Let's Talk About Mickey's Mouse Trap (And the Public Domain)
Channel: Daniel Goldhorn
Date: 2024-01-07

Steamboat Willie's Mickey Mouse has been freed from Disney into the public domain! I can't wait to see what creative things will be done with him after these movies come out!

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Mickey's Mouse Trap is an upcoming Canadian independent comedy slasher film directed by Jamie Bailey from a screenplay written by Simon Phillips. It is a horror reimagining to Walt Disney's 1928 animated short film Steamboat Willie and stars Sophie McIntosh, Nick Biskupek, James Laurin, Mireille Gagné, Damir Kovic, Callum Sywyk, Allegra Nocita, Jesse Nasmith, Mackenzie Mills, Madeline Kelman, and Ben Harris, with Phillips as the titular character. It follows a group of friends trapped inside an amusement arcade after it closes as they are terrorized by a masked killer in a Mickey Mouse costume.

Mickey Mouse's rights had been owned by The Walt Disney Company since mid-1920s and, while Disney retains exclusive rights to the depictions of the character from their own franchise, Mickey's Steamboat Willie version went into the public domain on January 1, 2024, the same day the film was announced.

Steamboat Willie is a 1928 American animated short film directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. It was produced in black and white by Walt Disney Studios and was released by Pat Powers, under the name of Celebrity Productions. The cartoon is considered the debut of both Mickey and Minnie Mouse, although both characters appeared several months earlier in a test screening of Plane Crazy. Steamboat Willie was the third of Mickey's films to be produced, but it was the first to be distributed, because Disney, having seen The Jazz Singer, had committed himself to produce one of the first fully synchronized sound cartoons.

Steamboat Willie is especially notable for being one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound, as well as one of the first cartoons to feature a fully post-produced soundtrack, which distinguished it from earlier sound cartoons, such as Inkwell Studios' Song Car-Tunes (1924–1926), My Old Kentucky Home (1926) and Van Beuren Studios' Dinner Time (1928). Disney believed that synchronized sound was the future of film. Steamboat Willie became the most popular cartoon of its day.

Music for Steamboat Willie was arranged by Wilfred Jackson and Bert Lewis, and it included the songs "Steamboat Bill", a composition popularized by baritone Arthur Collins during the 1910s, and the 19th century popular song "Turkey in the Straw". The title of the film may be a parody of the Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), itself a reference to the song by Collins. Disney performed all of the voices in the film, although there is little intelligible dialogue.

The film has received wide critical acclaim, not only for introducing one of the world's most popular cartoon characters but also for its technical innovation. Animators voted Steamboat Willie as the 13th greatest cartoon of all time in the 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons, and in 1998, the film was selected by the United States Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry. The cartoon entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2024. 

#TheMouseIsOut #SteamboatWillie #MickeyMouse #PublicDomain