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Beat Me Daddy, Eight to the Bar
2 years ago
General
So Steamboat Willie is now in the public domain -- the film itself, not the Mickey Mouse trademark, of course. But come to think of it, who is Mickey, besides the iconic face of the Disney empire?
In A Mouse Divided (2018), author Jeff Ryan poses a couple of telling questions: "Not counting The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Steamboat Willie, can you name any other Mickey Mouse cartoon? Have you seen any? Mickey is the biggest paradox in popular culture: a globally beloved character no one seems to know anything about." I'm imagining a moment in early 1928: Walt Disney, livid at having had his star character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, along with much of his animation staff, poached by Universal Studios, has just a few weeks to come up with a new cartoon star, before his fledgling company goes under. Walt, who started out as an animator, has spent more time making business deals than drawing, so he and his chief animator, Ub Iwerks, start brainstorming. The new character can't be a cat -- there were already too many Felix the Cat knockoffs -- and Walt was damned if it'd be another rabbit. He sketches an awkward-looking mouse in a bow tie and highwater pants; Ub, the practical, shortcut-seeking animator, reduces the character to a few, rounded lines, and the end result is a prototype: Mickey Mouse 1.0.
Plane Crazy (1928), a silent cartoon short, is the debut of Mickey (in thrall to aviation hero Charles Lindbergh) and his girlfriend Minnie; it fails with a test audience, and Walt, impressed with the 1927 feature film The Jazz Singer, throws himself into making the first animated cartoon with synchronized sound. The gamble pays off: Steamboat Willie is a hit, turning Mickey Mouse into a star. Then something weird happens: the more popular Mickey's films become, the blander the character gets, 'til he barely registers as a presence in his own cartoons.
Cartoonist Floyd Gottfredson has the freedom to give Mickey a good-hearted, do-or-die tough guy personality in the long-running Mickey Mouse comic strip, but onscreen -- forget it. Mickey's more valuable to Disney as an icon -- a mascot, a graven image -- than a character. Hell, that's what Goofy and Donald Duck are for. If his cartoons are bland, so what? They're not the point.
Anyway, this is where my imagination takes me. And if you need ephemera like the new horror movie Mickey's Mouse Trap -- yeah, you've got that, too.
In A Mouse Divided (2018), author Jeff Ryan poses a couple of telling questions: "Not counting The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Steamboat Willie, can you name any other Mickey Mouse cartoon? Have you seen any? Mickey is the biggest paradox in popular culture: a globally beloved character no one seems to know anything about." I'm imagining a moment in early 1928: Walt Disney, livid at having had his star character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, along with much of his animation staff, poached by Universal Studios, has just a few weeks to come up with a new cartoon star, before his fledgling company goes under. Walt, who started out as an animator, has spent more time making business deals than drawing, so he and his chief animator, Ub Iwerks, start brainstorming. The new character can't be a cat -- there were already too many Felix the Cat knockoffs -- and Walt was damned if it'd be another rabbit. He sketches an awkward-looking mouse in a bow tie and highwater pants; Ub, the practical, shortcut-seeking animator, reduces the character to a few, rounded lines, and the end result is a prototype: Mickey Mouse 1.0.
Plane Crazy (1928), a silent cartoon short, is the debut of Mickey (in thrall to aviation hero Charles Lindbergh) and his girlfriend Minnie; it fails with a test audience, and Walt, impressed with the 1927 feature film The Jazz Singer, throws himself into making the first animated cartoon with synchronized sound. The gamble pays off: Steamboat Willie is a hit, turning Mickey Mouse into a star. Then something weird happens: the more popular Mickey's films become, the blander the character gets, 'til he barely registers as a presence in his own cartoons.
Cartoonist Floyd Gottfredson has the freedom to give Mickey a good-hearted, do-or-die tough guy personality in the long-running Mickey Mouse comic strip, but onscreen -- forget it. Mickey's more valuable to Disney as an icon -- a mascot, a graven image -- than a character. Hell, that's what Goofy and Donald Duck are for. If his cartoons are bland, so what? They're not the point.
Anyway, this is where my imagination takes me. And if you need ephemera like the new horror movie Mickey's Mouse Trap -- yeah, you've got that, too.
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melan.....elephants.html
Something you could do with these comic strips was develop detailed plot lines and personalities that weren't possible in the cartoons. In fact, these comic strips were so popular and widely read that the movie audience didn't need any information about the characters, they brought everything they needed to know in with them. The cartoons were a novelty to entertain you while you waited to see the feature film. Interestingly, it was the exact opposite with Bugs Bunny. His personality was developed in the cartoons over many years by writers and animators, some of whom came through the Disney animation department, and with a free-er hand to be funny, or crazy, his cartoons evolved and became more memorable. The later newspaper comic strips were almost an afterthought, something to keep the character in the public's face when they weren't in the theater. And, don't forget, comic books were everywhere!
Aside from the "media", and mass marketing to make money, (and let's face it, that's what it's all about ain't it folks?) maybe the concept that's missing in this copyright bruhaha is ATTENTION SPAN. Back then, up to about the time of TELEVISION, everyone's approach to all this popular culture was literary. Everybody learned about things by reading about them. This required a certain level of education that helped keep things in perspective and it seems like this perspective is gone now. Without knowing anything about Mickey Mouse, everyone is suddenly salivating over the prospect of a new Mickey slasher movie. Wasn't that one of the first things they did when Whinne the Pooh entered public domain? (And how many people saw that?!)
Disney's fight over copyright control is money fueled melodrama that fits perfectly in with the access the internet gives us on our phones now. No one needs to know anything because your device will tell you exactly what something is instantly. I guess this means that every character that somehow survives in the popular media will, someday, have their own post copyright slasher extravaganza.