In 1928, Walt Disney's distributor Charles Mintz pressed him to accept a lower fee for the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons, and Disney discovered that the distributor Universal owned the rights to Oswald. He refused, returned to Los Angeles, and lost most of his animators to Mintz's studio. Disney and Ub Iwerks created a new mouse, first named Mortimer, before Disney's wife suggested Mickey. Steamboat Willie, released in 1928, was the first cartoon with synchronized sound and an immediate hit. Disney soon began selling Mickey merchandise, and when a New York company paid $300 for a license to put Mickey on writing tablets, Mickey became the first licensed character. Within a year, Kay Kamen had 40 Mickey licenses, and the Waterbury Clock Company's Mickey Mouse watch helped save the company during the Great Depression.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.