The Wild Rip-offs & Inspiration That Built Mickey Mouse

[Music] well 2024 is here and it's actually happened Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse has finally entered the public domain which I'm sure will lead to plenty of tasteful uses of the character but despite the wave of quick cashs this is actually great because now everyone can enjoy the Anarchy that was the early days of Mickey like the time he spied on women changing in the dressing room or the time he was pretending to be a police officer and almost got blasted apart by a criminal or even when Mickey caught Minnie cheating on him with the circus ring [Music] Master the thing is this isn't Mickey Mouse and neither of these two and while all three look like total ripoffs it turns out these are all characters that are just ghosts of Walt Disney's past well before is time with the main Mouse so who exactly are they and why do they all have such a striking resemblance to you know who well we're about to find out as we explore the inspiration and eventual ripoffs that led to the creation of Mickey Mouse and there's a lawsuit or two but you probably guessed that [Music] now if you've heard the official Disney story of Mickey Mouse you're already familiar about how he was born out of desperation after having Oswald the Lucky Rabbit stolen by a shady producer Walt Disney needed a new character and he needed one fast Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when the business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lest e and disaster seemed right around the corner Legend has it that on that train what wanted to call Mickey Mortimer Mouse but his wife Lillian suggested Mickey Mouse and it's those three words Legend has it that always makes doing any sort of historical Deep dive into early Disney history kind of hazy but unlike so much of the company's history the birth of Mickey Mouse is something they're at least willing to call a legend the retelling of that story on a train over and over again and the different inflections it becomes myths so no we can't verify the exact inspiration that led Walt Disney to brainstorm up a mischievous mouse named Mickey but one thing we absolutely can say is that Walt Disney was never afraid to look for inspiration from other popular media around him just start with those first three Mickey Mouse cartoons from 1928 that are all now in the public domain as fun and unique and exciting as these were each one is very clearly built off of some other song or movie or event that audiences were already gravitating towards take plain crazy technically the first Mickey Mouse cartoon produced by Walt Disney and master animator H ey works the story here revolves around Mickey trying to impress Minnie with a homemade airplane and was clearly inspired by the national obsession with Charles lindberg's 1927 flight from new New York to [Music] Paris a similar situation is also true for the gallop and gout show the second Mickey Mouse cartoon Walt Disney produced this one has a very different feel to it probably because it's basically a parody of 1927's the gouto with Douglas Fairbanks which had been a legitimate hit with movie [Music] goers and then of course there's Steamboat Willie Mickey's first wide release that just so happened to Pioneer synchronize sound with animation once again well took advantage of the audience's fascination with music and sound in the cinema which had already been well established with talkies like the jazz singer and lights of New York let's not forget too that a little film by the name of Steamboat Bill Jr from Buster Keaton had just come out a few months before Steamboat Willie which references a song that I'm sure everyone's more than a little familiar with so like I said it's pretty clear that Walt Disney wasn't afraid to use other bits of Pop Culture media as a point of inspiration for his own work which is all well and good especially when you consider that in the late 1920s animation was still a rapidly evolving form of commercial entertainment and so you really needed an edge any Edge to differentiate your product over the ever increasing competition and right when Walt was looking for inspiration for that new cartoon character the industry still very much revolved around talking anthropomorphic animals as the star of each animated short Felix the Cat originally known as Master Tom had hit it big with 1919s feline Foles by today's standards it's pretty crude with mice eating all of the food in Felix's house while he's out trying to serenate his love interest in the end he gets blamed for the missing food he finds out that his love interest already has a litter of kittens from another cat and so Felix decides to Huff a bunch of gas like I said pretty crude but a clearly defined character with mannerisms and motivations that an audience can quickly recognize and relate to ended up being wildly popular because sure we all recognize that cats just naturally love to chase mice mice are kind of jerks you've probably had a mouse get into your house and eat your food or play your piano so you can relate so throughout the late teens and early 1920s cats and mice were having a moment crazy cat for instance along with his quick to anger friend ignot Mouse made the jump from comic strips to animated shorts first in 1916 and then again in 1920 after the success of Felix the Cat Walt Disney surprise surprise was also heavily influenced by Felix and used him as a template for his first major character Julius the cat introduced in 1922s Little Red Riding Hood laag Julius would go on to be featured in the Disney Brothers Alice comedies where he would become a Mainstay and every so often he would partner with a certain then unnamed [Music] Mouse but Felix wasn't the only animated character that Disney was directly influenced by there was also a mouse Milton Mouse who had a girlfriend Mary Mouse and it's here here where the lines between inspiration and outright theft start to get a little blurry in 1921 animator Paul Terry launched asops fables a series of animated shorts based around the classic morality Tales these shorts began as loose adaptations featuring talking animals but before too long shifted entirely to a pretty standard collection of gags usually revolving around cats and dogs and mice with the occasional farmer stepping into things it wasn't long before the series started gaining a following and the main characters were given names with ph the dog Henry the cat and Milton the mouse and as they gained in popularity Terry and his team continued to look for ways to keep his characters busy which is where Mary came in both as an object of desire and as a damsel in distress now as the mainstream of claim was building aso's Fable short started to catch the eye of other animators in the industry who were eager to replicate this success one of these animators was Walt Disney who was not only influenced by the presentation of Paul Terry shorts but also his production techniques an employee at laag Studios Disney's first attempt at an animation company in the early 1920s even confirmed that Walt and his artists would cut up old asops fables film prints to analyze them cell byell so once again we see Walt Disney directly inspired or even heavily influenced by other ideas around him again all well and good but where does the outright theft that I referenced earlier come in well for that we've got to go forward in time a bit to right after the release of Steamboat Willie which proved to be a smashing success the innovation of synchronized sound brought these characters to life in a way that audiences just needed to see in order to believe and just like Felix the Cat had influenced a giant way of talking animals almost a decade prior Mickey Mouse had established sound as the new musthave for all animation going forward but it wasn't just this new fangled synchronized soundtrack that set these Mickey Mouse cartoons apart it was the quality of Animation coming from UB Eyeworks it was the rarely reused and always inventive gags being thought up by Walt Disney and it was the merchandise which started to be churned out almost immediately before too long long Mickey Mouse was everywhere that's a pretty hard Trifecta to beat and even though most of Walt's competition did find ways to modernize at that point it was all just a matter of settling for second place which most of the companies we've talked about accepted and continued to put out their better sounding better-looking cartoons which often still feature the same old talking animal characters but then there was Milton Mouse and the asops Fable shorts ironically enough Creator Paul Terry who at one point had inspired Walt was forced out for refusing to produce cartoons with sound in order to compete with Disney on the other hand his production partner that was left in charge did absolutely want to compete but not when it came to Quality or effort instead when the freshly updated asops sound fables debuted in 1929 it was pretty clear that both Milton Mouse and Mary now named Rita had also gotten a fresh update and you know what they say if you can't beat them you make your characters look exactly like [Music] them how do you think that worked out well if you guessed poorly you'd be right because on March 31st 1931 the Walt Disney Studio successfully sued the distributor for copyright infringement in a later interview Walt's brother Roy reflected that the lawsuit wasn't about collecting damages as much as it was about protecting the Mickey Mouse copyright and stopping such a blatant ripoff asop sound fables would continue to limp along for a few more years without Milton Mouse but in 1933 the cartoon series it had at one point been a major inspiration for Walt Disney would cease production and this wasn't the only time that Mickey's Newfound success would bring back a ghost from Walt's past in 1930 Warner Brothers began and producing their own series of theatrical cartoons with Looney Tunes and marry Melodies to compete with both Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony shorts to help lead this new studio they hired animator Rudolph icing who as it turns out had helped Walt Disney launch that first wave of laag cartoons in the early 1920s one of ising's first goals with Warner Brothers was to establish a starring character that could successfully launch the marry Melodies brand and I'll bet you can't guess who this character was modeled after in 1931 Barry Melodies debuted their first short lady player mandolin starring foxy and his girlfriend both foxes that sure looked a whole lot like a couple of very popular mice [Music] senorita foxy would go on to be featured in a total of three merry Melodies cartoons before Rudolph eising got a call from his old friend Walt Disney who wasn't feeling particularly friendly and threatened to sue if the character of Foxy wasn't changed to look less like Mickey Mouse iing obliged and literally killed him off in 1931's one more time no [Music] more so long folk but even though this would clear the path for Disney to continue his Mickey Mouse dominance it's surprisingly wouldn't be the last time we saw foxy in action in a 1992 episode of Tiny tune Adventures titled two-tone town we got a brief return of Foxy and his girlfriend the both now sporting a new less infringing look and with all of that the Walt Disney Studio had pretty much established Mickey Mouse as a dominant figure both in popular culture and in the courtroom sure Paramount could have their buffed out Sailors and eye-catching Flappers and even warmer could have their fast talking rabbits and mey mouth Ducks but one thing was for sure they had all better stay away from that distinctive look of Mickey Mouse though if you are looking for a more inspired Mickey Mouse tail you got to check out my video on the animated short that was so extreme Disney has decided to completely bury it it's actually some pretty monstrous stuff

Channel: The Other Vault

Views: 92,879

Keywords:

Id: 5GThQuuPIsc

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 24 2024