Ub Iwerks had ambitions to run his own cartoon studio. Either through a falling out from Walt Disney, who was rumored to have treated him rudely at a party, or having an offer come his way to finance his own studio by a former Disney distributor, Iwerks left in January 1930 to form his own Iwerks Studio under Pat Powers. Iwerks needed to design an entirely new set of characters from the ones he introduced while working with Walt. His debut was cinema's first audio animated cartoon in color, August 1930's "Fiddlesticks."
The cartoon, containing mostly music, features features Flip the Frog, who's seen tickling the piano keys. On the fiddle was a Mortimer The Mouse lookalike, a cross between the original Mickey Mouse and Disney's earlier Oswald The Lucky Rabbit. "Fiddlesticks'" color process used Harriscolor, one of many two-strip bipack color treatments emerging at the time. MGM handled the distribution of Frog the Flip after Iwerks produced four of them. But the cartoon series reverted back to inexpensive black and white because of the high cost of color. MGM stuck with Flip for three years before audiences got tired of the frog. With his creative mind cranking, Iwerks then came up in 1933 with Willie Whopper, about a young boy who tells the hugest lies known to mankind.
Businessman and innovator Pat Powers had a previous working relationship with Disney when he provided Walt with a sound processing system that made possible his 1928 "Steamboat Willie," cinema's second cartoon with sound. Powers had been an investor in the DeForest Phonofilm Company, which was sliding into insolvency from a series of lawsuits to enforce his sound-on-film patents. De Forest had been selling his equipment to second-tier movie houses who wanted to show sound movies on the cheap. Powers copied De Forest's technology and Disney contracted with Powers' Celebrity Pictures for his sound-on-film. A year into the partnership, Disney noticed he was being short-changed by Powers and cut him loose. Powers then stole Iwerks from Disney, only to see the artist return to Walt in 1937.