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Steamboat Willie

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Steamboat Willie (Western Animation)
The mouse that started it all.note 

"By 1927-1928, audiences would groan when a cartoon came on. Animation had worn out its welcome. The novelty was gone. If sound hadn't come in, the cartoon would have vanished."
Shamus Culhane on why Steamboat Willie was such an important film for animation

Steamboat Willie is a black-and-white Mickey Mouse short released on November 18, 1928, and is the cartoon that kicked off what we have come to know as The Golden Age of Animation. It is notable not for being the first Mickey Mouse cartoon (that honor goes to Plane Crazynote ), nor for being the first sound cartoonnote , but for being the first cartoon with a completely post-produced soundtrack of music, dialogue, and sound effects. Namely, it was the first cartoon to get it right, bringing The Silent Age of Animation to an end.

The short itself begins with the iconic image of Mickey Mouse at the wheel of a steamboat, whistling to himself. The villain, Pete, the real captain of the ship, steps in and hassles Mickey for not doing his job. The steamboat docks to pick up a cargo of animals, and Minnie Mouse rushes to board the ship as it leaves the dock. Mickey manages to get her on board (by using a hook to pick her up by her panties no less), but an Extreme Omni-Goat eats her ukulele and her sheets of music. Somehow Mickey and Minnie are able to make the most of the situation by cranking the goat's tail, which causes it to play music. The ensuing scenes involve Mickey abusing animals in order to add to the music, by swinging a cat by its tail, choking a duck, pulling on the tails of baby pigs and then playing the mother pig's nipples. Black Comedy Animal Cruelty aside, this scene readily showed off what adding sound to cartoons could do. Pete gets angry at Mickey for slacking off again and forces him to peel potatoes. The short ends with Mickey throwing a potato at a parrot for laughing at him.

The short was revolutionary for its time, and its copyright status in the US was still up in the air for a long time — in 1998, Disney successfully lobbied the U.S. Congress to extend its copyrightnote  to 2024 (this is part of the reason that the Copyright Term Extension Act is occasionally derisively called the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act"), though by the original law it should have fallen into the public domain years ago. It may in fact have already been in the public domain during that time due to errors in the original copyright formulation, but no one wanted to challenge Disney's lawyers. As of January 1, 2024, the short, along with Mickey, Minnie and Pete as they appear in the short, are now definitively in the United States public domain.note  It should be noted that in several other countries, including Canada and Russia, the short has been in the public domain for several years. Predictably, an indie horror movie called Mickey's Mouse Trap (later renamed as The Mouse Trap) was announced the very day this short's copyright expired, and another called Screamboat was just announced the next day after. A horror video game is in the works, and a First-Person Shooter game inspired from this short named Mouse is in developmentnote .

In 1994, the short ranked at #13 on the list of The 50 Greatest Cartoons as selected by 1000 animation professionals.

In 1998, 70 years after its debut, the short was chosen for preservation in the National Film Registry. It can be watched on Walt Disney Animation Studios' official YouTube channel here or on its Wikipedia article here.


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Goat phonograph

A goat transforms into a living phonograph after eating Minnie Mouse's sheet music and ukulele.

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