November 18: Mickey was born from a loss

On November 18, 1928, in a New York theater, a cartoon of just over seven minutes called Steamboat Willie premiered. In it, the public met Mickey Mouse.

What happened

Steamboat Willie premiered at the Colony Theatre, in New York. It was one of the first cartoons with sound synchronized to the picture: music, noises and whistles matched the character's movements. It was an immediate success. Decades later, Disney adopted the date as Mickey's official birthday.

The mouse was born from a loss. Months earlier, in March 1928, Walt Disney had gone to New York to negotiate a better contract for his successful character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. He discovered that the rights to Oswald belonged to the studio that distributed the films and that the distributor had taken a good part of his team. Walt went home without the character. With Ub Iwerks, he created a new one. Mickey's first two cartoons, still silent, found no distributor. The third, with sound, was Steamboat Willie.

Why it matters

It's one of the clearest stories of how a no can become a beginning. If Walt had kept Oswald, Mickey might never have existed. The loss forced the creation of something entirely his own.

The bridge to Bairo's vision

Bairo was born in Colombia and made his life in Brazil; capoeira was the bridge between the two countries, as he tells in Capoeira was the bridge. What matters here is the meaning of the date. Mickey was born from an idea taken from Walt. In Bairo's story, too, there was an idea taken from him: his partners pushed him out of the business, and the idea stayed with them. He didn't make it an open wound. He made it a floor. And from there came the sentence that became his rule for life: no is the foundation of yes. It's in the chapter No is the foundation of yes.

Bairo doesn't compare himself to Walt Disney. If he could speak to him, he says he'd tell him one thing only: "Your dreams inspired me."

Read also: Walt Disney: the dream he saw before it existed · About Bairo

Sources

• D23 (official Disney archive), "Steamboat Willie Premieres": https://d23.com/this-day/steamboat-willie-premieres/
• Smithsonian, "Mickey Mouse turns 90": https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/mickey-mouse-turns-90
• Steamboat Willie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie
• MoMA, Steamboat Willie (1928): https://www.moma.org/collection/works/302797
• Oswald and the loss of the rights (1928): https://mouseplanet.com/the-history-of-oswald-the-lucky-rabbit-part-one/4512/