©Walt Disney Productions
94 years ago today, Steamboat Willie, the first Walt Disney Productions sound cartoon and the second starring vehicle for Mickey Mouse, premiered at Universal's Colony Theater in New York City. Walt elaborates, in an appearance on his television show.
Steamboat Willie wasn't the first cartoon with sound - Max Fleischer's studio had already made a bunch of Screen Songs a.k.a. Sound Car-tunes.
Fleischer Studios also produced a documentary about the introduction of sound to movies.
What's new and different about Steamboat Willie is the way sound was synchronized and how the music by Carl W. Stalling and sound effects were as much the star of the show as Mickey. Contemporaneous efforts from other studios just slapped a music track on a silent cartoon. Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks and Carl Stalling asked the questions "what can we do with sound?" and "what can we do that nobody else is doing?"
Who could be attributed with the animation style of Steamboat Willie and its predecessor Plane Crazy? Ub Iwerks!
Charles Mintz had hired away much of the staff from Disney and (at least briefly) took possession of flagship character Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, leaving the extremely talented Ub Iwerks as Walt Disney Productions' top animator.
Steamboat Willie was followed by the first Silly Symphony, The Skeleton Dance, which extends and further develops the creative use of music (Carl W. Stalling!) and sound effects.
Ub and Stalling would leave the Disney Studio in 1930 and then produce the first sound cartoon in color, Flip the Frog in Fiddlesticks.
For more info on Ub Iwerks, watch this. . .
For more info on Disney's 1920's cartoons, the transition to sound and Ub Iwerks, also read Michael Barrier's Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, The Hand Behind the Mouse: An Intimate Biography of Ub Iwerks by Leslie Iwerks and John Kenworthy, Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, The Ultimate History by David Gerstein, J. B. Kaufman, Bob Iger and Daniel Kothenschulte (Editor), Walt Disney's Ultimate Inventor: The Genius of Ub Iwerks by Don Iwerks (with foreword by Leonard Maltin), Russell Merritt and J.B. Kaufman's Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney book.
And the also terrific book by David A. Bossert, J.B. Kaufman (Foreword) and David Gerstein (Archival Support) devoted to the Disney Oswalds. David Gerstein's
In addition, it is highly likely that a search for articles about Walt Disney, the early sound era and Ub Iwerks by such terrific authors and historians as John Canemaker and Jim Korkis will turn up something interesting on these topics.
3 comments:
I am on a Disney Treasure binge as of recently. I loved the Oswald collection.
Does the Oswald book have any NEW information? I'm writing a book on the Golden Age and am researching books on that use primary sources (i.e. interviews and archives).
I find the Disney Treasures Oswalds with commentaries pretty amazing, especially all the who-animated-what information. My guess, Buddy, is that you are way ahead of the curve on animation research and already know whatever new information is in the Oswald book. Would assume that Mike Barrier and Milt Gray spoke with the usual suspects (Hugh Harman, Rudy Ising, Friz Freleng, Les Clark) at length back in the early 1970's, as they were on a mission to interview the animators of the silent and early sound eras while they were not quite elderly and still lucid.
All the best on your book!
Thanks Paul!
I want my book to be more than rehashes of Of Mice and Magic and Hollywood Cartoons, and are currently contacting Mark Kausler and Mike Barrier, as well as newspapers.
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