Walt as the Voice of Mickey Mouse

To say that Mickey Mouse was incredibly near and dear to Walt’s heart is an understatement. Mickey was Walt’s beloved creation and Walt knew that he had created a star. Walt not only put his heart and soul into that little mouse, but he also put his voice. That’s right, Walt Disney voiced Mickey Mouse himself from Mickey’s creation in 1928 until the studio’s ninth animated feature film Fun and Fancy Free which was released in 1947.  Walt took great pride in voicing Mickey and would do so again in The Mickey Mouse Club television show from 1955 to 1959.  The instantly recognizable falsetto voice of Mickey may have changed slightly over the decades, but the key style will always be rooted in the way Walt created this famous voice.

• Walt also provided the voice for Minnie Mouse in many of the earlier cartoons until artist and voice actress Marcellite Garner took over in 1930.
• Mickey did not say actual words in his first eight cartoons. There were only whistles, grunts, squeals, squawks, etc. and these were all done by Walt.
• Mickey says his first actual words “Hot Dogs! Hot Dogs!” in The Karnival Kid (1929) but it is actually composer Carl Stalling who is voicing Mickey. However, Walt does do the voice of Minnie in this short who says things like “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo” when choosing her hot dog.
  
• Even after Mickey started talking in his cartoons, he still didn’t say a lot. Mostly  a lot of “Pluto!”s and “Hot Dog!”s.
• Walt was not able to voice Mickey in every single short produced during this time. Sometimes, when he was too busy or traveling, other actors would substitute in such as Clarence Nash who was the original voice of Donald Duck.
• But Walt did voice Mickey in over 100 shorts!
• Walt also voiced Mickey in two animated feature films: Fantasia (1940) and part of Fun and Fancy Free (1947). In Fantasia, the only speaking part of Mickey’s was when he congratulated composer Leopold Stokowski after The Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment.
  
• The honour of voicing Mickey after Walt was not able to anymore, went to voice actor and sound effects artist Jimmy MacDonald who then voiced Mickey until his retirement in 1977. Jimmy started to voice Mickey halfway through production of Fun and Fancy Free.
• Walt voiced other minor characters in his cartoons such as the parrot in Steamboat Willie (1928) and an Elf in the Silly Symphony Santa’s Workshop (1932). He also voiced Mickey’s nemesis Peg Leg Pete in a few cartoons.
• The Mickey Mouse Club showed both the vintage Mickey cartoons but also featured new footage of Mickey introducing and closing out some of the segments.
• The most recent performance of Walt Disney voicing Mickey Mouse was in the 2013 short Get a Horse! which debuted before Frozen.  This short featured the original characters from the Mickey Mouse cartoons and contained archived footage of Walt voicing his cherished mouse. Every single word spoken by Mickey was used from some sort of stored documentation of Walt’s voice, even if a word need to be put together by using separate sounds and syllables.