Mickey Mouse at 80

Today marks the 80th anniversary of Mickey Mouse’s first appearance in front of an audience ... Photograph: AP

.. at the Colony Theater in New York before the main feature, Gang War ... Photograph: Rex Features

... starring Olive Borden, Eddie Gribbon and Jack Pickford, Mary Pickford’s brother ... Photograph: Corbis

Although, like so much about Mickey Mouse, there is some inexactitude about his birthdate. Photograph: Getty

Walt Disney claimed to have fathered the Mouse out of desperation ... Photograph: AFP

... on a train ride from New York to Los Angeles in March 1928 after he discovered that his distributor ... Photograph: Allstar

... a weasel named Charles Mintz, had the legal rights to the previous character Disney had created ... Photograph: Reuters

... Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and had surreptitiously hired away most of his animators. Photograph: Getty

Essentially fired from his own studio, Disney, only 27 at the time, set to work with the three animators who had not defected ... Photograph: Allstar

... and together they made a Mickey Mouse cartoon. Photograph: AFP

The work began in April (which might be one birthdate) ... Photograph: EPA

... the first footage was screened in late June or early July (which could be another) ... Photograph: Natacha Pisarenko/AP

... and the sound was synchronised on September 30, the real completion date of Steamboat Willie (which could be yet another birthday). Photograph: Leif Skoogfors

If Mickey’s birth was unsettled, so was his parentage. Photograph: AFP

Disney laid claim to him, but his primary animator and partner ... Photograph: AP

... the oddly named Ub Iwerks, was the first to actually draw him ... Photograph: Fred Prouser/Reuters

... and the two men, like squabbling papas, each saw in him their own DNA. Photograph: Ric Francis/AP

Disney always thought of Mickey as a kind of Chaplin-esque imp, who provoked and was put upon by the world. Photograph: Reuters

His Mickey had a nasty streak, not unlike Disney’s own bitter grievance. Photograph: Press Association

Iwerks, on the other hand, thought of Mickey as a Douglas Fairbanks-like swashbuckler who wasn’t so much subversive as he was heroic. Photograph: AFP

His Mickey had a gallantry that the modest, painfully introverted, monosyllabic Iwerks clearly saw as a self-fantasy. Photograph: Guardian

Thus was Mickey Mouse born a schizophrenic, never certain of who he really was. Photograph: AP

You see the split personality in the very first two Mickey cartoons. Photograph: AP

Plane Crazy was the first to be animated and Steamboat Willie, with its sound accompaniment, was the first to be released. Photograph: EPA

In Plane Crazy, Mickey fancies himself a Charles Lindbergh, slapping together an airplane out of auto parts and animals and taking his girl, Minnie, for a ride with comic consequences. Photograph: Alain Nogues

That’s Iwerks’s Mickey. Photograph: AFP

In Steamboat Willie, Mickey is a mate on Pegleg Pete’s boat. Photograph: Reuters

Much to Pete’s consternation, Mickey finds himself seized by music mania and turns everything he sees ... Photograph: Getty

... from a goat to a cat to a sow, into a musical instrument, often pulling, hitting or squeezing with casual sadism. Photograph: Rex Features

That's Disney's Mickey. Photograph: Reuters

This oscillation between Fairbanks and Chaplin would continue even after Iwerks decided to leave the company early in 1930 and run his own studio. Photograph: Guardian

It would never entirely be resolved. Photograph: AFP

Instead, something else happened to Mickey. Photograph: AFP

As the 1930s progressed, he evolved or, for many former enthusiasts, devolved ... Photograph: Guardian

... into neither a hero nor a subversive but an anodyne figure whose split personality became no personality. Photograph: AP

Disney himself acknowledged Mickey’s transformation, and he attributed it to the Mouse’s tremendous success. Photograph: Reuters

Whether it was because Mickey had managed to straddle movie heroism and movie puckishness ... Photograph: Press Association

... or because he always seemed to be giddy during the Depression when most people were anxious ... Photograph: AFP

... or because he was cute ... Photograph: Guardian

... or because he expressed infantile liberty, or because his circular construction conveyed survival ... Photograph: AP

(and these were just a few of the many theories at the time to explain his appeal) Photograph: Reuters

... he had rapidly become the most popular star in movies. Photograph: AFP

This, as Disney said, drastically constricted the things he could do lest he offend his fans. Photograph: Corbis

“If our gang ever put Mickey in a situation less wholesome than sunshine,” Disney wrote in 1933 ... Photograph: AP

“Mickey would take Minnie by the hand and move to some other studio.” Photograph: AP

This new Mickey was without an edge, both figuratively and literally. Photograph: AP

Where the early Mickey was all lines and angles, with pipestem legs and arms and a pointy nose, the new Mickey ... Photograph: Rex Features

... as redesigned by the great animator Fred Moore (who would later design the dwarves in Snow White) ... Photograph: Reuters

... was rounder, softer, squatter, heavier, more pear-shaped, which led to another identity crisis. Photograph: Allstar/Disney

The early, rambunctious Mickey was mostly mouse. Photograph: Corbis

(In fact, Louis B Mayer of MGM had angrily rejected an opportunity to distribute the cartoons because he said that pregnant women in the audience would be terrified of a giant mouse on the screen.) Photograph: Allstar/Disney

The reconceptualised Mouse was more man or boy. Photograph: Rex Features

He had shed his trademark red shorts for a whole new wardrobe ... Photograph: Rex Features

... and he had seemingly moved with his dog Pluto to the suburbs where he courted Minnie ... Photograph: Allstar/Disney

... (romantically and often musically, rather than aggressively as he once did) ... Photograph: Corbis

... and he assumed a number of disparate roles, like any Hollywood actor. Photograph: EPA

... Mickey the scientist, Mickey the giant slayer, Mickey the detective. Photograph: AP

What he had lost was his mischief – his deepest or at least his most interesting self. Photograph: Rex Features

Already by the late 1930s the Disney animators felt strapped by Mickey. Photograph: Reuters

Because he could be everything, he was essentially nothing. Photograph: Reuters

They vastly preferred Walt’s new character, Donald Duck, because Donald ... Photograph: Rex Features

... irascible, narcissistic and flawed ... Photograph: Getty

... was much easier to create gags for and was subsequently much funnier, which is why he rapidly eclipsed Mickey both at the studio and among audiences. Photograph: AFP

Mickey, now neither Chaplin nor Fairbanks, neither impudent nor heroic, neither mouse nor man, disappeared. Photograph: AP

Disney made The Sorcerer’s Apprentice as a way of reviving his beloved Mouse, but this was only a reprieve, not a rescue. Photograph: Allstar/Disney

As Walt himself later put it of Mickey’s demise, “We got tired and we had new characters to play with.” Photograph: AFP

In 1953, Mickey Mouse cartoons were suspended entirely. Photograph: AP

Of course, Mickey survived, but he has become a name, an icon, a corporate logo, a brand of merchandise. Photograph: Getty

He has ceased to be a character. Photograph: Reuters

With a few exceptions, such as appearances on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color television show ... Photograph: Allstar/Disney

... or as the drum major on The Mickey Mouse Club ... Photograph: Rex Features

... it would be another 30 years before he would star in a new cartoon ... Photograph: Reuters

... even then, it was another indication of how much his identity had evaporated that when he did return it was in Mickey’s Christmas Carol, as the nondescript Bob Cratchit. Photograph: Reuters

What Mickey fans celebrate today, then, is what Mickey once was way back before success ruined him. Photograph: Karen Kasmauski

It is that early Mickey, with his sinister toothy grin and his limitless elasticity ... Photograph: Corbis

... the mischievously mousy Mickey who constantly bedeviled the hulking Pegleg Pete ... Photograph: Corbis

... the loopy Mickey who was forever breaking into song because he had a world inside his head. Photograph: Bobby Yip/Reuters

In short, it is the Mickey we lost to fame and realism and domestication ... Photograph: AP

... the Mickey we enjoyed and who we miss 80 years after he arrived on the scene. Photograph: Rex Features

Happy Birthday to him. Photograph: Corbis