Mickey Mouse
Created as a replacement for a prior Disney character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Mickey first appeared in the short "Plane Crazy", debuting publicly in the short film "Steamboat Willie" (1928), one of the first sound cartoons. He went on to appear in over 130 films, including "The Band Concert" (1935), "Brave Little Tailor" (1938), and "Fantasia" (1940). Mickey appeared primarily in short films, but also occasionally in feature-length films. Ten of Mickey's cartoons were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, one of which, "Lend a Paw", won the award in 1942. In 1978, Mickey became the first cartoon character to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
History of animation
In 1923, a studio called Laugh-O-Grams went bankrupt and its owner, Walt Disney, opened a new studio in Los Angeles. Disney's first project was the "Alice Comedies" series, which featured a live action girl interacting with numerous cartoon characters. Disney's first notable breakthrough was 1928's "Steamboat Willie", the third of the Mickey Mouse series. The short film showed an anthropomorphic mouse named Mickey neglecting his work on a steamboat to instead make music using the animals aboard the boat. Even though many wrongly believe Steamboat Willie was the first cartoon with synchronized sound, since May 1924 and continuing through September 1926, Dave and Max Fleischer's Inkwell Studios produced 19 sound cartoons, part of the Song Car-Tunes series, using the Phonofilm "sound-on-film" process.