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Mickey Mouse is a cabin boy on Captain Pete's side-wheeler paddle
steamer, constantly at odd with his rather brutish captain and the boat's
annoying parrot. He's good though at hoisting lifestock on board and even
passenger Minnie, who would have missed the boat if it wasn't for Mickey's
inventiveness. But then one of the lifestock, eats all of Minnie's sheet
music and ukelele, upon which Mickey just turns the goat into a musical
box and manhandles many other lifestock to (ab-)use them as musical
instruments. So he and Minnie have lots of fun - until Pete intervenes and
sends Mickey to peel potatoes ... A little background on this
one: After Walt Disney has lost (or given up according to some sources)
the rights to his previous cartoon character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
to Universal
he created the rather similar looking Mickey Mouse pretty
much out of the blue and made two silent shorts, Plane Crazy and The
Gallopin' Gaucho to launch the character - but found no interest from
distributors. For Steamboat Willie then, Disney had the idea to add
sound to Mickey's antics, and make many of them sound-themed at that, and
then the film, released by Pat Powers' Celebrity Productiuons,
opened for the feature Gang War. it became a runaway success and
pretty much birthed Disney's media empire. Now the film must
have been a revelation when it was first released as the combination of
animation and sound, revolutionary for the time (even if contrary to
popular belief Steamboat Willie isn't the first animated talkie,
only the one with the most appeal back when), but today it seems a little
crude, and not so much in its use of sound but its randomness, lack of
character depth (with Mickey Mouse being nothing like his later iterations
and actually rather mischievous in character) and rather crude humour. Now
of course, all these aspects are squarely in line with what was standard
for animation back when, but seen today, this one hardly comes across as a
masterpiece, its technological achievements notwithstanding, but more a
product of its time - which is not at all denying the film's overall
significance.
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