New Photo Contest Results

My new photo contest does not have a winner, and that's my fault. The last contest I had two winners in the first three hours of posting anything, and I thought that despite calling the contest an easy one this time, that I'd make it a rather complicated question to get the prize. This was the prize:



Now, my mother knew what building was represented by the photograph, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA, but the question was "Using the prize as a clue, tell me the name of the real Chester Lampwick."

My goal with this particular contest was to educate anyone paying attention to some little known facts about Walt Disney. Maybe "little known" isn't accurate, because there is a rather wide consensus about the whole thing.

Really though, the key to this little quest was that a contestant would have to know who Chester Lampwick was. A fictional character from an episode of the Simpsons, Chester was a bum who had created Itchy, the mouse from the Itchy and Scratchy show in the Simpson canon. Roger Meyer Sr had stolen the likeness from him, and thrown him out, consigned to a life as a hobo (apparently no one else was hiring talented artists).

The prize was meant to represent Walt Disney, and Chester was to represent a real life person, the Chester to Walt's Roger Meyer.

The real life Chester Lampwick was a guy named Ub Iwerks. Ub's name is explained by is Frisian/German roots, as he was born in Kansas City, and befriended Walt early in their lives. While Walt was an idea and pitch man, selling stories and animated shorts to studios, his animator and workhorse was Ub. Their first great and popular creation, which has begun to make a comeback with a starring role in the Epic Mickey video game, was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

The lesson that Universal taught to an angry Walt Disney, about ownership rights and forfeiting what was felt like proprietary material, (the loss of rights to Oswald being the main action) wasn't dispersed as well to Ub Iwerks. Mickey Mouse was Ub's baby, "their" creation after they left Universal and struck out on their own. This fact is well established today. The honeymoon didn't last long, of course.

Chafing under the demanding Disney and angry he wasn't getting the credit he felt he deserved, Ub left. He bounced around different animation studios as Walt Disney created an empire and became a household name. Ub even came back to work for Walt after a decade or more.

Was Mickey stolen from Ub like Itchy was stolen from Chester? Maybe not, but the credit not being assigned properly (see Sam Simon) is similar and accurate.

An addendum to this story and some perspective:

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was the most popular thing in animation in the infancy of the medium. Ub animated it almost entirely, but the stories, plotting, and pacing were from Walt. What happened when Walt and Ub left Oswald? Had you ever heard of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit before the Epic Mickey game? If so, are you an animation buff? Next, what happened to Mickey Mouse when Ub left?

Let's say he didn't suffer the same fate as Oswald.

Does this assign the credit of Oswald's, and then later of Mickey's, success to Walt Disney? I think that argument can be made.

As an epilogue, I can say I learned a lesson about complicated contest quests.