Disney Retrospective #0: Steamboat Willie

 

My original concept for a Disney Retrospective series was going to examine the Disney Animated Canon, going through every movie animated by Walt Disney Animation Studios starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and finishing with whatever the current film from them ends up being.  As of this writing, the latest film is Wish, but by the time I finish this project, their next film is going to be out, which according to their schedule, is currently unannounced.  I don’t know whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I’m sure the anti-woke mob is gleeful about how the lack of a schedule compared to Pixar is a sure sign that Disney is dying.

If we go back further than Snow White, how many of us have actually sat down and watched Steamboat Willie before this year, when it finally became a public domain work (alongside other notable works like the book Millions of Cats)?  Does it hold up and is it really worth watching?  With how much it’s hyped up as Disney’s first Mickey Mouse cartoon (technically incorrect) and an important work in their library, to the point that the opening whistle scene became the current logo of Walt Disney Animation Studios, what’s the big deal with Steamboat Willie?

If my reaction in Quarantine Control #196 is anything to go by, it’s not a good cartoon.  We open with Mickey Mouse as the captain of a steamboat, piloting it down a river.  However, he’s not actually the captain, because the real captain, Pete, shows up to put Mickey in his place.  In response, Mickey blows him a raspberry but flees before he can get further comeuppance.

Even the ship’s parrot laughs at him, so Mickey tosses a bucket of water on his head and storms off in a huff.  This is definitely not the happy-go-lucky Mickey Mouse we’re used to seeing in later cartoons, the sympathetic Mickey we see in specials like Mickey’s Christmas Carol or the heroic Mickey we see larger than life in Kingdom Hearts and Epic Mickey.  This version of Mickey Mouse is a spiteful asshole who aims higher than his station without having earned such a position, and gets mad when he’s knocked back down.

If you ask me, this exact same plot is handled much better in Fantasia, when Mickey Mouse is an apprentice to a sorcerer and decides he’s ready to command magics that are more than he’s capable of handling.  He learns the error of his ways and actually looks remorseful at the end, and we get the sense that he is going to one day be casting those kinds of spells, but not until he patiently works his way up there.  Here, though, he’s clearly got a chip on his shoulder and this may be the reason for the rest of his childish behaviour throughout the cartoon.

Meanwhile, we see Pete take out a huge block of chewing tobacco from somewhere in his overalls and take a huge bite out of it.  He spits and accidentally hits the bell hanging nearby, so he tries it again on purpose and instead he covers his own face with the tobacco juice.

Meanwhile, at Podunk Landing (Secret of Evermore prequel confirmed?), a shipment of chickens is waiting, along with a rather skinny-looking cow, a goat and probably other livestock not seen on camera at this time.  Mickey has trouble adjusting the belt around the cow to lift her onto the boat, but gets the brilliant idea to feed her first.  This is the first and last time he shows any kindness to an animal in the cartoon.

Actually, the kerning on the sign makes it look like Podunk is two words, which potentially makes it unique among podunks.

Minnie Mouse is not so lucky.  She’s late to make it to Podunk Landing and misses the boat, but chases after it on foot and Mickey spots her.  He then uses the ship’s crane to hoist her aboard, but not before having it lift her skirt first.  It then lifts her by her panties, which possibly makes it the first cartoon panty shot in history.

Well, okay, they’re meant to be bloomers, but it’s hilarious to see how scandalous lifting someone’s skirt is in most animation made after this, but it’s just treated as a normal thing in Steamboat Willie.

In this cartoon, Minnie is probably a musician, considering she’s carrying various sheet music as well as what I thought was a guitar but which is listed in the Wikipedia entry as a ukulele, but which honestly doesn’t look like either of them, due to the lack of strings for both.  I just assumed it was a low detail artist’s rendition of a random string instrument.  It could also have been a fiddle for all we know, since one of the songs Minnie was carrying was “Turkey in the Straw”, a song commonly played on such an instrument.

However, the fiddle and sheet music exit the cartoon as quickly as they enter, for they’re eaten by a goat despite Mickey’s best efforts to at least rescue the instrument; the sheet music is sadly long gone by then.  Mickey gets the idea to treat the goat like a gramophone and has Minnie turn the goat’s tail like a crank.  For most of the rest of the cartoon, the song Turkey in the Straw is played in such a manner, issuing forth from the goat somehow, as well as from various animals after Mickey runs out of non-animals to play like musical instruments:

-a cat that happens to wander on screen has his tail pulled several times before he’s picked up and swung around, yowling in pain and terror
-a goose is played sort of like a cross between bagpipes and a trombone, having his body constantly squeezed while Mickey wrings his neck
-a litter of piglets get their tails tugged constantly, but the version embedded in our Quarantine Control column differs a bit from the original version, it immediately cuts back to Minnie turning the goat’s tail like a crank; this is likely the 1998 version that reverses some of the cuts made to the cartoon in the 1950s
-the piglets are forcibly kicked off of the sow, who is then picked up and played like an accordion while she is visibly upset and suffering; this does not show up in the 1998 version, but is present in the Disney+ version, which restores all of the material cut from the cartoon
-a cow’s teeth are played like a xylophone

Pete, however, is not pleased by this and punishes Mickey by telling him to go peel potatoes.  Mickey’s mad at Pete for ruining his fun and tries to waste as much of each potato as he can, and when the ship’s parrot comes and makes fun of him for getting punished, Mickey tosses a half-peeled potato at the parrot, knocking him into the river where he drowns and dies.  It’s Mickey’s turn to laugh and that’s when the cartoon ends.

I should probably emphasize this.  Mickey is mad that Pete puts a stop to his animal abuse and kills a parrot out of spite.  If anything, that makes Pete the protagonist of this cartoon and Mickey the villain.  Compare this to Fantasia, where Mickey’s antics only bring harm to himself (and arguably, some temporarily sentient brooms) and he doesn’t act mad that he was caught.

As you can see, it turns out that there’s a reason everyone’s familiar with the famous whistle tune at the start and absolutely nothing else, because it’s not great.  Sure, they’ve released it on home media many times over the years.  It’s a bonus feature on the Snow White Bluray, it’s been included in a few compilations, but I know I hadn’t watched it until the 4th of January, this year.  It’s one of those things where you know the trivia, that this is considered the first appearance of a couple of Disney’s most iconic characters, but you don’t really know anything else about it.

95 years may be a long time to hold onto copyright, but there are several ways you can look at it.  Disney could’ve wanted to keep making money from Steamboat Willie, but I don’t think there’s anything legally stopping them from continuing to include it in compilations that they can sell.  Just because they lose the copyright doesn’t mean they lose the right to do whatever they want with it.  There’s just nothing stopping everyone else from distributing the original cartoon now.  Disney didn’t lose rights in 2024, we merely gained some that we didn’t have before.

There’s also the question of the character himself.  Disney still owns the character as he appears today.  Only the Steamboat Willie version of Mickey Mouse is public domain, which is why Last Week Tonight can get away with using him as their new mascot.  Still, people who want to use Mickey Mouse in their own works have to be very careful that they use the correct version of the character, as Disney still has the right to sue anyone who just uses the character without making it clear that they’re using the version that appears in the one specific cartoon.

So far, anyway.  An additional fourteen cartoons will be freely available for public use next year as well, with early silent versions of two of those already in the public domain.

It’s also possible Disney had a very long memory when it came to why Mickey Mouse was created.  They lost their previous creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, to Universal and that must have stung, so Walt Disney came up with Mickey Mouse and the company has kept a tight grip on him ever since, to the point that several copyright extension laws are said to be a result of the Walt Disney Company lobbying the United States congress.  The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was nicknamed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act by critics, because one of the most significant effects of the bill was that it prevented Disney from losing the rights to Steamboat Willie, which at the time was going to happen in 2004 if they didn’t do anything about it.  People also thought that Disney would lose all rights to Mickey Mouse if Steamboat Willie was in the public domain, but this was never on the table to begin with.

So what happened to cause this cartoon to enter the public domain now, rather than gaining protection for another twenty years?  I’m sure a lot of Republican lawmakers will want to claim responsibility for this, considering they’re currently at war against Disney for the company’s opposition to Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law, officially known as the Parental Rights in Education Act, but their war with Disney began in 2022.  These lawmakers vowed to stop any attempts to extend copyright specifically so that they could publicly give Disney the middle finger, but it was mostly posturing at that point because if an extension was to happen, it would’ve happened already.  The previous extensions occurred at least a half a decade, sometimes as much as a full decade ahead of when the copyright on the cartoon would’ve expired.  If Steamboat Willie was going to gain further protections by the United States government, it likely would’ve happened by 2018 at the latest.  2022 was far too late to even be considering it.

It’s far more likely that the Walt Disney Company saw how the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was received and realized that if copyright was extended even just one more time, everyone would know why, so they looked into other methods to try to maintain control of the cartoon.  Prior to 1998, Steamboat Willie was only made available to the home market once (according to this handy list on Wikipedia that is probably incomplete and doesn’t cite very many sources), but starting in 1998, Disney began releasing it more frequently and in sneaky and unexpected ways.  As was mentioned earlier, it was included as a bonus feature on the 2009 Diamond Edition Bluray of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but it was also included on Walt Disney Treasures: The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 2007, among other more logical releases like Vintage Mickey in 2005 and Celebrating Mickey in 2018.  Steamboat Willie even made it into Kingdom Hearts II as a world called the Timeless River, which was designed to be a celebration of early Disney cartoons.

Disney also made Steamboat Willie the production logo of Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2007, and at the time it had been speculated that this would be the means that the company could use to leverage further protections for the cartoon starting in 2024.  So far, this has not been the case, but we’re only half a month into the year and there’s still plenty of time for the company to try something.

So what is the legacy of Steamboat Willie?  Since 1928, Mickey Mouse has appeared in more than a hundred cartoons, and sometimes Minnie Mouse and Pete show up as well, although Pete is used as a Bluto-style villain more often than not.  Pete is often shown kidnapping Minnie or otherwise being a nuisance, which is a shame because it’s helped contribute to his status as a villain in most modern Disney media.  He’s Maleficent’s ally in the Kingdom Hearts series, and he’s even the Ebenezer Scrooge figure in an episode of Goof Troop where he steals a vacation prize that Goofy rightfully won and the rest of the main cast, including his own wife and children, play out a miniature version of A Christmas Carol to get him to give it back.

To be fair, Pete had shown up as a villain prior to the creation of Mickey Mouse, but it’s hard to justify applying the label to him in Steamboat Willie when Mickey is shown committing far more abhorrent behaviour.  Mickey is legitimately a protagonist in later cartoons, but I can’t justify being on his side here.  There’s absolutely nothing redeemable about him in this.  It’s hard to imagine that the Walt Disney Company is the “house that Mickey Mouse built” when this is how Mickey Mouse debuted.