Acquired
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.
00:50:59 · David Rosenthal, Ben Gilbert
[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. [00:51:04] S0: Yes. And he couldn't get the original conductor of the orchestra to actually use his method. The orchestra guy was like, trust me. And then it was all out of sync with the screen. The the net of it is it's a giant, painful, operational struggle to get this thing out, but my god, does it hit. Yes. Well, [00:51:25] S1: you know, this is the nature of the New York distributors. They get it made. Walt takes it and shops it around to all the big folks in New York, and they're so conservative. They're like, well, this is cool, but, I don't know how audiences are gonna react to this. We kinda wanna see a [00:51:43] S0: test first. I don't wanna be first in line. [00:51:45] S1: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly like VCs. Like so Walt decides that he's gonna take matters into his own hands, and he goes directly to the manager of the Colony Theater in New York City and cuts a deal for a thousand dollars to run Steamboat Willie before the features that they're showing in the Colony Theater. So going around distributors just to get this in one theater as a test. Yep. And so Steamboat Willie premieres in New York City on 11/18/1928 before the film gang war. Nobody really remembers gang war because Steamboat Willie is a revolution. Critics love it. Audiences love it. [00:52:29] S0: Yeah. Isn't there some famous story of people sort of standing up and screaming, we want Steamboat Willie again instead of playing the the main feature?