The original Mickey Mouse was an actual mouse

Mickey Mouse, the iconic mascot of the Walt Disney Company (and famed monarch/magician in Kingdom Hearts), has been around for so long that the character was first set to enter public domain in 1984, and it’s taken extensive revisions of the law to keep him in-house for Disney up until now. Did you also know that the original Mickey Mouse was a real, actual mouse?

Let’s start with some background. Walt founded Laugh-O-Gram Studio with his friend Ub, before incorporating The Walt Disney Company. They started with a short film series loosely inspired from the original. Alice in WonderlandThe animations were a unique mix of animation with live action. Virginia Davis was a child actor who played Alice and interacted 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.

Disney and Iwerks were responsible for the creation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. They made more than twenty-six animated films together. Universal owned the rights and threatened to ban Walt from making Oswald films without him. But Walt and Iwerks had a fallout. Disney and Iwerks decided to leave the distributor and start fresh, looking for new characters that would make an impact.

Image: Disney

In the brainstorming phase, Iwerks drew a bunch of different animals, but none of them did it for ol’ Walt. In this brainstorming session, future Disney legacy characters, such as Clarabelle Cow, Horace Horsecollar and Flip the Frog, were born.

However, it was a mouse (or several of them) that gave birth to Mickey. At Laugh-O-Gram Studio’s less-than-pristine office in Kansas City, there were apparently many mice. Apparently (and perhaps apocryphally), one of them was especially tame, and a favorite of Walt’s. Some sources claim that Disney adopted the mouse. However, this is still up for discussion. We do know that Walt and Iwerks worked together with Hugh Harman, who sketched mice using a Walt photo. Iwerks took the illustration and used it for their own ideas. Unfortunately, the original drawing has been lost, however, you can still find old concepts of Mickey from 1928 at Walt Disney Family Museum.

According to Neal Gabler’s Walt Disney biography, Harman’s doodling spawned “Mortimer Mouse,” a great mouse with a not-so-great name. Walt’s wife Lillian correctly told him “Mortimer” was terrible (she reportedly said it sounded “pompous”) and suggested “Mickey” instead. You can read the rest of the story, sweet readers. It all started in 1928 with the very first short stories and ended at the House of Mouse Empire.

So next time you see Mickey Mouse — as part of a logo, in a movie, in a new series of contemporary shorts or a revived lost short, in a video game, in real life at a park, or in any of the millions of other possible scenarios in which you might encounter Mickey Mouse iconography in the 21st century, remember: It all started with actual furry little rodents.