1928 - Index

    

Shorts

Harem Scarem Neck 'n' Neck The Ol' Swimmin' Hole Africa Before Dark Bright Lights Rival Romeos Sagebrush Sadie Ride'em Plow Boy Ozzie of the Mounted Hungry Hoboes Oh, What a Knight

Sky Scrappers The Fox Chase Tall Timber Sleigh Bells Poor Papa Hot Dog Plane Crazy Gallopin' Gaucho Steamboat Willie The Barn Dance

What began as a seeming disaster for Disney turned out to be the turning point of his career.

The first run of the "Oswald" series had been fairly successful. Disney, then, made the trip to New York to meet with Mintz to negotiate a new contract for a second series. Because of it's success, Disney wanted to increase his fee from $2250 per cartoon to $2500. However, when he got to new York, he was in for a rude shock. Not only did Mintz want to decrease his fee per short, but he had also secretly met with some of Disney's artists and signed them to contracts of his own, effectively taking control of Oswald away from Disney.

Mintz was completely within his legal rights. Universal, as the distributor, owned Oswald, and Mintz was simply trying to find a way to keep Disney and his staff under contract to him, and in the process to cut costs. Mintz also felt that Disney's track record, although good, didn't justify the increase. Most cartoons in the late 20's only cost about $2000 to produce, if that. The exception was Pat Sullivan, who was getting $12,5000 for Felix the Cat who was at that time an extremely hot property, both in cartoons and in merchandIsing revenue. Oswald had not yet reached that stratosphere.

But Disney was mortified. He felt that Oswald had been stolen away from him, along with most of his staff. The Disney company mythology says that while Disney was on the train coming back from New York, he didn't want to come back with bad news and began scribbling a little mouse figure which he would present to the staff on his return. The more probable story is much less magical. In order to stay in business, Disney had to go on to something different. So, he took the staff that had been hired away by Mintz and assigned them to the remaining Oswald shorts. The loyalists meanwhile, including Ub Iwerks, were put to work secretly on the new project.

Mickey Mouse was probably as much a creation of Iwerks as it was Disney. It is said by some that while Mickey always had Disney's personality, but was more visually Iwerk's. Another myth that often gets reported is that Iwerks animated "Plane Crazy" single-handedly. While he did do an incredible amount of work, sometimes putting out as much as 700 drawings per day, the fact is that he was just the chief animator with other assistants working under him. One of the reasons why such prodigious amounts of work was done was that Iwerks used to have races with the rest of the staff to see who could put out the most in one day.

The Oswald cartoons eventually ended up in the hands of Walter Lantz, who would later go on to create Woody Woodpecker. They never had quite the success that they did under Disney, though, and after a few years was discontinued. Disney took a completed reel of "Plane Crazy" to distributors and once again, started to shop his creations around to little interest. "Gallopin' Gaucho" and "Steamboat Willie" had already been put into production as well, but Disney was finding that he needed some sort of gimmick to sell his new creation.