From two undelivered reels to a lunchbox

This is `howdy-doody` nineteen years early and further along, and it is the point at which the fictional figure stops being a picture and becomes a product with a supply chain. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks made him as a replacement for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit; he was "originally to be named 'Mortimer Mouse', until Disney's wife, **Lillian**, suggested 'Mickey'"; and his first two shorts, *Plane Crazy* and *The Gallopin' Gaucho*, **were not picked up for distribution**. The public debut was *Steamboat Willie* (1928) - the third attempt, and the one that worked, which is a useful reminder that the famous version is usually the version somebody retried. What makes the entry is the licensing. **"Since his early years, Mickey Mouse has been licensed by Disney to appear on many different kinds of merchandise. Mickey was produced as plush toys and figurines, and Mickey's image has graced almost everything from T-shirts to lunchboxes."** Over 130 films, a comic strip that ran 45 years, and a merchandising department run by **Kay Kamen from 1932 until his death in 1949**, "a 'stickler for quality'", named a Disney Legend in 1998 - which is the detail that matters, because the object pipeline needed somebody whose job was to police what the figure was allowed to appear on. The character was **licensed from the beginning**, which is the commercial form of `made`: the other end is worked by a company and sold back to you. And then the two facts that tie it to the rest of this corpus. In 1978 **Mickey became the first cartoon character to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame**, and he is described as **"a meetable character at the Disney parks"**. Meetable. A drawn figure who exists on a screen and cannot hear you became a person in a room who can see you - which is the whole of `the-fourth-wall`'s argument arriving fifty years early, and arriving as a ticket price.