It most definitely existed.

Before 1919, the most successful cartoon series was one starring comic strip duo Mutt and Jeff. This series was produced by Barre Studios beginning in 1916, but mismanagement saw the studio close its doors in 1923. Mutt and Jeff were revived in 1925 by the comic strip's creator Bud Fisher, but the series ceased production for good in 1926.

The Barre Studio's main rivals were the Bray Studio (started by a newspaper illustrator named James Randolph Bray in 1914) and International Film Service (started by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in 1915). Like Barre, these studios were also in the business of adapting established comic strip characters to animated form. Both animation studios were short-lived, but each did something longer lasting. International Film Service originated a series featuring the comic strip character Krazy Kat in 1916. When International Film Service closed down in 1918, Krazy Kat was revived by Bray Studios. When Bray dropped the series in 1921, Krazy Kat was revived again, by Margaret Winkler in 1925 (more on that later).

But the Bray Studios' contribution to animated film was much more fundamental and much more longer lasting. They developed the process of using transparent celluloid sheets ("cels") to make animated cartoons, which could be layered so that only the moving parts of a scene had to be re-drawn for each frame. For many years after, into the 1930s, any animator using the cel process had to pay patent fees to the Bray company. (If you see a cartoon from the 1930s with a notice about the "Bray-Hurd Patent Process", this is what they're talking about. Earl Hurd was the employee of Bray who had come up with the idea.)

But cartoons were unprofitable for Bray, and he had expanded to live action by the end of the 1910s and shut down the animation division around 1926. His animators by then had begun to look for different opportunities, and two of them even started their own studios. These two fellows were named Paul Terry and Max Fleischer. They had a rival in Pat Sullivan, an animator who had started out at the rival Barre Studio. At the time Disney got his start in the business, these three men were the biggest names in cartoons.

Pat Sullivan was the biggest success of the three early on. His company created Felix the Cat. (Sullivan said he himself created the character, though his animator Otto Messmer consistently claimed credit after Sullivan's early death.) Felix the Cat premiered in 1919 and was an immediate hit. Felix was far and away the most successful cartoon character of all time up to that point, and Sullivan was savvy enough in the beginning to be a pioneer in merchandising. He licensed the character rights for all sorts of products, including stuffed animals and clocks. Felix remained the biggest star in animation until the dawn of sound.

Paul Terry had only briefly worked for Bray before striking out on his own with a character named Farmer Alfalfa. The character had started under Bray, but Terry was able to take him to another producer named Amadee J. Van Beuren. Farmer Alfalfa then morphed into a series called Aesop's Film Fables by 1921, which were rarely adaptations of Aesop's Fables. They were pretty standard cat-and-mouse and farm animal cartoons (on Farmer Alfalfa's farm) but the joke was that every short would end with a bit of on-screen tongue-in-cheek advice that rarely had any relevance to the preceding animated film.

Max Fleischer was another Bray alum who struck out on his own. He established Out Of The Inkwell Studio with his brother Dave in 1921, later renamed Fleischer Studios. Their innovation was to take an animated character named Koko the Clown and place him in live action settings. The studio was called "out of the inkwell" because each short started with live-action Max Fleischer sitting at an easel, inking Koko who would then come to life, and jump "out of the inkwell", off the page, and into the real world where he would have adventures.

In those days, a producer like Max Fleischer would contract with a distributor, who would in turn contract with film exchanges and theater chains to get the shorts in theaters. After leaving Bray to strike out on his own, Fleischer's original distributor was a woman named Margaret Winkler. She had started as the personal secretary of Harry Warner (of the Warner Brothers) who themselves had started out as distributors. They had acquired the Mutt and Jeff series back in 1917 and gave it to Winkler to handle. She was so successful that Warner encouraged her to form her own company, which she did, specializing in cartoon properties.

One of those properties was Out Of The Inkwell in 1919, but the Fleischer Brothers figured they could handle distribution on their own, and left her at the end of their contract in 1921 to establish a distribution arm of their company for themselves.

Winkler then contracted with Pat Sullivan to fill the void, but her relationship with Sullivan was rocky, to say the least. That's because Pat Sullivan was a drunk and an asshole. (He was also a vocal racist, which annoyed his New York staff to no end, and had served jail time in 1917 for raping a 14-year-old girl.) Nevertheless, he owned the character rights to Felix the Cat, so Winkler had to put up with him at least until their contract ended. They feuded constantly for the couple years that they had a business relationship and by the end of it, Winkler was ready to move on and work with somebody else, no matter how much money Felix the Cat might be pulling in.

To this end, she wrote a letter to a young animation producer who had solicited her to screen a pilot film (or that's what we'd call it now) that he had produced in the hopes of making it into a series. That producer was a 22-year-old named Walt Disney.

And that series he had proposed was called "Alice In Cartoonland" or "The Alice Comedies". Essentially, Disney's idea was the Out Of The Inkwell idea, but in reverse. Instead of a cartoon character having adventures in the real world, a live-action girl would have adventures in a cartoon world. The pilot was satisfactory enough to Winkler that she agreed to sign Disney to a contract. There was one catch: she would own all the character rights. She didn't want a repeat of what she'd been through with Pat Sullivan. Young Walt Disney eagerly signed on the dotted line. Production on the "Alice Comedies" began in early 1924.

That was essentially the state of the animation industry at the time Disney entered it. Predictably, when Sullivan's contract expired, he signed with a different distributor. Soon afterward, Winkler contracted with Universal Pictures for distribution of a cartoon series to be screened with their feature films. Winkler turned to Disney for this new project, and the Alice Comedies wound down so that Disney's team could start this new venture. Their new star would be Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, another in a long line of Felix the Cat wannabes.

While all this was going on, Margaret Winkler got married. She married one of her employees, a guy named Charles Mintz. After their marriage, Winkler retired from the business she had founded, and her husband took over operations. And in so doing, he decided he wanted to cut costs of the Oswald division. He figured he could produce the Oswald cartoons just as well as Disney, and once he got word that many of Disney's employees were unhappy with the long hours and low pay, Mintz poached nearly Disney's entire staff out from under him, in secret.

So when it came time for the contract renewal, to set budgets for next year's Oswald cartoons, Disney traveled from Hollywood to New York to meet Mintz. Mintz didn't fire Disney, but essentially gave him an offer he knew he would refuse. That included a paycut and a demotion while Mintz would now get all the screen credit. This put Disney in a real bind, since he didn't own Oswald. Winkler, and now Mintz, did. As Mintz expected, Disney walked away, furious over the way he'd been treated.

Legendarily, Disney and one of the only two employees who had stayed loyal to him, animator and good friend Ub Iwerks, created Mickey Mouse on the train ride back to Hollywood. It probably didn't happen exactly that way, but what definitely did happen is that Disney secured financing for a series of pilot films in the hopes of finding a new distributor. Ub Iwerks practically drew every frame of the first one all by himself. Disney held a screening in New York of this short, Plane Crazy, in May 1928, but no distributor wanted it.

Disney allowed work to be finished on the second Mickey Mouse short, already in progress, called The Gallopin' Gaucho, but Plane Crazy gave him cold feet and he didn't release it. Instead, he decided to go for broke and began production on a third cartoon, Steamboat Willie, this time with synchronized sound planned right from the beginning.

Sound cartoons has been done before. Max Fleischer had made a couple of experimental cartoons back in 1924 in partnership with DeForest Phonofilms, but they didn't go anywhere because the industry was still years away from outfitting movie theaters with speaker systems. Paul Terry had produced his own that was released in September 1928, but it hadn't gained much attention. Notably, the soundtrack was added after production had finished, so the music had little to do with the story on screen.

Not so with Steamboat Willie, which included several audio-visual gags, something audiences hadn't seen before. It was one thing to see Al Jolson talking and singing onscreen in The Jazz Singer. It was entirely another to see anthropomorphic steam whistles on a boat, or a mouse playing a cow's teeth like a xylophone. Steamboat Willie was a huge hit immediately upon its New York City premiere, and Disney quickly signed a distribution contract with Columbia Pictures.

(...continued...)