How Mickey Mouse Came to Be as Told by Writer Jeff Ryan in an approximately 1 Minute Filmisode from TAFT Club Video Mini Podcast
Here is how writer Jeff Ryan puts it:
“I love the interconnectedness between the characters and the creators behind them, because their real life bleeds into the characters in ways that you would never imagine. And the characters lives in turn reflect their creators. Mickey Mouse, for instance, there’s two Mickey’s. There’s one who’s citizen Mickey who’s a good public citizen. And then there’s the swashbuckler, and the swashbuckler is what the mild mannered co-creator of Mickey Mouse always wanted to be, and who he saw in his best friend Walt Disney and the Public Citizen was who Walt Disney couldn’t ever be but always saw in his best friend Ub Iwerks. Mickey Mouse is a child of two fathers, and he represents the best parts of both of them.”
The mission of TAFT Club (TAFT is the acronym for True Art For Truth) is creative collaborating since 1982 and has a focus on fostering collaborations and partnership between creative performing artists and businesses in any industry building visibility for the arts and its importance in the world.
In this approximately one minute installment of “TAFT Club Video Mini Podcast” writer Jeff Ryan shares a story of character creation that emphasizes the power of drawing from real human relationships rather than inventing personalities in isolation.
It suggests that memorable fictional characters often emerge when creators blend the qualities, aspirations, and limitations of real people into a single figure.
According to this account, Mickey Mouse was not simply the product of one creator’s imagination but the result of two complementary personalities.
One version of Mickey—the responsible, civic-minded “Citizen Mickey”—embodied qualities admired by Walt Disney’s collaborator of Mickey Mouse Ub Iwerks.
Ub Iwerks (1901–1971) was an American animator, cartoonist, and animation pioneer whose artistic skill and technical innovation played a major role in the early success of Disney animation.
Contradictions create realism. A character who can be both a responsible citizen and a fearless adventurer mirrors the complexity of real people, making the character more believable and enduring.