying to force Minnie to give him a kiss. Mickey even tries to intimidate her with dangerous aeronautical maneuvers in hopes of scaring her into kissing him so he’ll stop.

When he does finally grab Minnie to force her kiss him, Minnie angrily slaps Mickey in the face and finally has to jump out of the airplane.

Steamboat Willie
received a great deal of attention because of its innovative use of synchronized sound and because it was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon to receive a general theatrical release. Certainly, the Mickey Mouse in that cartoon is much more identifiable with the Mickey that audiences grew to know and love over the decades compared to the version in
Plane Crazy
, but that doesn’t change the fact that
Plane Crazy
, not
Steamboat Willie
, was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon.

In 2001, the International Cartoon Museum was unsuccessful in trying to sell off the illustrated, six-page, thirty-six-panel animation story script done by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks at the listed price. The story script had been donated to the museum by famed collector Stephen Geppi, who had obtained it through a former Disney publicist.

When the museum experienced financial trouble, it sought to alleviate the problem by selling the script. The museum had originally valued it at more than $3,000,000, the cost of insuring the script with Lloyds of London when it traveled to Italy for a special exhibition in 1993.

However, the bidding went no higher than the $700,000 range. That was not enough to save the museum, which closed in 2002.

Cartoonist Mort Walker, the founder and chairman of the museum, had originally offered the illustrated story script to the Disney Company. According to Walker, the response was that Disney already had lots of artwork from that time period and weren’t interested.

While
Steamboat

Steamboat Willie
, ey Mouse cartoon, is perhaps the most important and well known of the early animated cartoons. It transformed a fading novelty into an art form and became the foundation of the Disney Company.

In early February 1928, Walt Disney and his wife, Lillian, journeyed to New York where Walt planned to negotiate a new contract for his popular Oswald the Rabbit cartoon series.

Walt wanted a modest $250 increase per cartoon so that he could experiment with some improvements. Instead, distributor Charles Mintz offered $450 less per cartoon than what he was currently paying the Disney brothers.

Walt discovered that Universal tudios not only owned all the rights to Oswald (a common practice in the industry for a movie studio to own the rights to its characters and films) but that Mintz had contracted with all of Walt’s animators, except for Ub Iwerks, to produce future Oswald cartoons for Mintz directly.

While Walt and Lillian were in New York, his latest Oswald the Rabbit cartoon,
Rival Romeos
, premiered at the Colony Theater on February 26. It was the same theater where
Steamboat Willie
would make its premiere later that same year.

One of the gags in this latest Oswald cartoon had a goat eating Oswald’s sheet music and Oswald opening the goat’s mouth and cranking its tail to make the music come out like a hurdy gurdy. The very same gag shows up in
Steamboat Willie
. It was not uncommon for Walt to re-use visual jokes if they had gotten a strong audience response, especially since the audience would not likely see the original cartoon again.

When Walt returned to Hollywood during the last week of March 1928, he and Ub Iwerks, and probably Walt’s brother Roy O. Disney, developed Mickey Mouse.

Disney legend maintains that shortly after the westbound train crossed the Mississippi, Walt created a mouse character named “Mortimer” and then, at Lillian’s insistence, changed the name to “Mickey”.

There is some truth in that story. Walt’s nature was to be in a state of constant activity and, judging from later trips he took, it is indeed likely that he was furiously sketching away in an attempt to come up with a character that would save his studio. Walt would often casually sketch ideas, whether the contours of Tom Sawyer Island at Disneyland or the initial layout for Epcot in Florida, on whatever paper was available from a napkin to an odd scrap that had been discarded. Documentation does exist that Walt was planning to originally name the new character “Mortimer” until Lillian objected.

But most animation historians agree that while the idea may have been conceived during the train trip, the design (which resembled Oswald but with a mouse’s ears and tail) and final decision to go with the mouse character did not occur until after Walt had arrived in Hollywood.

Walt and Roy had been able to save over $25,000 and decided to use that money to fund a new series of cartoons to save the studio.

Ub was given the job of animating by himself the first Mickey Mouse cartoon,
Plane Crazy
, which was previewed at a theater on Sunset and Gardner in Hollywood on May 15, 1928. Encouraged by the audience’s favorable response, Walt and Ub began work almost immediately on the second Mickey Mouse cartoon,
Gallopin’ Gaucho
.

Walt was not just trying to devise a new cartoon series to save his studio or to exact revenge against Mintz. Walt genuinely loved producing cartoons. Lillian recalled an incident shortly before they were married:

My sister and I were visiting a friend that night, so Walt decided to go to the movies. A cartoon short by a competitor was advertised outside, but suddenly, as he sat in the darkened theater, his own picture came on. Walt was so excited he rushed down to the manager’s office.

The manager, misunderstanding, began to apologize for not showing the advertised film. Walt hurried over to my sister’s house to break his exciting news, but we weren’t home yet. Then he tried to find Roy, but he was out too. Finally he went home alone. Every time we pass a theater where one of his films is advertised on the marquee I can’t help but think of that night.

The same joy motivated Walt to develop a new series.

On May 29, 1928, Walt threw a party for Iwerks, Les Clark, Wilfred Jackson, Roy O. Disney, and others at his o come up with gags for
Gallopin’ Gaucho
. The cartoon was completed and ready for preview just three months later, on August 28.

During the cartoon’s production, Walt saw the sensation caused by Warner Bros.’
The Jazz Singer
(1927), the first movie featuring synchronized sound on film of a character talking, and realized that distributors would now have less interest in a new silent cartoon series. Walt became intrigued by the idea of applying synchronized sound to animation.

Animator Wilfred Jackson recalled:

Walt didn’t know if people would believe that the character on the screen was making the noise. Nobody had ever seen a drawing make noise, and there was no way to be sure that the people would believe it.

It might just look like some kind of a fake thing, and Walt wanted it to seem real, as if the noise was coming right from what the character was doing. So to find out whether the whole thing would be believable… when a few scenes had been animated… they set up this test.

Walt arranged a test screening at the Hyperion Studio. The opening scene had been put on a loop of film so that it would constantly repeat. Roy Disney positioned himself outside a window so the projector noise would not be audible as he ran it.

Iwerks rigged up a microphone and customized an old crystal radio into a makeshift speaker which was placed behind a bedsheet hung on a doorway, onto which the film would be projected.

Before the screening, Walt had gone to a nearby five-and-dime store and purchased items like noisemakers, cowbells, tin cans, a frying pan, slide whistles, ocarinas, a washboard, and a plunger.

Jackson played his harmonica. Iwerks played the washboard and the slide whistles and produced various sound effects. Les Clark did percussion and sound effects. Johnny Cannon vocalized sounds for the barnyard animals. Walt supplied the voices and additional sound effects.

Jackson said:

When Roy started the projector up, I furnished the music, with my mouth organ… and the other fellows hit things and made sound effects,. We had spittoons everywhere then, and they made a wonderful gong if you hit them with a pencil. We practiced with it several times, and we got so we were hitting it off pretty well. We took turns going out there ourselves, and looking at the thing [from the other side of the bedsheet], and when I went out there wasn’t any music, but the noises and voices seemed to come from it just fine. It was really pretty exciting, and it did prove to us that the sound coming from the drawing could be a convincing thing.

Each of the men took turns going in front of the screen to watch as the loop of film ran over and over and the others did their sounds. Also, on the other side of the bedsheet in chairs were the wives of the Disney brothers and Iwerks, as well as Jane Ames, Jackson’s girlfriend who would later become his wife.

Walt later complained that when it was his turn to go out and view the film, the ladies were paying little attention to the experiment and were instead spending their time gossiping and talking about babies and exchanging recipes. Lillian recalled:

The screening went on for several hours, repeating the same loop of film and readjusting the sounds over and over, so it is understandable that the spouses lost interest.

Iwerks remembered the process as a magnificent experience:

It was wonderful. There was no precedent of any kind. I’ve never been so thrilled in my life. Nothing since has ever equaled it. That evening proved that an idea could be made to work.

Ever the perfectionist, Walt re-ran the film repeatedly, trying to perfect the synchronization of music and sound effects with the cartoon images being projected on the screen.

Walt, Iwerks, and Jackson came up with a rough score that would align sound with action.

Jackson, whose mother was a music teacher, understood rudimentary musical notation and the principle of a metronome to keep time. He developed the first crude bar sheet in animation.

Although this initial bar sheet did not contain conventional musical notation, it did include a measure-by-measure breakdown of the songs, delineating each musical beat. The orchestra later received a musical score using this beat and measure breakdown as a guide.

Despite its crude form, the bar sheet represented an important innovation that made it possible to time and synchronize the soundtrack precisely to the picture. Even without the proper musical notation, the sheet contained all the essential characteristics of the “dope sheets” still used today.

Jackson played harmonica and worked together with Disney to adapt two popular songs, “Steamboat Bill” and “Turkey in the Straw” (one of Jackson’s favorite harmonica pieces), for the soundtrack.

Apparently, it was Walt who suggested the tune “Steamboat Bill” and the Mississippi river boat setting. From this idea, Walt hosted a “gag” meeting at his house where Jackson, Iwerks, Les Clark, and others suggested possible funny business that could be derived from the premise.

Walt journeyed to New York early in September 1928 to get the film recorded but encountered chaos as movie companies scrambled to get recording equipment and recording time.

He first approached Fox and its Movietone system, but they were uninterested because they were already overwhelmed with work. The representative at RCA not only kept padding the estimated price but was also condescending about the idea of accurately synchronizing sound to a cartoon.

When Walt asked for a demonstration of RCA’s work, the studio showed him a copy of
Dinner Time
, an
Aesop’s Film Fables
cartoon produced by Paul Terry, for which they had recently synchronized the sound and which premiered in theaters on September 1, 1928, a full six weeks before
Steamboat Willie
. In a letter to his brother Roy, Walt shared his opinion of the film:

My gosh… terrible… a lot of racket and nothing else. I was terribly disappointed. I had expected to see something halfway decent. But honestly… it was nothing but one of the rottenest fables I ever saw and I should know because I have seen almost all of them. It merely had an orchestra playing and adding some noise… The talking part does not mean a thing. It doesn’t even match… We sure have nothing to worry about from these quarters.

RCA and Movietone had secured a monopoly on the sound-on-film system, but Patrick A. Powers had bribed company engineers into providing him with the technical information. With slight modifications, he created an outlaw recording system called Cinephone which was remarkably similar.

Powers was a notorious character in the film business. At one time, he had partnered with Carl Laemmle at Universal Pictures. When Laemmle discovered that Powers was cheating him financially, he immediately confronted Powers, who protested his innocence.

With dramatic flair, Powers took the doctored financial record books and threw them out his upper-floor office window, where they were retrieved and spirited away by a waiting accomplice below.