It was one of the very first cartoons to ever successfully utilize synchronized sound, and was so popular, it was talked about more than the feature film it was meant to just compliment. The third time was the charm for Mickey, however, when Steamboat Willie premiered on November 18, 1928, in New York’s Colony Theatre. One unpleasant distributor even told Walt, “They don’t know you and they don’t know your mouse.” The second Mickey Mouse cartoon, The Gallopin’ Gaucho, met with the same fate. The cartoon premiered in Hollywood on May 15, 1928, in the form of a test screening. Inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s heroic first solo flight across the Atlantic, its plot entailed Mickey and some animal friends attempting to assemble their own airplane. The first Mickey Mouse cartoon actually completed was Plane Crazy. Walt’s daughter Diane Disney Miller recalled, “It was on that long train ride that dad conceived of a new cartoon subject, a mouse who was then refined and further developed by Ub Iwerks, and given his name by my mother.” Walt knew he had to come up with a new character, and fast. He simply indicated when he would arrive home, and took care to add, “Don’t worry everything OK,” to ease his brother’s nerves. Nowhere in it did he outline the possible career-ending blow he and his brother had just sustained. Just before Walt left New York for the cross-country train ride back to Hollywood, he sent his brother Roy a telegram. As for who popped out of Walt’s mind? Why, that was Mickey Mouse! “He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when the business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb, and disaster seemed right around the corner,” Walt penned in a 1948 essay titled “What Mickey Means to Me.” The disaster Walt mentioned was the brazen theft of both his successful cartoon character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, as well as most of the Disney artists, at the hands of Universal distributor Charles Mintz.
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