Steamboat Willie and included the songs "Steamboat Bill", a composition popularized by baritone Arthur Collins during the 1910s, and "Turkey in the Straw," a composition popularized within minstrelsy during the 19th century. The title of the film is a parody of the Buster Keaton film "Steamboat Bill, Jr." (1928), itself a reference to the song by Collins. Walt Disney performed all of the voices in the film, although there is little intelligible dialogue. While the film has received some criticism, it has also received wide critical acclaim, not only for introducing one of the world's most popular cartoon characters, but for its
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