In the late 1920s, an artist named Disney arrived in Hollywood with a strange scheme: the making of animated motion pictures with sound that would star a large-eared rodent. Within five years, Mickev Mouse was known around the world.
This is the first of a five-part series from the new book "Walt Disney: An American Original," by Bob Thomas. The serialization will continue in Tempo Monday through Thursday. Part 1 covers the development of Mickey Mouse, the character who made the name Walt Disney a household word.
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The birth of Mickey Mouse Is obscured in legend, much of it created by Walt Disney himself. He enjoyed telling the tale of how he dreamed up the mouse character on a train trip and how his wife, Lilly, objected to the name of Mortimer Mouse. So he made it Mickey Mouse instead. He also hinted that the character originated with a pet mouse that played around his drawing board in Kansas City in the years before he went to the West Coast. Both stories had basis in fact, but the real genesis of Mickey Mouse appears to have been an inspired collaboration between Walt Disney, who supplied the zestful personality and the voice for Mickey, and Ub Iwerks, who gave Mickey form and movement.
Except for a few abortive experiments, the motion picture had been mute throughout its history. On Oct. 6, 1927, with the premiere of "The Jazz Singer" at the Warners' Theater in New York City, the motion-picture medium was changed forever, though most of the film moguls were slow to realize it. Not Walt Disney. He recognized sound as an inevitable addition to the art of animation. Even though the first two Mickey Mouse cartoons had not found a buyer, he planned a third, this one to be synchronized to sound.
Walt and Iwerks, who had worked together back in Kansas City as artists, borrowed from a successful Buster Keaton comedy for the third Mickey Mouse, "Steamboat Willie." The action in the first part of the cartoon was to be syncopated to an old vaudeville tune "Steamboat Bill," the last half to "Turkey in the Straw."
"But how the hell do we match the sound to the action of a cartoon?" Walt pondered. He himself had only a passing acquaintance with music. Wilfred Jackson, whose mother was a music teacher, brought a metronome to the studio, and he and Walt devised a way to time music to the flow of film through a sound camera - 24 frames per second. While Jackson played his harmonica, Walt calculated on a blank music sheet how many frames of cartoon would be required to match the tune. The cartoon was completed as a silent, with music and sound effects cued by marks on the film.
"Steamboat Willie" opened at the Colony Theater in New York on Nov. 18, 1928, and it was the sensation that Walt had dreamed it would be. The bill featured a talking movie, "Gang War," starring Olive Borden and Jack Pickford, and a stage show headed by Ben Bernie and his orchestra. But the patrons left the theater talking about "Steamboat Willie," billed as "the FIRST animated cartoon with SOUND." Variety reported: "It's a peach of a synchronization job all the way, bright, snappy, and fitting the situation perfectly.... With most of the animated cartoons qualifying as a pain in the neck, it's a signal tribute to this particular one.... Recommended unreservedly for all wired houses." Weekly Film Review: "It kept the audience laughing and from the moment the lead titles came on the screen, and it left them applauding." Exhibitor's Herald: "It is impossible to describe this riot of mirth, but it knocked me out of my seat."
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