Mickey Mouse, every mention
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Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Mickey Mouse comes up
Disney: The Renaissance and the Empire · Acquired
- ▶ 16:10 Ben Gilbert Despite the fact that as soon as he later gets the job, he was never without his Mickey Mouse tie.
- ▶ 1:15:36 Ben Gilbert Mickey Mouse and SportsCenter do not meet.
The Walt Disney Company: The most successful enterprise for monetizing human nostalgia (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 0:00 Ben Gilbert Have I ever shown you my Mickey Mouse impression?
- ▶ 0:10 David Rosenthal Alright, alright, give me, give me Mickey, give me Mickey.
- ▶ 0:18 David Rosenthal You sound like Walt himself doing Mickey.
- ▶ 0:21 Ben Gilbert Didn't he do Mickey for, like, 20 years?
- ▶ 3:13 Ben Gilbert There was a character that was supposed to be Mickey Mouse before Mickey Mouse, but was lost in a contract dispute.
- ▶ 31:41 David Rosenthal And they come up, not with Mickey Mouse, but with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
- ▶ 41:33 David Rosenthal But before we tell the story of Mickey Mouse,
- ▶ 43:27 Ben Gilbert Okay, so David, how does this Oswald catastrophe lead to Mickey Mouse?
- ▶ 43:32 David Rosenthal Alright, so here's the story of Mickey Mouse as Walt would tell it.
- ▶ 43:55 David Rosenthal And this would go on to become the Mickey cartoon plain crazy.
- ▶ 44:09 David Rosenthal How about Mickey?
- ▶ 44:10 David Rosenthal And thus, Mickey Mouse is born.
- ▶ 44:37 Ben Gilbert And also when you see Mickey and you see Oswald, it's not hard to imagine where Mickey Mouse came from.
- ▶ 45:18 David Rosenthal And at least according to the Neil Gabler book, most likely Ub is the one who first draws Mickey, not Walt on the train, but either way, Ub definitely was the primary animator of the first Mickeys for the whole first series of Mickeys,…
- ▶ 45:42 David Rosenthal The summer of 19 28, we finished out the Oswald contract, and Walt and Ub and the small little Mary crew have gotten two Mickey shorts ready for production, Plain Crazy and the Gallop and Gaucho, and Walt takes them around to distributors,…
- ▶ 46:12 David Rosenthal Mickey.
- ▶ 47:32 Ben Gilbert Mickey on screen bop into something, then you might hear a xylophone on the exact same downbeat play a note.
- ▶ 47:48 Ben Gilbert There's a great business model lesson in this, which is with the first two Mickeys flopping, if you just do the same thing as an existing competitor who already has distribution, brand, customers,
- ▶ 48:28 David Rosenthal Walt taking out the mickeys before bringing sound, like, he's got nothing to bring to the table here.
- ▶ 48:56 David Rosenthal And so Walt and Ub and crew animate a test sequence of a Mickey with sound, and they screen it for all their wives and girlfriends.
- ▶ 49:06 David Rosenthal And Ub writes later of what happened next when they screen the synchronized sound Mickey for the first time.
- ▶ 50:36 David Rosenthal So they make Steamboat Willie as the third Mickey, but the first Mickey.
- ▶ 52:47 David Rosenthal These New York distributors, they're still so conservative, they're like, well, you had one hit.
- ▶ 53:02 David Rosenthal And famously, one distributor, while Walt is meeting with him here, and he's trying to explain to Walt why he's going to pass again on the Mickey deal, picks up a package of Lifesavers candy.
- ▶ 54:18 David Rosenthal His partner in the sound technology, who had been one of the, you know, original universal executives, and they cut a deal where Powers will be Disney's direct distribution agent in return for just 10% of the gross revenue on the Mickeys,…
- ▶ 55:48 David Rosenthal By the time this happens, over a dozen Mickey shorts with sound have come out.
- ▶ 56:06 David Rosenthal Everybody still wants the Mickeys.
- ▶ 56:15 David Rosenthal Disney first switches to Columbia for distribution and then to United artists and audiences just keep loving Mickey.
- ▶ 58:06 David Rosenthal And then as part of the club, the kids and their parents would gain the right to buy exclusive Mickey merchandise.
- ▶ 59:47 David Rosenthal And then for Disney, they're just getting this turbocharged distribution and brand recognition of Disney the company and Mickey Mouse the character.
- ▶ 59:57 Ben Gilbert Ok, so they take the learnings from the Mickey Mouse Club, right, and they kind of lean into Mickey in a, in a big way at the corporate level.
- ▶ 1:01:06 Ben Gilbert And even if they weren't getting paid for it, the marketing on that, so that people go see Mickey films.
- ▶ 1:01:58 David Rosenthal Is walking the street in New York and a man comes up to him, like comes up to Walt Disney on the street and offers Walt 300 dollars to license the Mickey character to put it on a series of children's writing workbooks that he's producing…
- ▶ 1:02:19 David Rosenthal Mickey's just starting to work.
- ▶ 1:02:32 David Rosenthal Mickey takes off during the Depression.
- ▶ 1:02:37 David Rosenthal It's part of his success that people view plucky Mickey's success as a mouse, as the underdog, as like something that Americans can identify with through the Depression.
- ▶ 1:02:56 Ben Gilbert Mickey's role in these early comics is exactly what you're saying, the underdog.
- ▶ 1:05:40 Ben Gilbert I mean, there's so much pent-up demand to buy Mickey Mouse stuff that you can sort of explode out of the gate.
- ▶ 1:07:14 David Rosenthal So just to illustrate the difference, the distribution deal that Disney does with United Artists for the Mickey films and for the Silly Symphonies, which is the second cartoon series that Disney starts in the thirties, Disney gets an…
- ▶ 1:11:19 David Rosenthal I mean, I think it really revealed itself to him and Roy in these early years of Mickey.
- ▶ 1:12:48 David Rosenthal Whereas Mickey works for free.
- ▶ 1:12:55 Ben Gilbert That's on the value capture side, but on the value creation side, which I think is the more important thing, Mickey is always available to work.
- ▶ 1:13:02 Ben Gilbert And Mickey doesn't age.
- ▶ 1:13:32 Ben Gilbert Like, Mickey can always exist in the present in a way that we're gonna talk about Davy Crockett later, but at some point it became completely uninteresting to watch Davy Crockett, even though he was like a complete heartthrob obsession.
- ▶ 1:14:30 Ben Gilbert So like Mickey in those films, get those films into as many theaters as possible to just completely saturate the world.
- ▶ 1:15:55 David Rosenthal Like, you're not gonna oversaturate Mickey by having a Mickey comic strip and daily exposure in the way that if you released a new Mickey film every single day, people would get tired of Mickeys.
- ▶ 1:17:58 Ben Gilbert Like, can Disney throw Mickey Mouse on all sorts of crap without diminishing the brand of Mickey Mouse as long as the primary medium of film stays really high quality?
- ▶ 1:49:43 David Rosenthal So, you know, if Walt thought that the flywheel worked well for Mickey Mouse, Snow White is like,
- ▶ 2:18:53 Ben Gilbert Like, you see all these crazy old posters with, like, you know, Donald Duck holding a gun, and, I mean, the stuff you sort of would never see with these characters today, but not only did Disney say, we'll work for hire, they said, we can…
- ▶ 2:19:14 Ben Gilbert They really did not employ Mickey Mouse.
- ▶ 2:19:17 Ben Gilbert They protected Mickey Mouse.
- ▶ 2:19:33 David Rosenthal But then it makes sense to protect Mickey, too.
- ▶ 2:19:39 Ben Gilbert Mickey started off as this troublemaker, but then kind of became the, like, nice protagonist.
- ▶ 2:39:32 Ben Gilbert There was a name floated, Mickey Mouse Village, that sort of quickly changed to Disneyland since it was much more about his new passions, trains, Americana, and miniatures than it was about Mickey Mouse.
- ▶ 3:56:55 Ben Gilbert Mickey with synchronized sound.
- ▶ 4:12:24 Ben Gilbert Now that they own Pixar, or Aladdin, or Mickey Mouse, like, this is true vertical integration.
- ▶ 4:18:00 Ben Gilbert Right, because their competitive set would have needed to be people who have the talent of their animation staff, which is not zero people, but few people, and who had all the cash from Mickey and the Mickey merch, which would have been…
- ▶ 4:18:46 Ben Gilbert As soon as Mickey Mouse was established.