Mickey Mouse Patent drawing - Slate & Wood Cutting board
It makes a wonderful wedding or house-warming gift! It is also a beautiful, useful piece to add to your own kitchen. This cutting board is made of slate and solid Acacia wood.
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Overall Size:
13 1/4" x 9" x 1/2" thick
History Facts:
Walt Disney, in full Walter Elias Disney, (born December 5, 1901, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died December 15, 1966, Los Angeles, California), American motion-picture and television producer and showman, famous as a pioneer of animated cartoon films and as the creator of such cartoon characters as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. He also planned and built Disneyland, a huge amusement park that opened near Los Angeles in 1955, and before his death he had begun building a second such park, Walt Disney World, near Orlando, Florida. The Disney Company he founded has become one of the world’s largest entertainment conglomerates.
Early life
Walter Elias Disney was the fourth son of Elias Disney, a peripatetic carpenter, farmer, and building contractor, and his wife, Flora Call, who had been a public school teacher. When Walt was little more than an infant, the family moved to a farm near Marceline, Missouri, a typical small Midwestern town, which is said to have furnished the inspiration and model for the Main Street, U.S.A., of Disneyland. There Walt began his schooling and first showed a taste and aptitude for drawing and painting with crayons and watercolors.
His restless father soon abandoned his efforts at farming and moved the family to Kansas City, Missouri, where he bought a morning newspaper route and compelled his young sons to assist him in delivering papers. Walt later said that many of the habits and compulsions of his adult life stemmed from the discipline and discomforts of helping his father with the paper route. In Kansas City the young Walt began to study cartooning with a correspondence school and later took classes at the Kansas City Art Institute and School of Design.
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In 1917 the Disneys moved back to Chicago, and Walt entered McKinley High School, where he took photographs, made drawings for the school paper, and studied cartooning on the side, for he was hopeful of eventually achieving a job as a newspaper cartoonist. His progress was interrupted by World War I, in which he participated as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in France and Germany.
First animated cartoons
Dissatisfied with their progress, Disney and Iwerks started a small studio of their own in 1922 and acquired a secondhand movie camera with which they made one and two-minute animated advertising films for distribution to local movie theatres. They also did a series of animated cartoon sketches called Laugh-O-grams and the pilot film for a series of seven-minute fairy tales that combined both live action and animation, Alice in Cartoonland. A New York film distributor cheated the young producers, and Disney was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1923. He moved to California to pursue a career as a cinematographer, but the surprise success of the first Alice film compelled Disney and his brother Roy—a lifelong business partner—to reopen shop in Hollywood.
With Roy as business manager, Disney resumed the Alice series, persuading Iwerks to join him and assist with the drawing of the cartoons. They invented a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, contracted for distribution of the films at $1,500 each, and propitiously launched their small enterprise. In 1927, just before the transition to sound in motion pictures, Disney and Iwerks experimented with a new character—a cheerful, energetic, and mischievous mouse called Mickey. They had planned two shorts, called Plane Crazy and Gallopin’ Gaucho, that were to introduce Mickey Mouse when The Jazz Singer, a motion picture with the popular singer Al Jolson, brought the novelty of sound to the movies. Fully recognizing the possibilities for sound in animated-cartoon films, Disney quickly produced a third Mickey Mouse cartoon equipped with voices and music, entitled Steamboat Willie, and cast aside the other two soundless cartoon films. When it appeared in 1928, Steamboat Willie was a sensation.
The following year Disney started a new series called Silly Symphonies with a picture entitled The Skeleton Dance, in which a skeleton rises from the graveyard and does a grotesque, clattering dance set to music based on classical themes. Original and briskly syncopated, the film ensured popular acclaim for the series, but, with costs mounting because of the more complicated drawing and technical work, Disney’s operation was continually in peril.
The Three Little Pigs
The growing popularity of Mickey Mouse and his girlfriend, Minnie, however, attested to the public’s taste for the fantasy of little creatures with the speech, skills, and personality traits of human beings. (Disney himself provided the voice for Mickey until 1947.) This popularity led to the invention of other animal characters, such as Donald Duck and the dogs Pluto and Goofy. In 1933 Disney produced a short, The Three Little Pigs, which arrived in the midst of the Great Depression and took the country by storm. Its treatment of the fairy tale of the little pig who works hard and builds his house of brick against the huffing and puffing of a threatening wolf suited the need for fortitude in the face of economic disaster, and its song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”was a happy taunting of adversity. It was in this period of economic hard times in the early 1930s that Disney fully endeared himself and his cartoons to audiences all over the world, and his operation began making money in spite of the Depression.
Walt Disney
Disney had by that time gathered a staff of creative young people, who were headed by Iwerks. Colour was introduced in the Academy Award-winning Silly Symphonies film Flowers and Trees (1932), while other animal characters came and went in films such as The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934) and The Tortoise and the Hare (1935). Roy franchised tie-in sales with the cartoons of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck—watches, dolls, shirts, and tops—and reaped more wealth for the company.
Feature-length cartoons
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Walt Disney was never one to rest or stand still. He had long thought of producing feature-length animated films in addition to the shorts. In 1934 he began work on a version of the classic fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), a project that required great organization and coordination of studio talent and a task for which Disney possessed a unique capacity. While he actively engaged in all phases of creation in his films, he functioned chiefly as coordinator and final decision maker rather than as designer and artist. Snow White was widely acclaimed by critics and audiences alike as an amusing and sentimental romance. By animating substantially human figures in the characters of Snow White, the Prince, and the Wicked Queen and by forming caricatures of human figures in the seven dwarfs, Disney departed from the scope and techniques of the shorts and thus proved animation’s effectiveness as a vehicle for feature-length stories.
Dumbo
Bambi
Fantasia
While Disney continued to do short films presenting the anthropomorphic characters of his little animals, he was henceforth to develop a wide variety of full-length entertainment films, such as Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942). Disney also produced a totally unusual and exciting film—his multisegmented and stylized Fantasia (1940), in which cartoon figures and colour patterns were animated to the music of Igor Stravinsky, Paul Dukas, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and others. In 1940 Disney moved his company into a new studio in Burbank, California, abandoning the old plant it had occupied in the early days of growth.
Major films and television productions
A strike by Disney animators in 1941 was a major setback for the company. Many top animators resigned, and it would be many years before the company produced animated features that lived up to the quality of its early 1940s classics. Disney’s foray into films for the federal government during World War II helped the studio perfect methods of combining live-action and animation; the studio’s commercial films using this hybrid technique include The Reluctant Dragon (1941), Saludos Amigos (1942), The Three Caballeros (1945), Make Mine Music (1946), and Song of the South (1946).
Cinderella
The Disney studio by that time was established as a big-business enterprise and began to produce a variety of entertainment films. One popular series, called True-Life Adventures, featured nature-based motion pictures such as Seal Island (1948), Beaver Valley (1950), and The Living Desert (1953). The Disney studio also began making full-length animation romances, such as Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953), and produced low-budget, live-action films, including The Absent-Minded Professor (1961).
Mary Poppins
The Disney studio was among the first to foresee the potential of television as a popular entertainment medium and to produce programs directly for it. The Zorro and Davy Crockett series were very popular with children, and a weekly showcase (known by several titles, including Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color) became a Sunday night fixture. The Mickey Mouse Club, a variety show featuring a cast of teenage performers known as the Mouseketeers, was also successful. The climax of Disney’s career as a producer, however, came with his release in 1964 of the motion picture Mary Poppins, which won worldwide popularity.
Disneyland
Disneyland: 50th anniversary
Walt Disney World
Walt Disney World
In the early 1950s Disney had initiated plans for a huge amusement park to be built near Los Angeles. When Disneyland opened in 1955, much of Disney’s disposition toward nostalgic sentiment and fantasy was evident in its design and construction. It soon became a mecca for tourists from around the world. A second Disney park, Walt Disney World, near Orlando, Florida, which was under construction at the time of his death, opened in 1971.
Legacy
Walt Disney
Disney’s imagination and energy, his whimsical humour, and his gift for being attuned to the vagaries of popular taste inspired him to develop well-loved amusements for “children of all ages” throughout the world. Although some criticized his frequently saccharine subject matter and accused him of creating a virtual stylistic monopoly in American animation that discouraged experimentation, there is no denying his pathbreaking accomplishments. His achievement as a creator of entertainment for an almost unlimited public and as a highly ingenious merchandiser of his wares can rightly be compared to the most successful industrialists in history.
The birth of Mickey mouse:
“He popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when the business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at the lowest ebb, and disaster seemed right around the corner,” Walt penned in a 1948 essay titled “What Mickey Means to Me.” The disaster Walt mentioned was the brazen theft of both his successful cartoon character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, as well as most of the Disney artists, at the hands of Universal distributor Charles Mintz. As for who popped out of Walt’s mind? Why that was Mickey Mouse!
Just before Walt left New York for the cross-country train ride back to Hollywood, he sent his brother Roy a telegram. Nowhere in it did he outline the possible career-ending blow he and his brother had just sustained. He simply indicated when he would arrive home, and took care to add, “Don’t worry everything OK,” to ease his brother’s nerves. Everything was not okay. Walt knew he had to come up with a new character, and fast. Walt’s daughter Diane Disney Miller recalled, “It was on that long train ride that dad conceived of a new cartoon subject, a mouse who was then refined and further developed by Ub Iwerks, and given his name by my mother.”
The first Mickey Mouse cartoon actually completed was Plane Crazy. Inspired by Charles Lindbergh’s heroic first solo flight across the Atlantic, its plot entailed Mickey and some animal friends attempting to assemble their own airplane. The cartoon premiered in Hollywood on May 15, 1928, in the form of a test screening. It failed to obtain distribution. The second Mickey Mouse cartoon, The Gallopin’ Gaucho, met with the same fate. One unpleasant distributor even told Walt, “They don’t know you and they don’t know your mouse.”
The third time was the charm for Mickey, however, when Steamboat Willie premiered on November 18, 1928, in New York’s Colony Theatre. It was one of the very first cartoons to ever successfully utilize synchronized sound, and was so popular, it was talked about more than the feature film it was meant to just compliment. Walt received $1,000 for a two-week run—the highest sum ever paid for a cartoon on Broadway. Walt Disney Studios, with its small but loyal staff, was saved, and a cartoon star was born.
But, when was he born?
Oddly enough, Mickey’s “official” birthday changed dates seemingly every year for decades following 1928. In 1933, Walt himself proclaimed, "Mickey Mouse will be five years old on Sunday. He was born on October 1, 1928. That was the date on which his first picture was started, so we have allowed him to claim this day as his birthday." That date wouldn’t last. Ranging from late September to December, Mickey’s birthday was often altered to conform to specific promotions. It wasn’t until 1978 that Dave Smith, the founder of the Disney Archives, determined that the premiere of Steamboat Willie was truly Mickey Mouse’s first public appearance, therefore his date of birth.
This of course makes November 18, 1928 Minnie Mouse’s birthday too, as she was there hurrying along the banks of the river trying to catch Pegleg Pete’s steamboat. Ever resourceful, Mickey found a way to get her aboard even after the boat had departed. The two realized an instant connection, and the rest, as they say, is history.
History of Mickey Mouse:
Mickey's story, however, starts with a rabbit. Disney Brothers Studio was just another cog in Universal Pictures' animation machine when, in 1927, Walt Disney created a character called Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. With his round, white face, big button nose and floppy black ears, the smiling Oswald was an instant hit and Universal ordered a series of shorts. When Disney met with executives to negotiate another contract in 1928, the rabbit was still riding high and the animator thought he had the upper hand. Instead, the studio told him that it had hired away all of his employees and retained the rights to Oswald. Universal offered to keep Disney if he took a lower salary, but he refused. He and Ub Iwerks — the one loyal animator who stayed with Disney Bros. — returned to work and held a series of hair-pulling, late-night brainstorming sessions for Oswald's replacement. They shortened the ears, added some extra padding around the middle, and turned the rabbit into a mouse. Named Mortimer. The moniker didn't last; there are a number of tales attempting to explain how and why — the most popular being that Disney's wife hated the name and suggested its replacement — but soon he was ready for his debut as Mickey.
The first two Mickey shorts drew no attention, but then came Steamboat Willie, the first animation to feature synchronized music and sound effects, hit the screen. The film premiered in New York on Nov. 18, 1928 and was an instant hit. A series of Mickey Mouse shorts appeared within a matter of months — including Plane Crazy, a short that predated Steamboat Willie in which Mickey plays a rodent, Charles Lindbergh. The mouse was a national fad by the end of the year, and it wasn't long before the real genius of Walt Disney kicked in: marketing. Walt quickly started up a line of Mickey merchandise, and within two years the Mickey Mouse Club, a fan club for children, was up and running.
In 1935, a young animator named Fred Moore gave Mickey his first makeover. Earlier animators had drawn the mouse as a series of circles, which limited his movement. Moore — who later animated Fantasia's Sorcerer's Apprentice segment — gave him a pear-shaped body, pupils, white gloves and a shortened nose, to make him cuter. Mickey also appeared in color for the first time that year; The Band Concert's use of Technicolor was so innovative that critics still consider it to be a masterpiece. (Click here for a list of the All-TIME 100 Movies)
By 1937, Disney Studios was producing about 12 Mickey shorts a year, with Disney himself providing the mouse's high-pitched voice. Mickey became a football hero, a hunter, a tailor, and a symphony conductor. He accidentally sprayed himself with insecticide, rescued Pluto from the dogcatcher, crashed a car into a barn, fell behind on his rent, enlisted in the army, had his house repossessed, and lost Minnie to an innumerable string of muscular bad boys (although he always won her back in the end). The cartoons' vaudevillian overtones made liberal use of slapstick and puns, and Mickey's close association with children required that he always remain upstanding and moral (leaving the cantankerous Donald Duck to get into all the trouble).
By the 1950s, Mickey had a theme park, a newspaper comic strip, and The Mickey Mouse Club, the hit television variety show that launched the careers of teen stars from Annette Funicello to Justin Timberlake. But soon Disney feature films like Bambi and Sleeping Beauty began to rake in the accolades — and box office receipts — the mouse faded into the background. Between his last 1953 cartoon short, The Simple Things, and the 1983 Christmas special Mickey's Christmas Carol, the mouse that built the house of Disney would remain out of work for 30 years.
Yet despite Mickey's semi-retirement, his ears are still one of the most famous cultural icons of the 20th and 21st centuries. He has posed for photographs with every U.S. President since Harry Truman, save one (Lyndon Johnson never visited a Disney theme park). Disney claims that Mickey had a 98% awareness rate among children between ages 3-11 worldwide. Mouse-related merchandise sales have declined from their 1997 high, but they still make up about 40% of the company's consumer products revenue. Mickey returned to the big screen for a cameo in 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Warner Brothers' Bugs Bunny was also in the film and the two companies demanded that each character receive the same amount of screen time, down to the very last second. A semi-secret 2001 image revamp put Mickey's logo in trendy places: on celebrities, in a Sex and the City episode — he was printed on a t-shirt and stretched across Sarah Jessica Parker's chest — as well as in high-end boutiques. In 2002, he appeared in the PlayStation2 video game Kingdom Hearts. And in 2006, he became 3-D for the very first time. Now you can see him on Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, an early morning Disney Channel show designed for children ages 2-6. Or you can book a flight to Disney World and shake his oversized glove yourself.