“Walt, because he was never satisfied with anything, kept on making up bigger and bigger whoppers to stretch the Mickey Mouse creation story," Ryan says. In all honesty, Mickey could have just as easily been a frog. So while the departing animators finished up the final Oswald cartoon, Disney and Iwerks worked behind a locked door to hastily sketch out a new character.
Everyone except Oswald co-creator Ub Iwerks. Walt Disney had just lost the rights to his first hit character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and all of his animators had abandoned him. The truth is that Mickey was born out of an extremely tense, stressful moment. So that was a very different story than the Disney company had put out or that Walt started telling after Mickey became successful,” says Ub's granddaughter Leslie Iwerks. “He said that it was not Walt creating the character on a train. Or that he came up the idea for Mickey on a train from New York to California. You may have heard that Mickey was inspired by a pet mouse that Walt Disney had here in Kansas City at the Laugh-O-Gram Studio. Plane Crazy (1928) After a record 700 drawings a day, Ub Iwerks animated the first Mickey Mouse cartoon single-handedly in two weeks, something that would have taken other animators months. "I think a lot of that has to do with the way that Disney over the years has controlled the Mickey Mouse narrative," Ryan says. But that doesn’t erase the fact that for decades, the collaboration between Iwerks and Disney was mostly kept a secret. In addition to defining Mickey’s personality, he literally voiced the character for years. It’s not like Walt Disney wasn’t integral to the success of Mickey Mouse. And when Walt was taking credit, Ub was the one who was denied credit,” says Jeff Ryan, author of “ A Mouse Divided: How Ub Iwerks Became Forgotten, and Walt Disney Became Uncle Walt.” “He was the person who was doing most of the behind-the-scenes work.
He is the one to thank for the iconic scenes in "Mary Poppins" and "Sleeping Beauty," in addition to Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds." In addition to being a prolific animator, Iwerks was also the genius inventor behind Disney's greatest special effects. It was his dad, a German immigrant, who first introduced him to film. And from an early age, Iwerks was fascinated with the idea of bringing still images to life. Unlike Disney, Iwerks was born and raised in Kansas City. The two originally met as teenagers, while working at the same Kansas City commercial art studio. It was Iwerks, not Disney, who in 1928 designed Mickey Mouse and single-handedly animated the first Mickey cartoon in Hollywood. To know the truth about Mickey Mouse and the secret to many of Walt Disney’s successes, you have to know the story of Disney's best friend: Kansas City animator Ub Iwerks. And the stories he told for years about how the iconic character came to be aren’t true. Kansas City takes a lot of pride in being the place where Walt Disney started his first animation studio and created his first cartoon characters.īut here's the thing: Walt Disney didn’t design Mickey Mouse. For more stories like this one, subscribe to A People's History of Kansas City on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Stitcher.
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