A number of folks on Facebook this morning are highlighting how today is Mickey Mouses 86th birthday because it was on this day in 1928 that his popular short film Steamboat Willie made its debut. I would make the case, however, that his 86th birthday was actually earlier this year on May 15th. Thats when he first appeared on the big screen in the silent film Plane Crazy. That film, co-directed by Walt Disney and Ul Iwerks, was shown at a Hollywood theater as a test screening. As the title suggests, the six-minute-long Plane Crazy focuses on air travel. Mickey Mouse, inspired by Charles Lindberghs historical non-stop transatlantic flight from New York to France in May 1927, aspires to likewise take to the skies in an airplane. The overall plot of Plane Crazy basically encompasses Mickeys attempts to create that flying device out of everything from wood to a tractor before he and Minnie Mouse (also making her debut) finally manage to take off in a makeshift airplane. In addition to introducing the worlds best-known anthropomorphic mouse and his significant other, Plane Crazy also has the distinction of being the first animated film to use a camera move. The point-of-view shot from the airplane makes it look like the camera is tracking into the earth below. That effect was the result of piling books under the spinning background in order to move the artwork closer to the camera. Unfortunately for Disney, the audience that attended that screen testing of Plane Crazy on May 15, 1928, was not impressed and he could not find a distributor for the film. A second silent short starring Mickey Mouse – The Gallopin Gaucho, in which he rode around on a giant flightless bird called a rhea – was shown to an audience in a test screening that summer but similarly failed to receive an enthusiastic response or attract a distributor. Today in 1928, however, Disney introduced a third cartoon short starring Mickey Mouse – Steamboat Willie – and that film received both a positive initial audience reaction and wide distributorship. Steamboat Willie, which was also one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound, helped launch its stars subsequent and huge popularity on the international stage. Nonetheless, Plane Crazy deserves at least some credit as the original vehicle that introduced Mickey Mouse to the public. That film was ultimately released as a sound cartoon in 1929 and received a more favorable response than it did the first time around. Plane Crazy has also had staying power as a key part of Mickey Mouses career throughout the years. When the newspaper comic strip Mickey Mouse made its debut in 1930, for example, its first story was the basic plot of Plane Crazy. In our own time, the current TV series Mickey Mouse Clubhouse – which has been aired since 2006 – features the same airplane from that long-ago film. Its name in that series, as a matter of fact, is the Toonplane. When you think about it, that film has also served as a cultural bridge between the 1920s and our own era. https://youtube/watch?v=kCZPzHg0h80
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 15:42:15 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015