Western Exile@westernexile
"It Was All Started By a Mouse"
2024 opens with a significant cultural landmark, as 1928's Steamboat Willie, one of the most groundbreaking films of the 20th century, which first introduced audiences to the character of Mickey Mouse, today enters the public domain.
Filmed on a budget of $4,986, Steamboat Willie was the first cartoon of Walt Disney Studio to feature a synchronised soundtrack, and represented a milestone in the history of motion picture. The enormous success it enjoyed following its premiere in New York, on the 18th November 1928, would render silent animation obsolete virtually overnight, and seal the fame of both Walt Disney himself and his most iconic character.
In a mark of the film's profound cultural legacy, seventy years after its release in theatres, Steamboat Willie was in 1998 selected by the United States Library of Congress for induction into the National Film Registry, fulfilling the criteria of being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Following repeated legal extensions to copyright terms in the United States - lobbied for so vigorously by The Walt Disney Company that the 1998 act would be dubbed the 'Mickey Mouse Protection Act' - the copyright protection of Steamboat Willie finally expired at the stroke of midnight on the 1st January 2024. As a consequence, should you be curious, the footage is uploaded below in its entirety.
On the successful empire that Steamboat Willie would give rise to, Walt Disney himself, speaking on television on the 27th October 1954, would offer a prescient reflection, and warning for the House of Mouse of the future:
"I only hope that we never lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse"
