Steamboat Willie

Steamboat Willie is a 1928 American animated short film directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. It was produced in black-and-white by Disney Cartoons and was released by Pat Powers' Celebrity Productions. The cartoon is considered the official debut of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, although both appeared months earlier in a test screening of Plane Crazy and the then-unreleased The Gallopin' Gaucho. Steamboat Willie is the third film in the Mickey Mouse series to have been produced, but it is the first to have been officially distributed, because Disney had seen The Jazz Singer (1927) and became determined to produce one of the first fully synchronized sound cartoons. Steamboat Willie is one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound, and one of the first cartoons to feature a fully post-produced soundtrack, which distinguished it from earlier sound cartoons, such as Inkwell Studios's Song Car-Tunes (1924–1926), My Old Kentucky Home (1926), and Van Beuren Studios's Dinner Time (1928). Disney believed that synchronized sound was the future of film. The soundtrack was arranged by Wilfred Jackson and Bert Lewis, and it included the songs "Steamboat Bill", a composition popularized by baritone Arthur Collins during the 1910s, and the popular 19th-century folk song "Turkey in the Straw". The film's title may be a parody of the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), which is a reference to the song by Collins. Disney performed all of the voices in the film's little intelligible dialogue. Steamboat Willie became the most popular cartoon of its time. It has received wide critical acclaim, for introducing one of the world's most popular cartoon characters and for its technical innovation. It is often considered one of the most influential cartoons ever made. Animators voted it the 13th-greatest cartoon of all time in the 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons, and in 1998, the film was selected by the United States Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry. As a work published in 1928, Steamboat Willie entered the US public domain on January 1, 2024.