August 22 - The Skeleton Dance

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On this day, in 1929, the first Silly Symphony, The Skeleton Dance, is released to theaters nationwide. In 1928, as Walt travelled by train to New York City to get the soundtrack to Steamboat Willie recorded, he made a stop in Kansas City, Missouri. He had a proposition for an old friend of his, an theater organist by the name of Carl Stalling. Synchronized sound was clearly the future of film, so would Carl be willing to compose music for the other two Mickey Mouse shorts that had already been completed without sound? Not only was Carl willing but during the course of the between the two men, he made a proposition to Walt. What about doing a cartoon series where the animation was drawn for a specific piece of music, rather than writing the music for the animation? For example, maybe have some skeletons dance through a graveyard to some spooky music.

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Even though he had a lot on his plate at that precise moment (what with trying to keep his studio from going under and all), the idea stuck with Walt throughout the whole process of getting the Mickey Mouse series up and running. As things began to roll successfully with his little mouse, he was able to give this new idea his full attention. It probably also helped that Carl was well on his way to becoming the studio’s staff composer. In order to create a second stream of revenue (in case, God forbid, their new star suffered the same fate as their previous one), the Silly Symphony series was born and it was as much of an experiment as anything else.

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As the concept of dancing skeletons developed, a musical piece called March of the Dwarves by Edvar Grieg was chosen as the soundtrack. Animation for the short was turned over to the Studio’s resident technical genius, Ub Iwerks. Like the first couple of Mickey shorts, Ub would do most of the drawings for The Skeleton Dance himself. And, something you would never know considering how marvelous the short is, he banged it out in about six weeks. That’s how good he was. The music was tacked on to an already scheduled recording of the soundtrack for the Mickey short The Opry House in February 1929, helping to keep costs down on the untested new series. At the end of production, The Skeleton Dance cost just under $5,500 to make (about $80,800 today), so Walt wasn’t betting the whole studio on its success but it was still a chunk of change. Now came the dance to find a distributor.

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When Walt sent a print of The Skeleton Dance to the distributor of the Mickey films, the reply was reportedly a terse, two word rejection: “More mice.” Undaunted, Roy Disney arranged to have the short played in two theaters on the West Coast, the Fox Theater in San Francisco and the Carthay Circle Theater in Los Angeles. Pat Powers, who owned Cinephone (the process Disney used to marry sound and image for their shorts) and made him a party interested in the studio’s continuing success, managed to convince the Roxy Theater in New York City to play it as well. The Skeleton Dance was a hit in all three venues, although it did garner a bit of controversy. The short was considered by some to be too gruesome for children (the skeletons literally scare a couple of cats right out of their fur) and was reportedly later banned in Denmark for the same reason. Columbia Pictures disagreed, however, and agreed to distribute the Silly Symphony series nationwide starting in August. Interestingly, when it played again at the Roxy under the Columbia deal, The Skeleton Dance became the first film to ever play a return engagement there.

Over the decade or so that the Walt Disney Studio produced Silly Symphonies, the series proved to be groundbreaking in so many ways. It includes the first cartoon made in three-color Technicolor, Flowers and Trees (1932), which was also the winner of the first ever Academy Award for Best Animated Short; the first use of Disney’s technically superior multi-plane camera in The Old Mill (1937); the studio’s first hit song, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? (1933); the first appearance of Donald Duck in The Wise Little Hen (1934). Mostly, the 75 films in the series were used to try out new techniques and push the envelope of what animation could do. The fact that their popularity eventually outpaced that of Mickey Mouse was just icing on the cake. Over the course of its run, the series would pick up seven Oscars with an additional three nominations.

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Everything the studio learned from producing the Silly Symphonies culminated in their first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The success of Snow White was the beginning of the end for the series, however. Features required so much time and energy to produce that one of the Silly Symphonies, Merbabies, was actually produced by an outside company in exchange for more artists to work on Snow White. Within two years of the studio’s first princess gracing the big screen, the Silly Symphonies ended their triumphant run. And although every other studio in town would try to imitate Disney’s success (the world would be subjected to Looney Tunes, Merry Melodies, Happy Harmonies and Swing Symphonies, all with varying degrees of popularity), the originals still stand out as pieces of art that will continue to be enjoyed for years to come.

July 29 - Laugh-O-Gram Studio

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On this day, in 1922, the Laugh-O-gram Studio of Kansas City, Missouri released its first cartoon that was more than a single gag, Little Red Riding Hood. In June 1921, a young artist by the name of Walter Elias Disney was contracted by a Kansas City theater manager, Milton Feld, to produce one minute cartoons that would be inserted into the newsreels shown before each feature at the Newman chain of theaters. Walt, only 19 at the time, drew the short films entirely on his own in the evenings after working all day at the Kansas City Ad Agency. The topics of the jokes in the shorts were all pulled from local Kansas City happenings, making the Newman Laugh-O-grams (as they were called; notice the lower case g on grams that Walt insisted on) a kind of editorial cartoon that moved. One week the punch line might be about pot holes, the next lampooning ladies fashion and the next showcasing a police scandal. Walt also drew pieces for the Newman Theater’s birthday celebration and one reminding audience members to refrain from reading the title cards out loud (a precursor to the silence your cell phone announcements of today). Most of the Newman Laugh-O-grams have been lost to history as film in those days was highly flammable and wasn’t kept around once it had been shown. The few pieces that do survive were part of a sample sales reel that Walt presumably brought with him when he later moved to California.

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The Newman Laugh-O-grams made Walt something of a local celebrity. People were starting to praise his humor and inventiveness. His success prompted Walt to place an ad in the paper promising to teach cartoonists the new art of animation. Several young artists responded, including Rudy Ising and Hugh Harman, both of whom would go on to great success at Warner Brothers. With all this helpful talent beginning to coalesce around him, Walt decided it was time to start his own animation studio. He couldn’t run it out of his family’s garage anymore (and not just because they’d moved to Oregon at this point) so he rented out space in the McConahy Building at 1127 East 31^st Street, occupying five rooms on the west end of the second floor. On May 18, 1922, the Laugh-O-gram animation studio (Walt continued the name since it was already recognizable) was officially incorporated, albeit illegally incorporated. Walt was listed as the studio’s president even though he wasn’t quite old enough to legally hold the position.

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Walt knew that his strengths lay in telling stories over drawing pictures, so he left most of the actual animation work to his young staff, although he did just about everything else at the studio. What they clearly lacked in experience and skill, they more than made for in enthusiasm and many of them would eventually become masters of the art form. In addition to Rudy and Hugh, Laugh-O-gram’s staff included Carman Maxwell and Friz Freleng (both of whom also found success at Warner Brothers), Lorey Tague,  Otto Walliman and Red Lyon. Walt’s old friend from the Kansas City Ad Agency, Ub Iwerks, also helped out a great deal, but since he was his mother’s sole means of support he couldn’t leave the steady paycheck behind to join Walt full time. The Ink and Paint Department consisted of one young woman, Aletha Reynolds. And, just to prove what a small world it really is, Carl Stalling, who would be part of bringing sound to Disney cartoons and later become a musical god at Warner Brothers, played the organ at the movie theater just around the corner from the studio. He and Walt started their friendship at this same time.

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It took months for Walt and his crew to painstakingly finish their first six minute cartoon, Little Red Riding Hood. Red would be the only Laugh-O-gram cartoon that was drawn on sheets of paper rather than on sheets of celluloid before being photographed. To streamline the process, generic characters were created of a girl, a boy, a dog, etc. that could be used in later films as different characters. Model sheets were created of each character showing front and side views in close ups, medium and long shots that could be traced to help with consistency.  Now that the studio had a product, it needed a distribution deal.

In September 1922, Laugh-O-gram Studio signed a multi-picture deal with Pictorial Clubs of Tennessee for $11,000. It sounded like the onset of a dream come true, but was in reality the beginning a nightmare for several reasons. Walt only got $100 up front, with the balance being due on delivery of the sixth film. That meant he didn’t have any operating capital to actually produce anything. To make matters worse, PCT went bankrupt just months after signing the deal without ever paying Walt any more of the remaining balance. What really sealed Laugh-O-gram’s fate though is what happened next. A New York company, also called Pictorial Clubs, acquired the Tennessee group’s assets. That included Red, The Four Musicians of Bremen, Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack and the Giant Killer (all of which were already completed) and three more cartoons that had yet to be produced. The horrible part of the acquisition deal, however, was that the new Pictorial Clubs wasn’t responsible for any of the old Clubs’ debt. Which meant that Laugh-O-grams was required to make more cartoons but wasn’t required to get paid for them.

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One by one, all of Walt’s staff would leave the studio and return to regular paying jobs. Walt would shrink his studio to just two rooms while at the same time living there himself. Laugh-O-gram managed to squeeze out the other three films, based on Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Puss in Boots and Cinderella. Walt then tried different schemes to try to save his company. He made several short films he called Lafflets, basically reviving the format of the Newman Laugh-O-grams but for a wider audience. He filmed a live action pilot for a series of sing along shorts under the brand Sing-O-Reel. He convinced a local dentist to pay him $500 to make a cartoon about dental hygiene, Tommy Tucker’s Tooth, that was distributed not to theaters but to schools.

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With the money from Tooth burning a hole in his pocket, Walt decided to do something creative with it rather than pay off creditors. He managed to hire a little girl named Virginia Davis to star as a live action girl in a cartoon world. He sweet talked his old crew into doing the animated parts of the new film and ended up with a 12 minute 29 second new lease on life. Because let’s be honest. The seven shorts that ended up going to Pictorial Clubs were nothing special. Sure the boys at Laugh-O-gram got better and better with each new project, but collectively their work wasn’t much different from a lot of run of the mill animation at the time. All their talents, though, came together and bloomed on their final collaboration. Called Alice’s Wonderland, it would become the film that launched an empire. Not an empire called Laugh-O-gram, though. That company was dead as a doornail.

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Before Walt could leave Kansas City to visit his brother Roy out in California, he had one more scheme to raise the price of a train ticket. He charged new parents a fee to film their babies and then stage a showing of that film for friends and families in their own living rooms. It might have reduced Walt from the head of his own studio to being nothing more than a high priced children’s photographer, but it provided the link to the future that he needed. With the proceeds he made from several of those sessions, coupled with what he got for selling his camera, Walt was able to take his print of Alice’s Wonderland, make his way to California and start some serious cinematic history.

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Incidentally, if you read the name of the man who gave Walt that first contract at the beginning of this post and thought to yourself, I think I’ve heard the name Feld in some other connection with Disney, you’re right. Milton Feld went on to be a circus promoter which led to booking and promoting other forms of travelling entertainment. Years after both Walt and Milton died, the Feld Family would purchase the Ice Follies and approach the Walt Disney Company about creating a Disney themed show. The first Disney on Ice show debuted in 1981 presented by Feld Entertainment and has been going (and growing) strong ever since.

July 7 - Ub Iwerks

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On this day, in 1971, Ubbe Ert Iwerks passed away in Burbank, California. Ub, as he usually went by, was born on March 24, 1901 in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of German immigrants. When he was eighteen, Ub went to work for the Pesmen-Rubin Art Studio in Kansas City. He met another young artist working there, Walt Disney, and the two became friends. When one of them began working for the Kansas City Slide Newspaper Company as an illustrator, the other soon followed (it’s unclear who went first). When Walt decided that he wanted to start his own animation company, Ub said Sign me up! And that’s how the Laugh-O-Gram Studio of Kansas City began. Two friends trying to make their way in the cutthroat film industry. It didn't work out. Neither of the talented young men were business minded and Laugh-O-Gram went bankrupt. But our story doesn't end there.

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The only thing Walt was left with after the bankruptcy of his first studio was a short film that was a hybrid of live action and animation. He took that film with him out to California and convinced his brother, a financial wizard, to start a new studio. The Walt Disney Studio got a contract to produce more films like the one he had. They became known as the Alice Comedies and they were chiefly animated by Walt's old friend, Ub.

Ub followed Walt out to California and became one of the driving forces behind the success of the Walt Disney Studio. He was basically an animating machine, able to churn out quality work at incredible rates. The look and feel of early Disney animation should actually be referred to as the look and feel of Iwerks animation. As the Alice Comedies were winding down in 1927, Walt asked Ub to create a new character. He came up with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and supposedly completely animated the first short, Poor Papa, himself. If you look at the bottom of most of the Oswald posters, you can see Ub's signature, which means he created the artwork for those as well. When the studio lost the rights to Oswald in 1928 to Universal, Ub was right in the mix helping to design the studio's next character, Mickey Mouse (who is admittedly just Oswald with round ears instead of long ones and a different tail).

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Ub was responsible for animating most of the first Mickey Mouse shorts as a lot of the Disney staff had been hired away by Universal. Steamboat Willie is almost entirely his work. The same can be said of the early Silly Symphony series as well. Ub did the animation, backgrounds and layouts for The Skeleton Dance. Ub was pouring his heart and soul into incredible characters and animated series, but wasn't feeling the love from the man who was getting all the credit, Walt Disney. By 1930, the relationship between the two friends had become completely broken and Ub walked away from the Disney Studio to start his own.

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The Iwerks Studio received financial backing from investors who had a suspicion that all of Disney's success was due to the work of one guy, Ub. Disney animation did suffer briefly after Ub's departure, but only briefly. Walt hired new, talented people, recovered from the loss of his friend and carried on to bigger and better things. The Iwerks Studio had a contract with MGM and introduced new characters to the genre like Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper, but it never quite attained commercial success. The are two claims to fame the studio could make. First, Ub invented a version of a multiplane camera in 1933, famously using parts from an old Chevrolet to do it. This camera shouldn't be confused with the better version that was invented a couple of years later at the Disney studio, but it was definitely an inspiration for that one.  Secondly, the Iwerks Studio was the first place to hire a young man named Chuck Jones, but it had folded long before that claim would mean anything. By 1936, Ub's investors had pulled out of the studio and it faded into history.

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Following the collapse of his studio, Ub was contracted by Leon Schlesinger to animate four Looney Tunes shorts, two of which he also directed. He then spent a few years under contract with Columbia Pictures' animation unit, Screen Gems, directing several of their Color Rhapsodies series. By 1940, Ub and Walt had repaired their friendship enough that Ub would return to work full time at the Walt Disney Studio.

Ub's second career with Disney was mostly involved with the technical side of things. He was kind of put into a department by himself where he worked on creating new visual effects for animation. Ub is credited with coming up with a new process, called the multi-head optical printer, for combining live action with animation that was used in Song of the South. He would win an Academy Award for later improving that process and nab another one for perfecting color traveling matte technology. He also created the xerography process of transferring animator's drawings onto acetate cels that was first used on One Hundred and One Dalmatians in 1961. That process is basically what brought production costs on animation down enough that Disney continued producing it. As the Sixties progressed, Ub moved into doing effects work with WED Enterprises, the precursor to Walt Disney Imagineering, putting his influence on many of the theme park attractions created during that decade including it's a small world and Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln.

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While Ub remains a name that the average citizen might not recognize, he has become revered by those who know and was given several accolades within the entertainment industry. In 1963, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his effects work on a non-Disney project, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. When the Annie Awards were created in 1972, the balloted award for Technical Achievement was named after him. He was declared an official Disney Legend in the second class of honorees in 1989 (he was the only honoree that year who hadn't been one of Walt's Nine Old Men). And in 1999, there was a documentary and accompanying book released about his life and work, The Hand Behind the Mouse. 

For the last few years of his life, Ub was involved with the development of shows and attractions for the Florida Project like The Hall of Presidents. He wouldn't live to see Walt Disney World open however. On July 17, 1971, he suffered a fatal heart attack in Burbank, California. He was 70.

April 2 - Bill Garity

On this day, in 1899, William Garity was born in Brooklyn, New York. Bill would later attend (but not necessarily graduate from, the details are really hazy) the Pratt Institute, a famous private school in Brooklyn that had programs centering around engineering, architecture and the fine arts (a STEAM school in the 1890s, when it was just called being well rounded).

By 1921, he was working under Lee DeForest. Lee was an inventor who held over 180 patents, including one for the Audion vacuum tube which made radio broadcasting possible. Lee and Bill worked together on a sound system for movies they called Phonofilm. Their process recorded sound directly onto the film itself (as opposed to Vitaphone which recorded a films sound onto records) but the sound quality wasn't terribly good. Even as the recordings improved, Lee had trouble convincing any major studios to use his system and after six years of trying, went bankrupt. At that point, a businessman-turned-producer named Pat Powers basically stole his idea, taking Bill to boot, and created a copycat system that he called Powers Cinephone. Pat, however, was able to convince a young studio owner looking to get into the sound game with a new animated character to use the system.

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Bill became the in-house sound technician for the Walt Disney Studio in 1928. At the same time, Pat became the new distributor of the studio's cartoons. Everything seemed to go well for just over a year. Then, in 1930, an old problem reared its head again. Walt confronted Pat about money that was owed, Pat begrudgingly paid up but then convinced the studio's head animator, Ub Iwerks, to start his own studio under Pat's guidance. As the distribution deal (and seemingly the studio) fell apart, Bill opted to stay with Disney. As the Thirties He continued to develop better sound for the studio until Walt brought a new project to his resident engineer.

Walt was looking for a way to make cartoons look more like live action films. He wanted to zoom into scenes and have forests look like they had some depth to them instead of like flat paintings. Ub was working on the same problem over at his studio. Both Ub and Bill came up with the concept of a multiplane camera, but Bills was more sophisticated. Instead of a camera photographing an animation cel laying directly on top of a background, the multiplane camera allowed for several layers of cels to be photographed at once and each layer could be moved individually. In a panning shot, for instance, some trees could move by faster than others enhancing the illusion that they were different distances from the viewer. The first project to use Bill's invention was the 1937 Silly Symphony The Old Mill. The multiplane camera can be credited with earning the Oscar for Best Animated Short. Bill's multiplane camera became a staple of Disney productions and was used on every animated feature from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 until Oliver and Company in 1988 (at that point it was being made obsolete by computers).

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As the Thirties came to an end, Bill returned to work in audio. Walt recognized the need for richer, fuller sound for the studio's upcoming feature, 1940's Fantasia. Bill's solution was known as Fantasound and made Fantasia the first commercially released film to be heard in stereo. Fantasound is credited with the first uses of a click track, simultaneous multi-track recording and is generally recognized as the first surround sound experience. It wasn't a cheap process (almost 20% of the film's budget was spent just on recordings) but it is a process that stood the test of time. In 1956, when a transfer was made from Fantasound's optical recordings to magnetic recordings (over a phone line, no less), just a small amount treble response was lost.

Shortly following the release of Fantasia, Bill would leave the Disney Studio to become Vice President and Production Manager over at the Walter Lantz Studio, where he would finish out his career. He passed away on September 16, 1971 in Los Angeles, California. In 1999, Bill was posthumously made an official Disney Legend for all of his technical genius that directly made the Walt Disney Studio what it is today.

November 17 - Les Clark

On this day, in 1907, Leslie James Clark was born in Ogden, Utah. Les and his family moved from Utah to Idaho before finally settling in Los Angles, California. He attended Venice High School and had a job in a local ice cream shop where he had hand lettered all the menus. There were two brothers, by the name of Walt and Roy, who frequented the shop and had complimented Les on his menus. Les finally worked himself up to asking Walt for a job. Walt asked for more examples, Les showed him some and Walt said Nice lines, show up for work on Monday. And just like that, the first of what would become Walt's Nine Old Men had joined the studio.

Photo borrowed from moma.org

Les' temporary position began in the Ink and Paint Department. He would also occasionally operate the camera. He eventually started working under Ub Iwerks and had become an accomplished in-betweener by the time the studio was developing a new mousy character. Les helped animate Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie and, after Ub left the company, would become the expert on drawing the cornerstone character of the studio. He refused to rest on his laurels, however, and continuously took art classes in an effort to hone his talent.

When it came time to launch the Silly Symphony series, Les was an integral part of the team, animating the iconic dance of The Skeleton Dance. He would continue his fancy footwork when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was in production as the animator charged with making the dwarfs dance with Snow White. For the next few decades, Les would have a hand in every major animation project the studio did. From Pinocchio to Make Mine Music, he was a lead animator. Starting with Song of the South, he began to fill the directing animator role and did so on Fun and Fancy Free, Melody Time, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp. Les was a sequence director on Sleeping Beauty and contributed to 101 Dalmatians.

Photo lifted from exploratorium.edu

After the completion of Sleeping Beauty, Walt asked Les to transition into a new role as the director of special projects for the burgeoning television department and the educational films the studio was beginning to produce. Les spent the final two decades of his career with Disney creating things like Donald in Mathmagic Land, Donald's Fire Survival Plan and shorts on topics as varied as The Social Side of Health and one called VD Attack Plan.

After 48 years of making magic with Disney, Les retired in 1976. Just a few years later, he would pass away from cancer on September 12, 1979 in Santa Barbara, California. For his immense body of work, the plucky Venice soda jerk would become an official Disney Legend alongside his fellow Nine Old Men and his one-time mentor Ub Iwerks in 1989.

November 5 - The Old Mill

On this day, in 1937, RKO released the Walt Disney Studio's Silly Symphony "The Old Mill." This short is really more about mood and effects than plot, but the story centers around a group of animals getting ready for bed in an abandoned mill with a storm brewing. It's noted for being the first Disney production to use the multi-plane camera. I say Disney production because Ub Iwerks had used a different multi-plane camera on some other work he'd done. That camera was a horizontal contraption. The Disney camera was a 14 foot high vertical monster that was so expensive to build, the studio only ever had two of them. The results, though, are undeniably magnificent.

The multi-plane camera wasn't the only innovation happening in The Old Mill. Disney animators were also perfecting things like raindrops, lightning, complex lighting techniques and rotating detailed three-dimensional objects. Everything they learned doing this short would make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that much better. Everyone's hard work paid off. The Old Mill would win the Academy Award for Best Short Subject, Cartoon for 1937 and has been preserved in the National Film Registry.

The Old Mill has become an iconic part of Disney history. One of the scenes depicted on Disneyland's Storybook Canal attraction was of its three windmills (until the ubiquitous Frozen bumped them to storage). A snack bar in Fantasyland at Disneyland Paris is shaped like the old mill and at one time had a ferris wheel type ride attached to the back of it (technically the buckets of the ride are still there, it's just that no one gets in them anymore). Mill is so iconic, it's even been parodied on The Simpsons.

September 17 - Robert Carey Broughton

On this day, in 1917, film effects artist Robert Carey Broughton was born in Berkeley, California.

 A California native through and through, Bob grew up in Glendale, graduating from Glendale High School. He then moved on to Glendale Junior College. When he had learned all he could there, he took the next logical step and went to the University of California, Los Angeles (you thought I was going to say UC Berkeley, didn't you?). Not one to shy away from a challenge even then, Bob studied chemistry, physics, math and optics, all of which would help him fulfill his destiny making movies.

In 1937, Bob got the most iconic Hollywood job he possibly could at the Walt Disney Studio: he started in the mail room. And just like in the movies, he didn't stay there long. Bob quickly got pulled to the camera department as an assistant in the test camera area. His job was to shoot test footage of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to check for fluid movement before the final shots were made. Bob's eye for detail helped him graduate from test footage to working on the granddaddy of Disney innovations, the multiplane camera. He helped give visual depth to Pinocchio and Bambi. Then came Fantasia and another semi-promotion: Bob was one of only two people running a special camera creating special effects like the ghosts on Bald Mountain.

After the successes of Fantasia, Bob was promoted again, this time to camera department supervisor. At about the same time, World War II broke out and Bob signed up to serve in the United States Army. He was assigned to the Field Photographic Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, what would eventually become the CIA. Bob spent most of the war working with director John Ford making documentaries of the fighting. They would win the Academy Award for best documentary in 1942 for their film about the battle of Midway.

Following the war, Bob returned to the Disney Studio and began working as assistant to Ub Iwerks. He started transitioning into doing effects for live action films. Bob was even in charge of filming Walt's introductions to the Wonderful World of Color television show for a while. He believed that his job was to create effects in the most subtle way possible. He once said "If it looked like we doctored up a scene, we were a failure." One of his great successes was making Dick Van Dyke dance with penguins in Mary Poppins, using a system called Color Traveling Matte Composite Technology to blend the live action shots with animation.

After 45 years with company, putting his mark on almost every movie from 1937's Snow White to 1979's The Black Hole, Bob retired from Disney in 1982. But only from officially working as he headed up the retiree club, The Golden Ears, for the next 15 years. In 2001, Bob became a Disney Legend. In January of 2009, he passed away in Rochester, Minnesota. He was 91.

September 5 - Oswald the Lucky Rabbit

On this day, in 1927, Trolley Troubles, the first short featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, debuted in theaters.

 Walt Disney knew his successful series of shorts, The Alice Comedies, was nearing the end of its run. He and Ub Iwerks had taken them as far as they could technically and the cost to produce them was rising. Walt needed something new to keep his little studio going and he figured it should be pure animation for this next venture. Luckily, his distributor, Charles Mintz, and Universal Studios agreed with him. Walt was given a contract to get Universal into the growing animation game.

Flush with new contract money, Walt moved his studio to Hyperion Avenue and got to work. Since there was already a couple of popular cats starring in their own series, Felix the Cat and Krazy Kat, Walt decided to branch out. His new character would be a rabbit. Maybe a lucky rabbit, since he carried not one but two rabbit's feet with him wherever he went. And he would be old. You heard me. Old.

The first short Walt and Ub finished with their new character, Oswald, was called Poor Papa. Universal executives took one look at it and said no thanks! Why? The production quality wasn't very good and why is the main character so old? No one wants to see a geezer bunny in a cartoon. So Poor Papa was scraped, Oswald had several decades pared off his age and Walt and Ub stepped it up on their second effort.The result was Trolley Troubles and it would become their biggest hit yet.

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was so successful as a franchise, the Disney Studio grew to nearly twenty staff members. Walt was able to pay himself $100 a week and his brother Roy $65. Happy days had come to the brothers. Nine shorts were produced that first year. The studio would produce 17 more the next year before disaster struck.

Walt was constantly worried about getting his contract with Mintz and Universal renewed. That worry intensified when he realized that Mintz was hiring away his own animators behind his back. The whole thing came crashing down around his ears in the spring of 1928, when Mintz informed Walt that he would have to take a 20% budget cut if he still wanted to produce Oswald shorts. Rather than submit to that, and with most of his animators now working for Mintz, Walt declined to sign a new deal and, as he didn't own the rights to his creation, walked away. Supposedly on the train ride home, he would come up with a new character that would completely eclipse Oswald, but since Walt could never tell the story the same way twice, I'll leave that discussion for another time.

Oswald would live on long after the Disney Studio no longer had anything to do with him. Mintz would also produce 26 shorts until Universal decided it no longer needed him and started making them right on their own lot. Walter Lantz, of Woody Woodpecker fame, took over the series and created 142 more shorts, ushering Oswald into the world of sound and, briefly, the world of color. While Oswald never had much of a regular actor to provide his voice, Mickey Rooney did provide it for a while in 1931. Interestingly, when Lantz took the series over, he consulted with Walt about some of the aspects of Oswald. Mickey Mouse had become such a cash cow by then that Walt didn't really care about Oswald anymore and reportedly gave Lantz his blessing to run with the character.

And that's how Oswald the Lucky Rabbit's story should have ended, petering out in films by 1943's The Egg Cracker Suite. Living on in comic books, albeit in a much different form, throughout the twentieth century, mostly outside the United States. Except Oswald was a Disney creation and he was destined for a resurrection.

In 2003, the branch of the Walt Disney Company that made video games came up with an idea for an Oswald game. For some reason, the idea stuck with the head of the company, Bob Iger, and he made it a pet project to return the Lucky Rabbit to the Disney fold. After negotiating with Universal, it was announced in 2006 that the two companies would take a page from the sports world and effect a trade: Disney would get the rights to Oswald and the Walt produced shorts, while Universal would get veteran sports announcer Al Michaels for their Sunday Night Football broadcasts. Al was pretty pleased with the deal and even joked "I'll be a trivia answer someday." The video game then became a reality, although before Oswald could put on any airs about his return it was name Epic Mickey.

And that is how Oswald's story ends. After almost 80 years away, guests in the Disney parks can now choose traditional mouse ears or new, hip rabbit ears. If you visit Disneyland, you might be able to actually meet him out and about. While Mickey will always be considered more successful, his older brother Oswald can now play new role and wonder what might have been.