Mickey Mouse was originally created as a replacement for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a character Walt Disney had created, along with Ub Iwerks, for Universal Studios. When Disney requested a larger budget for his popular Oswald series, Universal quickly fired him and hired other artists and writers to work on the show--to which Universal owned all the rights. Disney learned an important lesson from this incident and made sure that, in the future, he owned the rights to all of his creations.