Walt Disney didn't draw Mickey Mouse.

Arts & Culture

D espite essentially being synonymous with his most famous character, Walt Disney didn't draw Mickey Mouse. The iconic cartoon rodent was actually designed by Disney's best friend, animator Ub Iwerks, in 1928. Indeed, A Mouse Divided: How Ub Iwerks Became Forgotten, and Walt Disney Became Uncle Walt author Jeff Ryan described Mickey as "basically the child of two dads." The pair worked together for decades, and Iwerks created effects for such Disney classics as Mary Poppins and Sleeping Beauty, in addition to helping develop theme park attractions such as "It's a Small World." But he rarely received much credit for his contributions to the company, especially in comparison to its namesake. That began to change when his granddaughter Leslie Iwerks directed the 2000 documentary The Hand Behind the Mouse: The Ub Iwerks Story, but even today, Iwerks remains relatively unknown.

For the first 20 years of Mickey Mouse's existence, Disney voiced the character himself. The world was introduced to Mickey in the 1928 animated short Steamboat Willie, though Disney produced two previous shorts featuring Mickey that same year, Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho, which weren't picked up by distributors. Steamboat Willie was the first of these to feature sound, though Mickey didn't utter his first actual words ("Hot dog!") until the following year's The Karnival Kid. Disney last lent his vocal talents to The Mickey Mouse Club between 1955 and 1958, though 2013's Get a Horse! patched together previous recordings to once again feature him as the voice of the famous cartoon mouse.

Thank you for supporting our advertisers!

By the Numbers

Academy Awards won by Walt Disney, the most of any individual

Drawings Iwerks could produce in a single day while working on Plane Crazy

700

Did you know?

Walt Disney received a custom-made Oscar statuette for "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."

Walt Disney is an Oscar legend, but he never won the Academy Award most often associated with animation over the last 20 years. Since there was no award for Best Animated Feature until 2001 (when Shrek won the inaugural prize), Disney received an Honorary Oscar for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1939, for "significant screen innovation which has charmed millions and pioneered a great new entertainment field for the motion picture cartoon." The award included a unique custom design that paid homage to the movie's beloved characters: one regular Oscar statuette and seven miniature ones placed along a stepped base. It was presented to Disney by Shirley Temple, who was 11 years old at the time and didn't totally understand the significance of the design. She later said, "I thought that the big statue was for Walt and that the Seven Dwarfs were the little ones going down the side and that Snow White herself hadn't gotten anything."

Thank you for supporting our advertisers!