Behind almost every piece of Disney merchandise is a mouse that Walt Disney did not actually draw. This episode unpacks the life of Ub Iwerks, the Kansas City animator who met Disney in 1919, invented a motor-driven camera switch that eliminated the biggest bottleneck in early animation, designed Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and then, after distributor Charles Mintz poached the studio's staff and took Oswald in 1928, locked himself in an office to draw up to 700 frames a day for the first Mickey Mouse cartoons, including Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willie.

We follow the fracture that followed: the 1929 moment when Disney asked Iwerks to draw Mickey so Disney could sign it, the secret deal with Pat Powers that launched Iwerks' own studio, the failure of Flip the Frog and Willie Whopper despite technical firsts like the first standalone color sound ...