The Book of Mouse: A Celebration of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (8 page)

This account tosses in another odd, untrue story about the creation of Mickey Mouse that appears nowhere else.

From the Athens, Georgia,
Banner Herald
(December 26, 1933):

It was Disney’s brother’s daughter, aged six, who was chiefly responsible for “Mickey”… Six years ago Disney had a five dollar a month studio over a garage where he sat at night and watched the antics of a pair of mice. After weeks of patient persuasion, he tamed them so that they would climb upon his drawing board. There they sat up and nibbled bits of cheese in their paws or even ate from his hand.

As he watched them, he occasionally wrote letters to his niece. The letters described the activities of the mice and sometimes were illustrated with drawings of them doing funny, fantastic human things.

Walt never had a studio above a garage, and Walt’s niece (the daughter of his older brother Herbert) would have been eleven years old, a significant age difference. More important, “six years ago” in 1927, Walt was living and working in Hollywood not in Kansas City. These letters were never discussed in any other article or surfaced during Walt’s lifetime. They are yet another bit of hokum on the creation of Mickey Mouse.

From
Psychology
magazine (November 1933):

[In Kansas City, Walt] made the acquaintance of Mickey. One evening as he was bending over his drawing board, two little mice scampered across his table. Amused at their capers, he began to make friends with them. And presently they were serving as his models. For hours they would sit on his drawing board, while he worked, combing their whiskers and licking their chops in true mouse fashion. And Walt would weave them into human situations and make them tell funny human stories.

Again, this story is not true. Sometimes Walt would say it was an entire family of mice that he captured and tamed. Other times, he would say that it was just one mouse that he made a prisoner in an overturned wire waste basket and eventually trained it (by hitting the mouse on the nose with the eraser on the end of his pencil) to stay inside a large circle he drew on a sheet of paper at the top of his drawing board.

When Walt decided to go to California, he supposedly took the mouse to a vacant lot “in the best neighborhood” he could find to release it. Walt told a reporter:

The mouse that had played on the drawing board didn’t seem to want to go. He stood around looking at me. I had to stamp my foot on the pavement and yell at him to make him beat it. That’s the last I ever saw of him.

None of these stories are literally true, but Walt loved embellishing how he created Mickey Mouse.

The story of Mickey’s birth on a train ride from New York became so polished by repetition over the years that it overshadowed any other variation and became as much an oft-told myth as young George Washington chopping down the cherry tree and then confessing it to his father.

Even today, people still insist that the story Walt told about being inspired by a real mouse and using that inspiration on the train to create Mickey Mouse is the gospel truth.

An article in
Cosmopolitan
magazine (February 1934) stated:

[F]iction has it that a mouse roamed Walt’s workroom; that the two became friendly, and the Mickey mouse originated in this room. It is a nice story, but false. As a matter of fact, Mickey Mouse’s papa is not overly fond of mice. He jumps out of their way, and doesn’t go looking for them.

In response to that article, John C. Moffitt wrote in the
Providence Bulletin
newspaper (April 1934):

A magazine writer recently dismissed the story of the [real Kansas City] mouse which inspired Mickey as a myth. But Walt Disney spent one whole morning telling it to me and he insisted it was true.

Walt’s engaging and magical tale of the creation of Mickey Mouse was so powerful that it overcame any reasonable doubts with ease.

Audiences wanted to believe in the story of one brief burst of inspiration in a moment of deep desperation that resulted in the birth of the world’s most beloved cartoon character as well as that it was inspired by the kindness Walt had shown to a helpless little mouse.

In fact, audiences still want to believe that story today despite any and all factual evidence to the contrary.

Inspired by Mickey’s popularity, the Disney Company introduced a daily Mickey Mouse comic strip on January 13, 1930, distributed to newspapers by King Features Syndicate. Walt explained:

[I considered] other ways to exploit characters like the Mouse. The most obvious was a comic strip. So I started work on a comic strip hoping I could sell it to one of the syndicates. As I was producing the first one, a letter came to me from King Features wanting to know if I would be interested in doing a comic strip featuring Mickey Mouse. Naturally, I accepted the offer.

In a letter to King Features dated October 19, 1929, Walt wrote:

Due to the fact that we have increased our production schedule from twelve to thirty-one pictures for the coming year, we have been unable to devote much time to the making up of the specimens of the MICKEY MOUSE COMIC STRIP that you requested. The comic strip is an entirely new angle for us and we have been somewhat puzzled as to the best policy to carry out in this strip. The artist that we have had working on this angle [Ub Iwerks] has made up quite a few specimens but we have not as yet been able to satisfy ourselves with the results.

A month later, on November 19, 1929, Walt wrote again to King Features:

I mailed you yesterday the first specimens of the MICKEY MOUSE Comic Strip… the popularity of MICKEY has been increasing by leaps and bounds and the pictures are now being distributed in every country in the world. Several of the big theater circuits in this country have already re-booked the first series… to play return engagements in their theaters. We are also starting a national campaign on what is known as the MICKEY MOUSE CLUB.

Several days later, on November 21, 1929, Walt received a reply from King Features:

I just received the six strips of “Mickey Mouse” and everyone here thinks they are great. We believe Mickey has the makings of a top-notch strip judging from these samples… we would like to have another six strips right away. One reason for this is that [newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst] will be here next week and we want to show “Mickey Mouse” to him.

On December 18, 1929, Walt sent the second batch of six strips (one for each day of the week, except Sunday) and the third set a few days after that, and then the fourth during the week of December 30.

The actual contract was not signed until January 24, 1930, but Walt gave permission by telegram for King Features to run the first strip, which appeared on January 13. Until May 17, 1930, those early strips were written by Walt Disney himself.

Many papers headed the strip as
Mickey Mouse by Iwerks
(or Ub Iwerks), with Walt Disney’s famous signature not appearing until Iwerks left the Disney Studio to start his own animation venture. Iwerks’ name had appeared on many early Mickey Mouse items, including movie posters, promotional items, and the title cards for the shorts.

Ub Iwerks had drawn the first few Mickey Mouse animated cartoons virtually by himself and was the natural choice to transfer Mickey’s antics to the newspaper page, fulfilling a dream of most cartoonists to have their own syndicated newspaper strip.

After three weeks and eighteen strips, Iwerks left the Disney Studio. His inker, Win Smith, took over both the penciling and inking of the gag-a-day format with the February 10, 1930, strip, until he was replaced on May 5 by Floyd Gottfredson, who would draw the strips for four-and-a-half decades and who was responsible for a series of continuity stories that have rarely been surpassed.

During those first two months of the strip, Mickey’s airplane activity echoed his experiences in
Plane Crazy
(1928), and Mickey becoming a castaway fighting off wild animals and cannibals in the strip helped inspire
The Castaway
(1931).

Near the end of March 1930, rather than a series of unconnected gags, the strip began to have a loose story continuity. Clarabelle Cow was first used in the strip on April 2, 1930, and Horace Horsecollar showed up the next day.

In 1931, Walt offered (in the comic strip itself) an autographed picture of Mickey free to interested readers to try to judge the size of the readership. Over the next two weeks, eight to ten sacks of mail each day were received by the studio full of thousands of letters from readers asking for the picture. Walt happily posed for a publicity photo standing next to a pile of letters with a Charlotte Clark Mickey Mouse doll on top.

Just as in the animated cartoons, the strips featured the slapstick violence popular during that time period.ey got into actual fistfights as he faced bandits, pirates, crooks, mad scientists, and a host of other menaces.

Unfortunately, such pluckiness was not in keeping with Mickey’s corporate image, which demanded an inoffensiveness of character to help sell his plethora of merchandise.

In the February 16, 1931, issue of
Time
magazine, the editors stated:

Great lover, scholar, soldier, sailor, singer, toreador, tycoon, jockey, prizefighter, automobile racer, aviator, farmer. Mickey Mouse lives in a world in which space, time, and the law of physics are nil. He can reach inside of a bull’s mouth, pull out his teeth and use them as castanets. He can lead a band or play violin solos; his ingenuity is limitless; he never fails.

Sadly, that early, raucous Mickey could soon be found only in Gottfredson’s newspaper comic strip.

Floyd Gottfredson was about twenty-four years old when he moved from his home in Utah with his wife and two children to Los Angeles in the hope of becoming a cartoonist for one of the seven major newspapers in the Hollywood-Los Angeles area.

Gottfredson learned cartooning through a correspondence course from The Federal Schools of Illustrating and Cartooning (now more commonly known as Art Instruction Schools, Inc.). Arriving in Los Angeles but finding no work in his field, he overheard that Walt Disney was looking for artists. He took his samples to the Disney Studio and was immediately hired as an animation in-betweener and possible backup artist for the Mickey Mouse daily strip.

At that time, Disney had already put in about six months of preparatory work on the strip which was to be officially launched about twenty-three days after Gottfredson had been hired.

The trend at that time was for all strips, comic and illustrative, to do continuities, following the example of Sidney Smith’s big comic strip hit,
The Gumps
. By April, a month before Gottfredson took over, the Mickey Mouse strip was also using story continuities at the request of its syndicator, King Features.

In an interview in 1978 for an Italian magazine, Gottfredson recalled:

Walt had continued to write the strip, including the first seven weeks of the first continuity. He had been trying to get Win Smith to do the writing as well as the drawing but, for some reason, he didn’t want to. This was one of the reasons for Smith’s leaving the studio.

I took over the drawing with the May 5, 1930, episode [Gottfredson’s 25th birthday] and I took over the writing with the May 19, 1930, release. I wrote the daily until late 1932. After that time, the continuities were written by five different writers: Webb Smith, Ted Osborne, Merrill de Maris, Dick Shaw, and Bill Walsh.

Interestingly, Gottfredson did not want to do a comic strip any more. Working as an in-betweener (the entry-level artist who provides drawings “in between” the animator and his assistant’s key drawings to create a smooth flow of movement), he had become very interested in animation and wished to stay with it. Walt promised Gottfredson that he would only have to work on the strip for two weeks while Walt found another artist. Gottfredson ended up working on the strip for more than 45 years. He recalled:

Walt checked my work the first couple of months after I took over the strip but after that and all through the years, except to pass on an occasional suggestion, he very seldom concerned himself with the strip or the department. He seemed to be relieved not to have to be concerned with them. He had bigger things to worry about.

In an interview with Disney archivist Dave Smith in 1975, Gottfredson explained the creation of Morty and Ferdie, Mickey’s nephews:

Walt asked me to tae a couple of the mice in the audience in
Orphan’s Benefit
and make nephews out of them for Mickey. Bill Walsh came in [as a writer] and we decided the two nephews who looked exactly alike and had exactly the same personality [was] being duplicated with the three nephews in the Duck strip… So, Bill and I decided that we’d just let Ferdie fade out of the picture so we could develop Morty as a little mechanical genius type… We haven’t used Ferdie in the comic strip since mid-1945 at least.

Gottfredson plotted all the
Mickey Mouse
daily continuities from May 19, 1930, to June 1943. Other writers became involved with the strip as early as 1932, but Gottfredson edited all the writing until 1946, and he would have “lively bull sessions on the upcoming week’s work” with the writers. Besides penciling, Gottfredson also inked the strip from May 5, 1930, until late 1932.

He said:

I always felt that Mickey should have been a little [Charlie] Chaplin mouse against the world and I tried to promote that idea when they dropped the continuity and started the … gag-a-day strips. Mickey had become bland and wishy-washy, too much like Dagwood and Blondie, in the neighborhood format. But my idea for changing Mickey’s personality was rejected.

Adding to his workload was a Mickey Mouse Sunday strip which Gottfredson penciled from January 10, 1932, until mid-1938, when Manuel Gonzales took over. Gonzales, with some occasional assistance from artists Bill Wright, Tony Strobl, and Gottfredson, continued to do the Sunday strip until his retirement in 1981.

In 1938, approximately 20,400,000 people read the daily Mickey Mouse comic strip.