The happy-go-lucky, bow-tie wearing Flip the Frog was the impressive debut solo effort of Ub Iwerks. Irwerks was Walt Disney’s oldest friend, and shared a lot of the same talents. Iwerks and Disney both worked for the Kansas City Slide Newspaper Company, and soon after after Disney left to strike out on his own, Iwerks joined him, designing the early Mickey Mouse character. But Iwerks felt chafed by Disney’s strict command, and left to make his own studio.

On this day, August 16, 1930 “Fiddlesticks”, the first Ub Iwerks cartoon, as well as the first one to be produced in the two-strip Technicolor process, premiered.

Despite a series of Flip the Frog cartoons (which also included cameos by an unnamed mouse bearing an unmistakable resemblance to a certain Mortimer, né Mickey, Mouse), Iwerks was never as successful with his own creations as he was with Warner Brothers, where he produced several early Porky Pig cartoons. Iwerks later returned to Disney, where he developed much of the technology that combined live action and animation in Song of the South.