Flip the Frog and Fiddlesticks, first color sound cartoon.

DATELINE: AUGUST 16, 1930: Fiddlesticks  was released on August 16, 1930 as the first color sound cartoon ever produced.

Fiddlesticks is a ground-breaking 1930 animated cartoon film. It was the first animated sound cartoon that was photographed in two-strip Technicolor. It was also Ub Iwerks's first cartoon since he departed from Walt Disney's studio.

This is the first film in the Flip the Frog series. The recording system for this film was the same for Steamboat Willie. Flip is seen dancing on lilypads until he reaches land and dries himself off. He walks to a party, where he performs a dance for the audience, accidentally climbing to a spider web. He also performs a duet with an unnamed mouse on violin (some say it might be Mickey Mouse), and Flip on piano. They perform two songs, which on the first, the mouse starts crying, so does Flip and the piano. The second song makes Flip start hugging the piano, which kicks Flip. The cartoon ends with Flip beating on the piano - he kicks all the piano keys into the air, and they drop onto him

Flip was created by Ub Iwerks, animator for the Walt Disney Studios and a personal friend of Walt Disney in 1930, at the Iwerks Studios. After a series of disputes between the two, Iwerks left Disney and went on to accept an offer from Pat Powers to open a cartoon studio of his own and receive a salary of $300 a week, an offer that Disney couldn't match at the time. Iwerks was to produce new cartoons under Powers's Celebrity Pictures auspices and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The first series he was to produce was to feature a character called Tony the Frog, but Iwerks disliked the name and it was subsequently changed to Flip.

Although the short looks to be very much like one of Iwerks's Silly Symphony endeavors, it attracted public attention by being the first color sound cartoon ever produced. The short was produced in two-color Technicolor and is the only Flip cartoon known to have been processed in color. However, some evidence indicates that the second Flip short, Flying Fists, may have been produced in Technicolor as well, and some have speculated that the later Techno-Cracked (1933) may have been photographed in Cinecolor. The Cinecolor process was a new two-strip color process that came out in 1932 and was considered superior to the two-strip Technicolor process. Iwerks would go on to make extensive use of this process with his ComiColor Cartoon series.

The unnamed mouse in the cartoon bears a striking resemblance to Mortimer Mouse, the original concept behind Mickey Mouse, both of whom were first animated by Ub Iwerks.