Biography | Walt Disney — The Colony Theatre Where a Seven-Minute Cartoon Opened

People treat Mickey Mouse as a California invention that arrived fully formed.

The public first met him in this theater, in a seven-minute short.

On 18 November 1928 Steamboat Willie premiered at Universal's Colony Theatre, 1681 Broadway at 53rd Street. The house is now the Broadway Theatre, still a working Shubert stage.

Harry Reichenbach, who was running the Colony for Universal, booked the cartoon for two weeks at five hundred dollars a week. It played in front of the feature Gang War.

This was not the first time Disney and Ub Iwerks had drawn the mouse. Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho were already shot as silents.

Steamboat Willie was the first of the three released, and the first with a synchronized soundtrack of music and effects.

Disney stood in the auditorium during the run and listened to the laughs. Variety reviewed the short on 21 November 1928 and treated the matched sound as the reason the drawing worked.

The run paid enough to keep the Hyperion studio alive after the Oswald rights had been lost.

The company later fixed 18 November as Mickey's official birthday, a date chosen in 1970, not in 1928.

The Colony had opened on Christmas Day 1924 as a movie house. The brick-and-terracotta box on Broadway is the same address.

The interior has been rebuilt for musicals.

A visitor buys a ticket for whatever is playing now. The 1928 screen is gone.

The street corner is not.

Photo: Steamboat Willie 1928 poster, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Theatre exterior: Andreas Praefcke, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.