I just got a tape of old cartoons, and at the beginning of the tape are two cartoons that aren’t Disney, but DO feature Mickey and Minnie Mouse. They’re not just look-alikes like Warner’s Foxy character (Mickey Mouse with points on the tips of his ears) where they at least pretended to file the serial numbers off.
This was Mickey!
One is an “Aesop’s Sound Fables” presentation called “Circus Capers”. It’s a “Van Buren film”. The Mickey is crudely drawn, but it’s absolutely Mickey Mouse. If it’d been in a Disney compilation, I’d have thought that the animator was having a bad day, but otherwise wouldn’t have blinked.
The other is an “Official Films” presentation called “Uncle Tom and Little Eva”. Mickey and Minnie (even down to the pillbox-like hat with the flower sticking out) are only in this one briefly, but still…
Two different companies doing what appear to be pirated Mickey Mouse cartoons? Anyone heard of these? Was pirating Mickey a regular occurance in the early days of cartoons?
I’m not sure about the first one, although Fables Studios did have a cartoon series about an animated mouse couple that predated Mickey and Minnie, although they were unnamed. Fables Studios was later taken over by Van Buren, and it was a huge bone of contention later between Disney and Van Buren.
It’s entirely possible that the second one is an actual Disney short entitled “Mickey’s Mellerdrammer” where Mickey and the other early characters put on a stage play of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” When the shorts were put out for public consumption on 8 or 16mm film, they were edited into 4 to 5 minute lengths and the titles were usually changed. So it’s possible that this is where the change of title came from.
I’m sure there were quite a few “unofficial” Mickey shorts out there, although it’s difficult to track any of them. The only one I have in my collection is one called “Mickey Goes to Vietnam” made in the mid 60’s where Mickey steps off the plane and is promptly shot by a sniper.
It’s not really a question of who pirated from who. Firstly, Walt Disney himself was always careful to say “this is my first sound cartoon” or “this is my first color cartoon.” It was his later publicists that tried to make it as if he had led the parade.
Even so, pirating is not a question here. The picture on thw website look to be more like early versions of Felix the Cat than anything else. The site seems to be saying that Disney stole the idea of sound cartoons from Fable Studios, but the Fleischer Brothers had been making sound cartoons even earlier than they had, although with a faulty and, in the end, unsuccessful process (The DeForest Sound-on-Film process.)
Even then, Mickey was more the work of artist Ub Iwerks than of Disney. Iwerks pretty much animated “Plane Crazy” himself, with the help of a few assistants. While Mickey’s character was pretty much Disney’s, his physical appearance was most likely the creation of Iwerks.
Lastly, even if the website is correct, “Dinner Time” was released on December 17th, 1928. “Steamboat Willie” beat it out by a month, being released on November 18th.
Samclem I’ll agree: Euty is great (and a gawd of animation…I though I knew a lot about the subject…'till I started talking with Euty! :))
But just to be clear, whoever the characters on the page Samclem links to are NOT the characters in “Circus Capers”. I’d agree that those characters are somewhat dissimmilar from Mickey. The character in “Circus Capers” is Mickey. I’m not saying “similar to” Mickey, I’m saying “identical” to Mickey. (except that Mickey inexplicably grows a single tooth and (presumably) a different animator makes him look like a cross between Mickey and some sort of panda-like creature both in the last 1/2 minute of the short.) In any event, per Samclem’s site, “Circus Capers” was Sept. 1930, a couple of years after Disney had a hit with Mickey.
Regarding “Mickey’s Mellerdrammer”, “Uncle Tom and Little Eva” has a Steamboat-Willy-esque Mickey playing a watermelon as though it was a harp (the strations on the melon form the strings) while on a riverboat. The characters do the standard early-30s “characters dance to music” routine (Stephen Foster, IIRC). Then we see some happy slaves being taken to market, including a “pickanninnie” type characture. Then it switches to a brief retelling of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Lots of scenes of Eva and the baby jumping from ice platform to ice platform with some dogs chasing…all in time to music, of course! Eventually Uncle Tom saves Eva and wasserhername…the baby…from going over a waterfall. Mickey and Minnie are only in the first minute or so.
Sound familar Euty?
Fenris
Mickey goes to Viet Nam? That sounds truly sick. I wanna see it!
Nope, not even close. Clarabelle is nowhere to be seen, Mickey and Minnie don’t have any involvement in the Uncle Tom part at all (I’d remember Mickey putting on blackface via a firecracker!), the Uncle Tom characters are typical of the period black caractures, etc.
Must be a completely different short. With a minute or so of Mickey and Minnie Mouse at the beginning.
This is just weird.
On the other one, “Circus Capers” Mickey is a clown, there’s a Snidely Whiplash type, Minnie two-times Mickey with the Snidely Whiplash type and Mickey sings “Laugh Clown, Laugh!” from Pagliacci. (He gains the tooth and becomes more panda-like during the song)
