How has Mickey’s most known earliest appearance aged over the years? Well not that well it has to be said. Steamboat is more of a historically importance short than an actually great film, but this has more to do with the increasing quality of the product coming from the mouse house in the upcoming years than any failings on the short's part; I mean, Snow White itself, was less than a decade away.

After losing Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in one of the most ironically fortunate underestimations of Walt Disney’s true abilities, the man needed a new star. Many stories have been suggested by numerous publications and one particular celebrity, but the strongest constant is that Mickey was the brainchild of both Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks; with Iwerks as the designer.

Animated and supervised by Iwerks, this short is nothing but consistent in the way everything moves, yet this rubber-nose animation that Iwerks’ favored would find itself increasingly at odds with Disney pursuit of realism. The end result is that he would finally take a chance to make his own film with Pat Powers.

This is still a short with some good moments, although watching Mickey and Minnie be just a little more than slightly mean to the ship animals is something which certainly doesn’t hold too well these days. Both mice would be tone down a lot in the years to come, the more they became popular the greatest their tamest became.

This short may not have been the first sound cartoon, or the first Mickey; but it was possibly more sophisticated than anything that went before it and made what could have been another ink-blot character into the biggest character, living or drawn that ever lived. The Mouse cemented the Disney Company’s future and became the most iconic celebrities that the moving image has ever produced.

This short is more an historic curio than a really great short, yet it’s fun, well made and you can tell that the people behind it believed in what they were doing. Walt Disney made have existed before Mickey, but the mouse made him and his company successful, less we forgot that old phrase: "it was all started by a mouse."

In Hindsight here’s another: The best was yet to come.