Mickey Mouse

Mickey Mouse's creation story is quietly fascinating. Walt Disney and his studio partner Ub Iwerks were inspired to create the iconic Disney mascot because ...

( [Some sources say Disney adopted the mouse](https://books.google.com/books?id=l51NDwAAQBAJ), but that part is also up for debate.) What we do know for sure is an artist named Hugh Harman who worked with Walt and Iwerks sketched mice around a photo of Walt, and Iwerks and Disney took that illustration and ran with it as an idea. Walt’s wife Lillian correctly told him “Mortimer” was terrible (she reportedly said it sounded “pompous”) and suggested “Mickey” instead. [a real mouse](https://books.google.com/books/about/Walt_Disney.html?id=7fwQjtTZKIYC) (or a bunch of them) who ended up sparking the idea for Mickey. That original sketch is unfortunately lost to time, as far as we can tell, but you can [find some old concept art of Mickey circa 1928 from the Walt Disney Family Museum](https://www.whothoughtofit.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Mickey_Mouse_concept_art.jpg). Instead, Disney and Iwerks left the distributor, starting fresh and looking for a new character to make a splash. According to Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney biography, Harman’s doodling spawned “Mortimer Mouse,” a great mouse with a not-so-great name. But Walt had a falling out with Universal, which held the rights to the character and threatened to box Walt out and make Oswald movies without him. [first](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCZPzHg0h80) [shorts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBgghnQF6E4) in 1928 to the modern House of Mouse Empire, is history. (Child actor Virginia Davis played Alice, interacting with animated characters.) The “Alice Comedies” series was a hit, and Laugh-O-Gram was asked to animate some work-for-hire shorts for Universal Pictures. But did you know the original Mickey was an actual, factual mouse? [Clarabelle Cow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarabelle_Cow), [Horace Horsecollar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Horsecollar), and [Flip the Frog](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_the_Frog) were spawned in this brainstorming session.) Apparently (and perhaps apocryphally), one of them was especially tame, and a favorite of Walt’s.