Mickey, Mouse of Our Hearts, Whistles His Way to 88

Celebrate by watching ‘Steamboat Willie’ again.

This weekend, I present a plea: For a few minutes, let us ignore the unpleasantries that currently plague our nation’s moral core and focus on one of the Good Things: Walt Disney.

No? Disney sucks? Walt was a racist and misogynist? OK, fine. Let’s focus on just one Good Thing Disney and animation director Ub Iwerks birthed 88 years ago: “Steamboat Willie,” the cartoon that debuted Mickey Mouse, his lady love Minnie, and his arch-nemesis Pete.

A technical and artistic first, “Steamboat Willie” was the first cartoon to feature perfect and normalized synchronized sound, starkly shown off in its opening seconds with the hiss of the boat’s smokestacks and Mickey Mouse’s now-iconic whistling; other toons, like those of Fleischer Studios, had sound in them, but went out of sync. Getting it right in such a popular, widely-hailed cartoon sent a clear shot across the steamboat bow to Fleischer and other animation outfits of the time, shot Mickey and Disney into super-stardom, and, more broadly, had a major effect on U.S. copyright law that persists to this day.

And today, clocking in at just over seven minutes, Steamboat Willie is basically made for Internet consumption — long enough to pull you away, tight enough that its rewards don’t feel forced.

Sometimes that’s all you can ask for.

Correction: Due to an astonishing and embarrassing oversight on my part, I embedded the incorrect clip of “Steamboat Willie.” Now that I’ve updated the post with the correct clip and runtime, I will proceed to jump off a steamboat. Sincere thanks to @drstong for pointing out the error. I regret it deeply.

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