Patrick Anthony Powers (October 8, 1869 – July 30, 1948) was an Irish-American producer who was involved in the movie and animation industry from the 1910s to 1930s. He established Powers' Cinephone Moving Picture Company, also known as Powers Picture Plays. His firm, Celebrity Productions, was the first distributor of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse cartoons (1928–1929). After one year, Disney split with Powers, who started the animation studio Iwerks Studio with Disney's lead animator, Ub Iwerks.
_q.jpg)
Steamboat Willie is a 1928 American animated short film directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. It was produced in black-and-white by the Walt Disney Studio and was released by Pat Powers, under the name of Celebrity Productions. The cartoon is considered the public debut of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, although both appeared months earlier in a test screening of Plane Crazy and the then unreleased The Gallopin' Gaucho. Steamboat Willie is the third of Mickey's films to have been produced, but it is the first to have been distributed, because Disney had seen The Jazz Singer (1927) and became determined to produce one of the first fully synchronized sound cartoons.
Steamboat Willie is one of the first cartoons with synchronized sound, and one of the first cartoons to feature a fully post-produced soundtrack, which distinguished it from earlier sound cartoons, such as Inkwell Studios's Song Car-Tunes (1924–1926), My Old Kentucky Home (1926), and Van Beuren Studios's Dinner Time (1928). Disney believed that synchronized sound was the future of film.