Hello, and welcome back to This Week in History! You may have noticed there was no issue of the column last week, and that was for a ton of reasons, but among them was one I’d like to briefly highlight. Last week in history was the first ever Life section party (as far as I’m aware), taking place in the mid-afternoon. It was a nice time to share some food and games as a section. Beyond that, I’m back, and this week we’ve got some Disney history to cover.
When the name Disney is mentioned anywhere, my first thought is of the magical Mickey Mouse. Whether it’s his early forms as a black-and-white cartoon mouse, or later on in animated games and movies where Mickey takes on a colorful persona, he’s undoubtedly the company’s icon and possibly the biggest animated character of all time. At first, I thought Mickey’s importance and near-universal appreciation comes from his simplicity, but behind the character is a history of innovation and change that is absolutely staggering.
That history generally comes to be in the late 1920s, as theatergoers were at the precipice of a great shift in the media industry. While the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw plays and concerts grow in complexity and even recordings (records) start to be produced in limited numbers, by the late 1920s, companies such as RCA Victor were working on new commercial technologies that would completely alter humanity’s consumption of media. RCA developed flat discs that would ultimately become vinyl records. Meanwhile, microphones were also being developed by companies such as RCA at this time, with broadcast microphones coming into use in the late 1920s.
As a backdrop to these technological innovations — partially spurred by the relative peace following World War I and the “Roaring Twenties” — Walt Disney was innovating in the animation industry with his own Walt Disney Animation Studios. He was caught in a difficult spot in the mid-1920s. With Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (Disney’s initial character) being owned by Universal Pictures, the studio was without a main character. Yet, even when Mickey came to be, two initial cartoons were unable to attract a distributor.
These setbacks were substantial, yet among the theatergoers of the 1920s was Walt Disney himself. It was while watching the first commercially released audio and video synchronized film, “The Jazz Singer,” that Disney committed to release a cartoon with sound of its own.
Thus, after months of work, with Disney as director and his staff, including producer Pat Powers and co-director Ub Iwerks, this week in history, “Steamboat Willie” released in theaters for the first time.
The short cartoon premiered on Nov. 18, 1928, in Universal’s Colony Theater in New York City, playing as an opener for the film, “Gang War.” Ironically, “Gang War,” the film that “Steamboat Willie” was there to support, ended up being totally lost and forgotten, while Mickey’s debut became incredibly popular, sending the mouse to success within its initial run. Critical acclaim was also nearly universal, with Disney’s innovative blend of animation and sound capturing an audience of theatergoers and critics alike.
It’s interesting to think of the success of Disney, and the company’s repeated use of “magic” as a concept in their branding and plotlines today. There is some serious merit to Disney’s ability to produce magical products, as that’s how “Steamboat Willie” must have felt for audiences used to viewing their films without audio, or at least without recorded audio. As Variety commented in 1928, “Giggles came so fast at the Colony [Theater] they were stumbling over each other.”
What a magical evening that must have been. Imagine being seated in a room full of people watching a completely new form of media for the first time, one that could make you jump as speakers play audio that syncs up perfectly with the cartoon’s exciting moments.
Those exciting moments, amazingly, have also now entered the public domain as of January 2024. After years of copyright extensions, often by acts of the U.S. legislature, the original “Steamboat Willie” can now be watched in their entirety free of charge.
There are so many moments of quirky cartoon-work, from pulling pigtails to spitting towards the wind, but everything is nonetheless charming. It is certainly worth a quick watch, though imagine if this was the first time you saw and heard a comic. That’s how it would have been for initial viewers in 1928, and that’s where the magic of Disney comes from. The spirit of innovation for the pursuit of fun has yielded many great technologies and pieces of media, and “Steamboat Willie” may be the oldest and biggest of them all.