you (beep) fart makers!"

(imitates farting)

(orchestral music)

- Hello.

Today, we're talking about Ub Iwerks,

the creator of Mickey Mouse.

So our story starts in 1919, in Kansas City, USA.

Walt Disney was a draftsman, Ub Iwerks was an animator.

Ub goes, "Hey, Walt, what if we were to put

a live-action person into an animated frame?"

"Yes!

That's it!"

They create something called the "Alice Comedies."

But there's no money in it.

Walt, though, is ambitious.

He goes off the California and he goes to the head

of Universal Animation, Charles Mintz.

He was like, "This is amazing!

I can use this.

But the quality has to be as good."

Walt's like, "Ub, get out here, ASAP.

Yo, this is better than being in Kansas City,

'Cause Kansas City is like,

you could, like, give me the deed to the city

and I still wouldn't even stay there."

He drives the seven days to California.

He takes these-

Oh, no.

Let me back up.

At this point, Ub came up with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

So Oswald does great for Universal,

and Walt goes to Charles Mintz, and he says, "Listen,

we are (beep) killing it.

Time for you to pay us some more money."

And Mintz, Mintz looks at him and he laughs,

(laughs)

"I'm gonna give you less money!"

Mintz goes, "I have signed all of your animators,

and I own Oswald.

He's mine."

Walt Disney vowed from that day,

"Not only

will I ever not own

any character I create,

I will never not own them."

(laughs)

He said to Ub, "Ub, you with me?"

And Ub, yet again, left with Walt Disney.

And Ub said to him, "What are we doing, Walt?"

And Walt's like, "We need a character, Ub.

What do you got?"

"What about a horse?"

"Nope."

"What about a dog?"

"Nope."

(sighs) "What about a cat?"

"No, man!

We got enough cats!

We got Felix the cat, there's a lot of cats out there!

What else you got?"

"What about a mouse?"

Walt's like, "Yeah, let's do that."

But what happened next was all Ub Iwerks, okay?

So Ub locked himself in the studio,

and he churns out 600 to 700 frames a day.

Unheard of.

He did two months of animation in two weeks

and he created a character,

Mickey Mouse.

He sat down and drew that cartoon plain crazy.

Walt loves it, but he goes, "You know what?

We need something bigger."

And Ub was like, "What if we could sync sound to it?

What if we did our next cartoon where

we could see the action happening

in the time with the music?"

And Walt was like, "Yeah.

Let's do sync sound."

So Steambew-

So Steamoa-

So "Steamboat Willie" comes out

and it blows audiences away.

They went, "I can see that mouse whistling!

I can hear the mouse whistling!"

"Oh, my God!

This mouse is whistling along with what his mouth is doing!

That's (beep) sync sound."

There were standing ovations.

Mickey Mouse became an icon overnight.

He was referenced in movies and songs,

and it creates

Disney.

Like, this embellishes their minds to everybody.

They know that this is, like,

the game has changed.

With the added pressures of Mickey doing really well,

Disney, he wanted to oversee every bit of production.

"Hey, you gotta meet this timing sheet

and we gotta be here by then, and productivity."

(speaks gibberish)

Now, at a party in Hollywood, a little kid came up

to Walt Disney, he's like, "Hey, Mr. Walt Disney!

I love Mickey Mouse!

Would you draw me a picture of him?"

Walt's like, "Sure, kid.

I'll draw you a picture of Mickey Mouse."

And he handed the paper to Ub Iwerks, and Ub goes,

"Whoa!

Are you (beep) kidding me?

This is-

What?

No.

I'm out of here."

Where was I?

Ub and...

- Oh, Walt Disney?

- [Derek Miller] And Ub starts Iwerks Animation.

Crazy stuff happened in his cartoons, you know,

girls' dresses would blow off,

and animals would lose limbs, it was anarchy.

But the Hays Commission comes in.

Those are the guys who were starting to put

limitations on what you could and couldn't show.

And they were like, "This is not gonna fly anymore."

So that was the end of Iwerks Animation.

A friend of Ub's is working at Disney Studios, still.

He's like, "Ub's out of work.

You could use him."

Walt agrees to have Ub for lunch.

He says, "Ub, I want you back.

Please come work for me."

And Ub looks at him and he says, "Walt,

I want to come back and work for you.

But I will never work for you in animation.

I want to work for you in photographic effects."

And Walt is like, "Yeah, you're the guy for that.

Come and do that for me!"

He was a rockstar for Walt.

He built stuff so they could do "Marry Poppins,"

the penguin dance, he wins a technical Oscar for that.

Ub Iwerks had his hand in every single ride at Disneyland,

creating the special effects.

And Ub died a Disney legend,

So this is a real Disney ending.

Or, as I like to think,

as I like to think, this is an Iwerks ending.

Because he was the man.

To Ub.

- [Derek Waters] Ub.

- What the (beep) kind of name's Ub?

- Hello.

My name is Mark Proksch,

and today we are gonna talk about the Bone Wars.

(wheezes)

A lot of people don't know this.

The first dinosaur wasn't discovered

until the mid-19th century.

This created kind of a new science.

Two of the first paleontologists

were Othneil Marsh and Edward Cope.

Cope discovers this great discovery in new Jersery.

New Jersery.

Not a place.

New Jersey.

The first dinosaur that's nearly complete.

And so, Marsh-

(laughs)

And so, Marsh gets there and they tour around.

It's like, "Hey, Cope.

You're a great guy, love you, thank you so much,

you're awesome."

And then he goes to the owners of this site and says,

"Listen buddies, here's my dollars.

Dollars good in the eye of the federal government.

If you find any more dinosaur bones,

don't send them to Cope, send them to me."

And they do that.

Cope finds out about this and becomes infuriated.

"You were my friend, I let you come see the site,

why would you do that to me?"

Marsh says, "Listen, if I can makes this work for me,

then bully to me.

That's what I'm all abo- (burps)

All about."

And so, Cope then breaks into Marsh's sites

and starts pillaging and stealing.

Marsh finds out about this.

(beep) livid.

"What the eff?

What do you think you're doing, mister man?

You're not-

Why would you-"

And Cope is like, "Listen, this is the game we're playing,

I was here, I found these bones.

Just 'cause you're not here yet

doesn't mean nothing to me."

(groans)

(laughs)

Well, Cope finds this dinosaur and he starts

publishing all this information,

and Marsh gets there and he's like,

"Wow, that's, I mean, that's neat.

Why did you put his head on his ass?

It's supposed to be on the other end, you dingus!"

Marsh takes the head, puts it on the tail,

and it fits perfectly.

And Marsh is like, "Einstein isn't invented yet,

but you're no Einstein."

So Marsh, or no, no, no.

Cope is like, "Screw you.

We are obviously not friends, let the Bone Wars begin."

(both singing dramatic fanfare)

A race breaks out to discover new dinosaur fossils

in Council-

in Como-

Count-

Como Bluff, Wyoming!

So you have these two pits.

It's like, "Hey, this discovery is pretty neat,"

and the other would be like, "Nuh-uh!

This, and this, and this, and this,

can go with this, and this, and this, and this!"

And the other would go, "You wish, tuna fish!

This and that was part of this and that!"

The other would be like, "Cool your jets!"

The two of them discovered over 140 species of dinosaurs!

But they were, like, fighting!

Throwing dirt in each other's pits,

sabotaging their own findings.

Marsh would be like, "Don't let Cope get ahold of these,

blow it up," just so Cope wouldn't find them.

Cope was like, "Don't let Marsh get ahold of these,

blow these up."

This is insane!

They even had a dirt ball fight.

These are two of the people that created paleontology!

They're acting like spoiled little babies!

Put diapers on 'em!

Give 'em a nook!

This went on, then, for 15 years.

And Marsh becomes the head of US paleontology

because he discovered the most bones, and is like,

"All of the fossils collected by Cope belong to the USGS."

That's all Cope had left and Marsh was trying to

take that (beep) away from him.

Cope was like, "Screw you, I'm going to fight you on this."

Cope, it turned out, had been collecting evidence

that Marsh was sabotaging all this science this entire time,

back to New Jersey, to Como Bluffs.

Cope gives the New York Herald

(wheezes)

all of these notes!

I get delightful when I'm drunk.

The New York Herald publicizes all this information

and it ruins Marsh.

(wheezes)

I got it, don't worry, guys.

(laughs)

This war, the Bone Wars, established paleontology.

But these two, they're children!

Cope was like, "You know what?

I hate Marsh so much that when I die,

I want my brain weighed and measured.

I bet my brain is bigger than Othneil Marsh's."

And so when he died, he had his brain cut out.