Fun and Fancy Free
Disney had provided the voice for Mickey Mouse since his debut in 1928, and "Fun and Fancy Free" was the last time he would voice the role regularly, as he no longer had the time or energy to do so. Disney recorded most of Mickey's dialogue in the spring and summer of 1941. Sound effects artist Jimmy MacDonald would become the character's new voice actor, starting in 1948. Disney, however, did reprise the role for the introduction to the original 1955–59 run of "The Mickey Mouse Club".
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.