Mickey Mouse and Ub Iwerks. Iwerks again served as the head animator, assisted by Johnny Cannon, Les Clark, Wilfred Jackson and Dick Lundy. This short was intended as a parody of Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill, Jr.", first released on May 12 of the same year. Although it was the third Mickey cartoon produced, it was the first to find a distributor, and thus is considered by The Disney Company as Mickey's debut. "Willie" featured changes to Mickey's appearance (in particular, simplifying his eyes to large dots) that established his look for later cartoons and in numerous Walt Disney films. The cartoon was
Steamboat Willie first in 1956, renewed to 1984, then to 2003 by the Copyright Act of 1976, and finally to the current public domain date of 2023 by the Copyright Term Extension Act (also known pejoratively as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act") of 1998. The U.S. copyright on "Steamboat Willie" will be in effect through 2023 unless there is another extension of the law. It has been claimed that these extensions were a response by Congress to extensive lobbying by The Walt Disney Company. In the 1990s, former Disney researcher Gregory S. Brown determined that the film was likely in U.S. public