The first Mickey Mouse watch was designed by August Shallak and manufactured by the Waterbury Clock Company under its Ingersoll brand for sale at the 1933 Progress World’s Fair in Chicago. There were two models - a children’s wristwatch which sold for $3.75 (later reduced to $2.95) and a pocket watch which sold for $1.50. The watches featured Mickey with gloved hands indicating the hours and minutes and a small dial with three tiny Mickeys indicating the seconds; the wristwatches had a leather band decorated with an image of Mickey.  Although they were quite expensive for the time (the middle of the Depression), 900,000 watches were sold during the first year, saving Waterbury from bankruptcy.

Mickey Mouse watches have been made by a variety of manufacturers ever since 1933, although for a period during the 1960s only the words "Mickey Mouse" appeared on the dial.

The first successful Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, was released in 1928. Walt Disney quickly began seeking merchandising opportunities for his cartoon characters, The original Mickey Mouse Club began in 1929 and, in 1930 Disney contracted a leading doll manufacturer, the George Borgfeldt Company, to produce Mickey and Minnie Mouse toys. 

Borgfeldt had been distributing a Micky (with no "e") Mouse toy for the Performo-Toy Company since 1926. The two toys co-existed until 1931 when  Disney sued Performo-Toy claiming that they copied their Micky from Disney’s. Despite Performo-Toy having patented its "animal toy" in 1926, Disney won and the small Performo-Toy Company went out of business.

Micky Mouse

In September 1929, less than a year after Steamboat Willie, the first successful Mickey Mouse cartoon, was released, the first Mickey Mouse Club was formed by the Fox Dome Theatre in Ocean Park, California. Disney quickly saw the potential of such a Club and supplied theatre managers with starter packs containing a manual, song sheets, badges and so on. The original Mickey Mouse Club reached its peak around 1932 and buttons from this period are highly collectable.

The first Disneyland theme park opened in July 1955 and The Mickey Mouse Club TV show, originally intended to promote the amusement park, began in October 1955. Buttons and pins featuring Disney characters, TV show cast members, Disneyland and its attractions were produced in large numbers. Many different Disneyland pins and buttons continued to be produced through the 1960s and 1970s. Disney cast member buttons are among the rarest and most valued from this period.

By the late 1920s, when Disney’s cartoons first appeared, theatre owners were provided with a full array of promotional material for new movies. "Legitimate" collectable movie posters are those which were part of this material which was made as for theatres and not intended for sale to the public. This material was on loan to the theatres which were supposed to destroy the posters or return them to the studio. 

All types of theatre and promotional material is collected but the most valuable category is "one sheet" posters usually measuring 27" x 41". (Posters are made in sizes up to 12-sheet for large billboards and down to small handout sizes.)

"Original issue" posters, which are issued before the movie is released, and "original release" posters, issued at the time of the movie’s first release, are the most valuable. Each time a movie is re-released, the "re-issue" and "re-release" posters are considered to be less valuable. Sometimes the poster for the re-release is the same design as the original poster. 

Figurines of Disney characters have been manufactured since the early 1930s. Early figurines are usually of Mickey and Minnie Mouse an, a little late, Donald Duck. Many of these have been of poor quality but the ceramic figures from two periods are of particular interest to collectors.

In the late 1950s, Disney licensed a variety of miniature ceramic figurines of its cartoon characters. These were manufactured between about 1955 and 1960 by Hagen-Renaker.  The first figures were from Disney’s then current Lady and the Tramp. These were followed by figures of characters from the Alice in Wonderland, Dumbo, Bambi and Cinderella movies and cartoon characters, including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto and Huey, Dewey and Louie. Some of these were later re-issued and a set of Fantasia figurines was produced in 1982.

In 1992, Walt Disney Studios began producing fine animation art figurines itself. These are made from a special low-fire porcelain, often enhanced with another material such as crystal, glass or a precious metal. Each figurine has a back stamp with Walt Disney’s signature and a symbol indicating the year in which it was made.

The first Disney comics appeared in 1930 when Walt began writing, and Ub Iwers drawing, a Mickey Mouse strip for the daily newspapers. The first comic books containing these strips were published in 1935 as Mickey Mouse Magazine. Disney’s characters sometimes appeared in a series of comic books called Four Color which contained a variety of newspaper strips. An all-Donald-Duck issue of Four Color was published in 1940. Shortly afterwards, Mickey Mouse Magazine was transformed into Walt Disney Comics and Stories which featured all of the Disney characters. From 1941, Walt Disney Comics and Stories began to include new material rather than just reprinted newspaper strips. From the late 1940s, Donald Duck comics outsold Mickey Mouse.

A distribution change in 1962 signalled the beginning of a long decline in the quality and popularity of Disney comics. Publication in the United States ceased entirely between 1984 and 1986.

As well as comics, it is possible to collect comic strip art. Generally, comic strips drawn by Disney artists were sent to a syndication company which produced the plates from which newspapers printed the cartoon strips. The artwork was then returned to Disney. 
  

The premium Disney collectable is the animation cel. "Cel" is film industry jargon for the celluloid on which each frame of a cartoon was painted (in the days before computer animation). Disney cels were sold as works of art by the Courvoisier Galleries as early as 1938. They were sold at Disneyland once it opened in 1955.

The earliest cels were made of cellulose nitrate. As this is a highly flammable material, cels were not stored but were either washed and re-used or destroyed. In 1940, during the making of Fantasia, Disney switched to more durable cellulose acetate cels.

As well as the original production cels, used in making the actual animated film, Disney produces hand-inked limited-edition cels, xerographic cels and serigraphic cels for collectors. The limited-edition, hand-inked cels are produced by tracing a cartoon drawing onto an acetate, colouring it by hand and adding a lithographic background layer. Xerographic cels are similar except that the cartoon drawing is reproduced onto the acetate by a xerographic process rather than being hand-drawn each time. Serigraphic cels, or "sericels", are produced by transferring a painting of a character to acetate by a screen-printing process. 
 

Walt moved to California to join his brother Roy who was recovering from tuberculosis there. The Disney brothers started a new business producing Alice in Cartoonland cartoons. The cartoons proved popular and the company soon hired Ub Iwerks and an assistant cartoonist, Lillian Bounds. Walt and Lillian married soon afterwards.