Acquired
00:43:27 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:43:27] S0: Okay. So, David, how does this Oswald catastrophe lead to Mickey Mouse? [00:43:32] S1: Alright. So here's the story of Mickey Mouse as Walt would tell it. It's March 1928. He and Lillian are on the long train ride back home to LA from New York. He's struck by the bolt of inspiration for a new cartoon scenario about a plucky mouse named Mortimer who is attempting to fly an airplane just like his hero, Charles Lindbergh. And, this would go on to become the Mickey cartoon, plane crazy. So Walt shows his sketches that he's making to Lillian, and Lillian says, I like it, but Mortimer? That's too sissy a name. How about Mickey? And thus, Mickey Mouse is born. Now the real story is more likely that Walt and Lillian get back to LA, and Walt is, like, sweating. So he and Roy and Ub and a couple other animators who stayed loyal to them hole up and they start brainstorming ideas for some kind of new idea or new character that they can create to replace Oswald and turn around the studio's fortunes. [00:44:37] S0: And also, when you see Mickey and you see Oswald, it's not hard to imagine where Mickey Mouse came from. It's, like, kinda like shorten the ears, make them circles. You know, they both kinda have this white face and the black outline. [00:44:49] S1: I mean, it's really just the same brief that created Oswald. It was like, hey. Take Felix and Yeah. Do something like Felix, except this time it's take Oswald and do something like Oswald. [00:44:59] S0: And make damn sure we own it. Yes. Exactly. [00:45:02] S1: So they land on the idea of a mouse.
00:45:02 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:45:02] S1: So they land on the idea of a mouse. [00:45:03] S0: And didn't Walt claim that he sort of, like, always had a fondness for mice because there were mice that would, [00:45:08] S1: like Yeah. [00:45:08] S0: Yeah. Jump in his trash can in Kansas City while he was animating and [00:45:11] S1: Sure. Whatever. You know, it's all it's all just part of the Walt myth. Yes. And at least according to the Neil Gebler book, most likely, Ub is the one who first draws Mickey, not Walt on the train. But either way, Ub definitely was the primary animator of the first Mickey's for the whole first series of Mickey's, including Steamboat Willie. So by summer of nineteen twenty eight, we finished out the Oswald contract, and Walt and Ub and the small little Mary crew have gotten two Mickey shorts ready for production, Plain Crazy and the Gallop and Gaucho. And Walt takes them around to distributors. You know, the Walt Disney studio is well known at this point. This seems like it would be promising new IP, and none of the major distributors are interested. They're like, yeah. I don't know. Mickey. It's like Oswald. But [00:46:14] S0: Without all the, you know, thousands or hundreds of thousands of raving fans for it.
00:46:14 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:46:14] S0: Without all the, you know, thousands or hundreds of thousands of raving fans for it. [00:46:19] S1: So Exactly. Exactly. And then comes the eureka breakthrough idea. One of the gang recalls that the jazz singer, the famous first popular talkie, you know, movie with dialogue and sound that had just come out the previous fall. When they went to see it, that there was a cartoon screened alongside it. And Walt, when he hears this, puts the two ideas together in his mind of a cartoon and sound. And supposedly, he says, that's it. That's it. That's what we've gotta do. Stop all these silent pictures. Now at this point, people had made cartoons with sound, but nobody had ever made a cartoon with sound like the jazz singer had sound. [00:47:08] S0: Synchronized sound. [00:47:09] S1: Synchronized. Yes. Exactly. Where what was happening in real time in the cartoon was then played in sound, exactly synchronized in the movie theater. [00:47:21] S0: Yeah. The concept before was there's music that plays, but it's only loosely attached. And this is to the frame and to the beat of the music. Like, if you see Mickey on screen bop into something, then you might hear a xylophone on the exact same downbeat play a note. [00:47:38] S1: Yeah. It's not just that, like, there's some music accompanying this cartoon that you're watching. It's that what is happening in the cartoon feels like it is producing the
00:47:38 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[00:47:38] S1: Yeah. It's not just that, like, there's some music accompanying this cartoon that you're watching. It's that what is happening in the cartoon feels like it is producing the [00:47:46] S0: sound. Yes. There's a great business model lesson in this, which is with the first two Mickey's flopping, if you just do the same thing as an existing competitor who already has distribution, brand, customers, it's not enough. You need to go do something leveraging a new piece of technology or a new platform. You gotta come at it from an orthogonal way in order to leapfrog and make people pay attention to you. Otherwise, you're just, like, smaller, worse, also ran. Totally.
00:48:17 · David Rosenthal
[00:48:17] S1: And and that could be anything. I mean, the only reason that the Oswalds worked, even though they were a rip off of Felix, was because they came built in with the universal distribution. But, yeah, Walt taking out the Mickeys before bringing sound, like, he's got nothing to bring to the table here. Yep. So Walt lines up access to the cinephone sound recording system from a character named Pat Powers, who had actually helped create Universal, you know, some number of decades earlier, and then had gone on to become a sound accolade and entrepreneur developing a sound system for this new movie technology. And so Walt and Ub and crew animate a test sequence of a Mickey with sound, and they screen it for all their wives and girlfriends. And Ub writes later of what happened next when they screamed the synchronized sound Mickey for the first time. I never saw such a reaction in an audience in my life. The scheme worked perfectly. The sound itself gave the illusion of something emanating directly from the screen. Walt kept crying, this is it. This is it. We've got it. It turned out that sound was the critical enabling technology for animation to go beyond a novelty and allow the characters that are on screen to actually have personality that audiences connect with. So interesting.
00:49:41 · Ben Gilbert, David Rosenthal
[00:49:41] S0: And it's not obvious at first. Until you do. It's obvious in retrospect, but you can totally see how when Walt had this insight and then they made the investment. Because doing a test animation and synchronizing the sound, like, even to show a little screener must have been really hard at the time because none of the tools existed. They sort of had to invent the way to synchronize the drawings with the music and the systems. It's sort of a big bet even to try and see if that creates personality. Right. [00:50:08] S1: Right. And sound did the same thing for live action movies, but it's not that big a leap to have humans talking. Like, humans talk. You know, sound just made it way better. Sound for cartoons was this giant leap. These characters, this art can now be actual characters with personalities Yep. In a way that they couldn't before. [00:50:32] S0: Non obvious at the time, completely obvious in retrospect. [00:50:35] S1: Yep. So they make steamboat Willie as the third Mickey, but the first with synchronized sound. [00:50:43] S0: Which we're gonna skip over the whole headache nightmare of creating this thing, but it was like Walt constantly going back and forth to New York, betting every last dollar that he had, inventing all these new processes, trying different ways to get an orchestra synced to the sound. [00:50:59] S1: Oh, yeah. They, like, animated a little ball on the screen that would sync to the orchestra as they were playing.