Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: What was the first Mickey Mouse film?
In 1928, to recover from the loss of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Disney came up with the idea of a mouse character named Mortimer while on a train headed to California, drawing up a few simple drawings. The mouse was later renamed Mickey Mouse (Disney's wife, Lillian, disliked the sound of 'Mortimer Mouse') and starred in several Disney produced films. Ub Iwerks refined Disney's initial design of Mickey Mouse. Disney's first sound film "Steamboat Willie", a cartoon starring Mickey, was released on November 18, 1928 through Pat Powers' distribution company. It was the first Mickey Mouse sound cartoon released, but the third to be created, behind "Plane Crazy" and "The Gallopin' Gaucho". "Steamboat Willie" was an immediate smash hit, and its initial success was attributed not just to Mickey's appeal as a character, but to the fact that it was the first cartoon to feature synchronized sound. Disney used Pat Powers' Cinephone system, created by Powers using Lee de Forest's Phonofilm system. "Steamboat Willie" premiered at B. S. Moss's Colony Theater in New York City, now The Broadway Theatre. Disney's "Plane Crazy" and "The Gallopin' Gaucho" were then retrofitted with synchronized sound tracks and re-released successfully in 1929.
In 1958, Mickey Mouse was introduced to the Arab world through another comic book called “Sameer”. He became very popular in Egypt and got a comic book with his name. Mickey’s comics in Egypt are licensed by Disney and were published since 1959 by “Dar Al-Hilal” and they were success, however Dar Al-Hilal stopped the publication in 2003 because of problems with Disney. The comics were re-released by "Nahdat Masr" in 2004 and the first issues were sold out in less than 8 hours.
Since his early years, Mickey Mouse has been licensed by Disney to appear on many different kinds of merchandise. Mickey was produced as plush toys and figurines, and Mickey's image has graced almost everything from T-shirts to lunchboxes. Largely responsible for Disney merchandising in the 1930s was Kay Kamen (1892–1949) who was called a "stickler for quality." Kamen was recognized by The Walt Disney Company as having a significant part in Mickey's rise to stardom and was named a Disney Legend in 1998. At the time of his 80th-anniversary celebration in 2008, "Time" declared Mickey Mouse one of the world's most recognized characters, even when compared against Santa Claus. Disney officials have stated that 98% of children aged 3–11 around the world are at least aware of the character.
Donald Duck and the Gorilla is a Donald Duck short adventure disaster and monster film which was originally released in 1944. It stars Donald Duck along with his three nephews; Huey, Dewey and Louie and Ajax, the killer gorilla. The 1930 Mickey Mouse cartoon "The Gorilla Mystery" has a similar plot involving a gorilla named Beppo who captures Minnie Mouse.
Minnie was first voiced by Walt Disney, who was also the original voice of Mickey Mouse. Marjorie Ralston, a Disney inker who joined the animation team as Disney's thirteenth employee, voiced her in the 1929 short "Wild Waves", but did not further pursue the role out of shyness. Then, from 1930 until 1939, she was voiced by Marcellite Garner. Then from 1941 to 1942, and on the radio program, "The Mickey Mouse Theater of the Air", she was voiced by Thelma Boardman. Following this, from 1942 to 1952 Ruth Clifford provided the character's voice. Janet Waldo voiced Minnie in the 1974 Disneyland record album, "An Adaptation of Dickens' Christmas Carol, Performed by The Walt Disney Players". Minnie Mouse would go without any spoken dialogue until 1986, when Russi Taylor inherited the role, which she continues to perform to this day (her late husband, Wayne Allwine, voiced Mickey from 1977 until his death in 2009).
"The Cactus Kid" (April 11, 1930) was the last film to be animated by Ub Iwerks at Disney. Shortly before the release of the film, Iwerks left to start his own studio, bankrolled by Disney's then-distributor Pat Powers. Powers and Disney had a falling out over money due Disney from the distribution deal. It was in response to losing the right to distribute Disney's cartoons that Powers made the deal with Iwerks, who had long harbored a desire to head his own studio. The departure is considered a turning point in Mickey's career, as well as that of Walt Disney. Walt lost the man who served as his closest colleague and confidant since 1919. Mickey lost the man responsible for his original design and for the direction or animation of several of the shorts released till this point. Advertising for the early Mickey Mouse cartoons credited them as "A Walt Disney Comic, drawn by Ub Iwerks". Later Disney Company reissues of the early cartoons tend to credit Walt Disney alone.
One of the most famous comics in Egypt is Mickey Mouse. In 1958 Mickey Mouse was introduced to the Arab world through another comic book called “Sameer”. Mickey Mouse became so popular in Egypt that he got a comic book with his name. Mickey’s comics in Egypt are licensed by Disney and were published since 1959 by “Dar Al-Hilal” and they were a big hit, but unfortunately Dar Al-Hilal stopped the publication in 2003 because of problems with Disney, luckily the comics were re-released by “Nahdat Masr” in 2004 and the first issues were sold out in less than 8 hours.
Beside the publish of the weekly magazine, two monthly magazines are published: SuperMickey and Mickey Geib "Pocket Mickey" (A pocket sized magazine).Most Disney comic stories carry a story code. This is a code written on the first page of the story (usually in the panel margin). The first letter of the code usually indicates who produced the story. For instance stories done for the studio program carried story codes that began with the letter S, thus the code for the first Mickey and the Sleuth story ("The Case of the Pea Soup Burglaries") is S 75164.
Complete list in Inducks.
Though not exactly labeled as such, there were early precedents for "television movies", such as "Talk Faster, Mister", which aired on WABD (now WNYW) in New York City on December 18, 1944, and was produced by RKO Pictures, or the 1957 "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", based on the poem by Robert Browning, and starring Van Johnson, one of the first filmed "family musicals" made directly for television. That film was made in Technicolor, a first for television, which ordinarily used color processes originated by specific networks (most "family musicals" of the time, such as "Peter Pan", were not filmed but broadcast live and preserved on kinescope, a recording of a television program made by filming the picture from a video monitor – and the only (relatively inexpensive) method of recording a television program until the invention of videotape).
Works of literature have been adapted for film from the dawn of the industry. Some of the earliest examples come from the work of Georges Méliès, who pioneered many film techniques. In 1899, he released two adaptations — "Cinderella" based on the Brothers Grimm story of the same name and "King John", the first known film to be based on the works of Shakespeare. The 1900 film "Sherlock Holmes Baffled", directed by Arthur Marvin featured Arthur Conan Doyle's detective character Sherlock Holmes intruding upon a pseudo-supernatural burglary. The film, considered the first detective movie, ran for only 30 seconds and was originally intended to be shown in hand-cranked Mutoscope machines.
The studio's first live-action film was "Treasure Island" (1950). Animated films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar are also released by Walt Disney Pictures. The studio has released four films that have received an Academy Award for Best Picture nomination: "Mary Poppins" (1964), "Beauty and the Beast" (1991), "Up" (2009), and "Toy Story 3" (2010).
Donald Duck is a cartoon character created in 1934 at Walt Disney Productions. Donald is an anthropomorphic white duck with a yellow-orange bill, legs, and feet. He typically wears a sailor shirt and cap with a bow tie. Donald is most famous for his semi-intelligible speech and his mischievous and temperamental personality. Along with his friend Mickey Mouse, Donald is one of the most popular Disney characters and was included in "TV Guide"s list of the 50 greatest cartoon characters of all time in 2002. He has appeared in more films than any other Disney character, and is the most published comic book character in the world outside of the superhero genre.
Donald's Nephews (1938) is a Donald Duck animated cartoon which features Donald being visited by his three nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. This cartoon is Huey, Dewey, and Louie's very first appearance in animation. The short, and the three nephews, was the idea of Al Taliaferro, the artist for the "Silly Symphonies" comic strip, which featured Donald Duck. The Walt Disney Productions Story Dept. on February 5, 1937, sent Taliaferro a memo recognizing him as the source of the idea for the planned short. Taliaferro subsequently introduced the nephews in his comic strip, which by this time had been renamed "Donald Duck", on Sunday, October 17, 1937, beating the theatrical release of "Donald's Nephews" by almost six months.
In 1950, Disney produced "Cinderella". "Cinderella" was an enormous success, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1950, and became Disney's most successful film since "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and Disney's first single narrative feature film since "Bambi".
The first episode, advertised as "Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus: Blödeln für Deutschland" ("Monty Python's Flying Circus: Clowning around for Germany"), was produced in 1971 and performed in German. The second episode, advertised as "Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus: Blödeln auf die feine englische Art" ("Monty Python's Flying Circus: Clowning around in the distinguished English way"), produced in 1972, was recorded in English and dubbed into German for its broadcast in Germany. The original English recording was transmitted by the BBC in October 1973.
The musical film adaptation "Mary Poppins" was released by Walt Disney Pictures in 1964. Primarily based on the original 1934 novel of the same name, it also lifted elements from the 1935 sequel "Mary Poppins Comes Back". The novels were loved by Disney's daughters when they were children, and Disney had spent 20 years trying to purchase the film rights to "Mary Poppins", which included visits to Travers at her home in London. In 1961, Travers arrived in Los Angeles on a flight from London, her first-class ticket having been paid for by Disney, and he finally succeeded in purchasing the rights. Travers was an adviser in the production, but she disapproved of the Poppins character in its Disney version, with harsher aspects diluted; she felt ambivalent about the music; and she so hated the use of animation that she ruled out any further adaptations of the series. She received no invitation to the film's star-studded première until she "embarrassed a Disney executive into extending one". At the after-party, she said loudly “Well. The first thing that has to go is the animation sequence.” Disney replied, "Pamela, the ship has sailed", and walked away.
Science fiction films appeared very early in the silent film era. The initial attempts were short films of typically 1 to 2 minutes in duration, shot in black and white, but sometimes with colour tinting. These usually had a technological theme, and were often intended to be humorous. "Le Voyage dans la Lune", created by Georges Méliès in 1902 is often considered to be the first science fiction film. It drew upon Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in its depiction of a spacecraft being launched to the moon in a large cannon. Its ground-breaking special effects pioneered the way for future science-fiction films, and it became largely popular after its release.
At the time, Walt Disney Productions had suffered from losing connections to the European film markets due to the outbreak of World War II, enduring some box office bombs like "Pinocchio" (1940), "Fantasia" (1940), and "Bambi" (1942), all of which would later become more successful with several re-releases in theaters and on home video. At the time, however, the studio was over $4 million in debt and was on the verge of bankruptcy. Walt Disney and his animators turned back to feature film production in 1948 after producing a string of package films with the idea of adapting Charles Perrault's "Cendrillon" into a motion picture. It is the first Disney film in which all of Disney's Nine Old Men worked together as directing animators. After two years in production, "Cinderella" was finally released on February 15, 1950. It became the greatest critical and commercial hit for the studio since "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), and helped reverse the studio's fortunes. It received three Academy Award nominations, including Best Music, Original Song for "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo".
The first cartoon from the "What a Cartoon!" project broadcast in its entirety was "The Powerpuff Girls in "Meat Fuzzy Lumkins"", which made its world premiere on Monday, February 20, 1995, during a television special called the "World Premiere Toon-In" (termed "President's Day Nightmare" by its producers, Williams Street). The special was hosted by Space Ghost and the cast of "Space Ghost Coast to Coast", and featured comic interviews and a mock contest with the creators of the various cartoons. The Toon-In was simulcast on Cartoon Network, TBS Superstation, and TNT. To promote the shorts, Cartoon Network's marketing department came up with the concept of "Dive-In Theater" in 1995 to showcase the 48 cartoon shorts. The cartoons were shown at water parks and large municipal swimming pools, treating kids and their parents to exclusive poolside screenings on 9' x 12' movie screens.
In 1948, Disney returned to the production of full-length features with "Cinderella", a full-length film based on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault. At a cost of nearly $3 million, the future of the studio depended upon the success of this film. Upon its release in 1950, "Cinderella" proved to be a box-office success, with the profits from the film's release allowing Disney to carry on producing animated features throughout the 1950s. Following its success, production on the in-limbo features "Alice in Wonderland", "Peter Pan", and "Lady and the Tramp" was resumed. In addition, an ambitious new project, an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty" set to Tchaikovsky's classic score, was begun but took much of the rest of the decade to complete.
"The Secret of Monkey Island" is the first game in the "Monkey Island" series and was released in 1990. The game, noted for its greater use of witty humor over previous titles, was designed by Ron Gilbert, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer. The concept itself was pioneered by Gilbert. Following the deviation in gameplay in "Loom", "The Secret of Monkey Island" returned to similar point-and click gameplay featured in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade". The SCUMM engine was again upgraded for the title. Set in the Caribbean in the Golden Age of Piracy, the game introduced Guybrush Threepwood, a hapless amateur pirate. The game's MIDI music soundtrack was the first to feature work by Michael Land. The added a new CD-audio music soundtrack, and updated the game's graphical user interface.
The books were adapted by Walt Disney into a musical film titled "Mary Poppins" (1964), starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. The film "Saving Mr. Banks" (2013) depicted the making of the 1964 film. Disney’s sequel to the 1964 film, "Mary Poppins Returns", was released in 2018, and stars Emily Blunt as Poppins.
Mickey Mouse was created as a replacement for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, an earlier cartoon character created by the Disney studio for Charles Mintz, a film producer who distributed product through Universal Studios. In the spring of 1928, with the series going strong, Disney asked Mintz for an increase in the budget. But Mintz instead demanded that Walt take a 20 percent budget cut, and as leverage, he reminded Disney that Universal owned the character, and revealed that he had already signed most of Disney's current employees to his new contract. Angrily, Disney refused the deal and returned to produce the final Oswald cartoons he contractually owed Mintz. Disney was dismayed at the betrayal by his staff but determined to restart from scratch. The new Disney Studio initially consisted of animator Ub Iwerks and a loyal apprentice artist, Les Clark, who together with Wilfred Jackson were among the few who remained loyal to Walt. One lesson Disney learned from the experience was to thereafter always make sure that he owned all rights to the characters produced by his company.
Every "Mickey Mouse" cartoon was originally released theatrically, typically appearing before feature films. In 1929, some theaters began to host the "Mickey Mouse Club", a children's program which would exclusively show Mickey's cartoons. The series was first distributed by Celebrity Productions (1928–1929), followed by Columbia Pictures (1930–1932), United Artists (1932–1937), and RKO Radio Pictures (1937–1953). The four most recent films were released by Disney's own company, Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (formerly known as Buena Vista Pictures Distribution).
In animation, Mickey's nephews first appear in the 1933 "Mickey Mouse" film "Giantland", although the film shows Mickey with as many as 14 nephews at the same time. The following year the nephews appear again in "Gulliver Mickey". The following film, "Mickey's Steam Roller", is the first to show Mickey with only two nephews, who can be presumed to be Morty and Ferdie, although they are unnamed in the film itself. This was two years after the twins debuted in the comic strip. Morty and Ferdie also make a cameo towards the end of 1938's "Boat Builders" and appear again in 1983's "Mickey's Christmas Carol" in speaking roles, albeit at different ages as one of the twins took on the role of Tiny Tim. In 1999 they make a cameo in the two part "Mickey Mouse Works" segment "Around the World in Eighty Days", which was used again in "Disney's House of Mouse".
In the spring of 1928, Disney asked Ub Iwerks to start drawing up new character ideas. Iwerks tried sketches of various animals, such as dogs and cats, but none of these appealed to Disney. A female cow and male horse were also rejected. They would later turn up as Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar. A male frog was also rejected. It would later show up in Iwerks' own "Flip the Frog" series. Walt Disney got the inspiration for Mickey Mouse from a tame mouse at his desk at Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri. In 1925, Hugh Harman drew some sketches of mice around a photograph of Walt Disney. These inspired Ub Iwerks to create a new mouse character for Disney. "Mortimer Mouse" had been Disney's original name for the character before his wife, Lillian, convinced him to change it, and ultimately Mickey Mouse came to be. The actor Mickey Rooney claimed that, during his Mickey McGuire days, he met cartoonist Walt Disney at the Warner Brothers studio, and that Disney was inspired to name Mickey Mouse after him. This claim, however, has been debunked by Disney historian Jim Korkis, since at the time of Mickey Mouse's development, Disney Studios had been located on Hyperion Avenue for several years, and Walt Disney never kept an office or other working space at Warner Brothers, having no professional relationship with Warner Brothers, as the Alice Comedies and Oswald cartoons were distributed by Universal.