kartooner

Today marks the 75^th Birth­day of Mickey Mouse, pop cul­ture icon orig­i­nally cre­ated by Wal­ter Elias Dis­ney in 1928. I can hon­estly say that Mickey Mouse for me was the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of all that is, was and always will be Walt Dis­ney. The char­ac­ter has sym­bol­ized the pro­fes­sion­al­ism of Dis­ney through­out the 75 years since Mickey was orig­i­nally con­ceived by Mr. Dis­ney himself.

Accord­ing to http://www.geocities.com/disneysmouse:

“Mickey Mouse was born in Walt Disney’s imag­i­na­tion early in 1928 on a train ride from New York to Los Ange­les. Walt was return­ing with his wife from a busi­ness meet­ing at which his car­toon cre­ation, Oswald the Rab­bit, had been wres­tled from him by his finan­cial back­ers. Only 26 at the time and with an active car­toon stu­dio in Hol­ly­wood, Walt had gone east to arrange for a new con­tract and more money to improve the qual­ity of his Oswald pic­tures. The mon­ey­men declined, and since the char­ac­ter was copy­righted under their name, they took con­trol of it. ”

… So I was all alone and had noth­ing,” Walt recalled later. “Mrs. Dis­ney and I were com­ing back from New York on the train and I had to have some­thing I could tell them. I’ve lost Oswald so, I had this mouse in the back of my head because a mouse is sort of a sym­pa­thetic char­ac­ter in spite of the fact that everybody’s fright­ened of a mouse includ­ing myself” Walt spent the return train ride con­jur­ing up a lit­tle mouse in red vel­vet pants and named him “Mor­timer,” but by the time the train screeched into the ter­mi­nal sta­tion in Los Ange­les, the new dream mouse had been rechris­tened. Walt’s wife, Lil­lian, thought the name “Mor­timer” was too pompous and sug­gested “Mickey.” A star was born!“

http://www.local6.com/entertainment/2643696/detail.html