The story behind the cartoon

By Farhad Manjoo


It's probably not much of a stretch to say that the cartoon character we know as Mickey Mouse became a world wide success because of what happened one Sunday in April 1900, when a Welsh-American railroad engineer who called himself Cayce Jones crashed his passenger train, the Cannonball Express, into the caboose of a freight line that had been mistakenly left on a length of track near Vaughan, Miss. Cayce Jones died that afternoon, but his fireman, Sim Webb, survived the accident, and he wrote a song to commemorate the perished engineer.

You could call Sim Webb's ballad the first piece in the puzzle that is Mickey Mouse. Along the Mississippi rails, Webb's song became a popular tune, and in 1909, two Vaudeville songwriters, T. Lawrence Seibert and Eddie Newton, published their own version, "Casey Jones (The Brave Engineer)." It was an instant hit. Indeed, "Casey Jones" was so popular that the year after it was released, the songwriting team of Ren Shields and the Leighton Brothers attempted to capitalize on Seibert and Newton's success by releasing what we might today call a "remix" -- "Steamboat Bill," a fast-paced ditty that substituted a steamboat pilot in place of a railroad engineer.

The route from Cayce Jones to Mickey Mouse took a few more turns: In 1928, Buster Keaton produced his last independent silent movie -- "Steamboat Bill, Jr.," a story that was at least partly inspired by the 1910 song. The film, which has been called one of Keaton's greatest works, did well, catching the eye of Walt Disney, an accomplished silent animator and a fan of Keaton's. By then, Disney had already conceived of his bubble-drawn cartoon mouse (Mickey's first film, a silent short called "Plane Crazy," had not been well received). Disney saw potential for his mouse in the Keaton story, and in the song that inspired it. Short of cash, the animator staked his one prized possession -- his Moon roadster -- on an idea featuring Mickey as a steamboat pilot, a kind of parody of Keaton's film. It would be Disney's first talkie, with Mickey whistling the tune from "Steamboat Bill" as he drove his barge down the river. Disney called it "Steamboat Willie." The short debuted on Nov. 18, 1928, at the Colony Theater in New York. It was a blockbuster, and s star was born.

This is how culture is made. In 1900, there's a crash on a rail line in Mississippi; 28 years later, after an anarchic, serendipitous process, one in which each new work feeds the next, you have a new star. Lessig, who retells part of this story in "Free Culture," notes that the process does not detract from the achievement of Walt Disney; of course, Mickey Mouse was cooked up in the mind of Walt Disney. But the mind of Walt Disney was a sordid thing, polluted by Buster Keaton, "Steamboat Bill," "Casey Jones," "The Jazz Singer" (the first talkie), and countless other cultural mementos. To produce "Steamboat Willie," Walt Disney did what creators in a free culture do, by nature -- he "ripped creativity from the culture around him, mixed that creativity with his own extraordinary talent, and then burned that mix into the soul of his culture," Lessig writes. "Rip, mix, and burn."

Imagine making a take-off on Finding Nemo called Finding Nemie and see how fast the Walt Disney Company would come down on you today. What Walt Disney took for granted, we've been trained to fear. Just ask the widow of the danish writer Ole Lund Kirkegaard which wrote a book called "Gummi Tarzan" many years ago.
The company threatened to sue not only the widow and her (and his) family bacause they used the name "Tarzan" in a book that was written many years before Disney made their Tarzan, Disney even threatened to sue an amateur theatre in a small rural district in Norway, simply because they were going to do a play based on this old book by Kirkegaard in their local assembly room if they did not change the name of the play (it is true, and this is the adress to the theatre; [email protected]).