Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, also known as Oswald the Rabbit, Oswald Rabbit, and Ozzie, is an animated cartoon character created in 1927 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks for Universal Pictures. He starred in the titular series of short films released to theaters from 1927 to 1938. Twenty-seven animated Oswald shorts were animated at the Walt Disney Studio and produced by Winkler Pictures, while the rest were produced by Walter Lantz Productions. After Universal took control of Oswald's character in 1928, Disney created Mickey Mouse as a replacement to Oswald, surpassing Lantz's Oswald in popularity as the series was eventually made redundant in favor of other Universal series. The films established both Walt Disney Studio and Walter Lantz Productions as major players in the American animation industry in the golden age of American animation.
In 2003, Buena Vista Games pitched a concept for an Oswald-themed video game to then-Disney President and future-CEO Bob Iger, who became committed to acquiring the rights to Oswald. In 2006, The Walt Disney Company acquired the trademark of Oswald and the rights to the Disney-era films (with NBCUniversal effectively trading Oswald for the services of Al Michaels as play-by-play announcer on NBC Sunday Night Football).
After his fade into obscurity, Oswald has since had a modern resurgence in popularity, and is considered a cult character, particularly in the Disney theme parks. Oswald returned in Disney's 2010 video game, Epic Mickey. The game's metafiction plot parallels Oswald's real-world history, dealing with the character's feelings of abandonment by Disney and envy toward Mickey Mouse. He has since appeared in Disney theme parks, comic books, and video games. Oswald made his first appearance in an animated production in 85 years through his cameo appearance in the 2013 animated short Get a Horse!. Oswald films produced before 1931, including the entirety of the Disney-era films, are in the public domain.
Characteristics
While under Disney's creative control, Oswald was one of the first cartoon characters that had personality. As outlined by Walt himself: "Hereafter we will aim to [make] Oswald a younger character, peppy, alert, saucy, and venturesome, keeping him also neat and trim". With Oswald, Disney began to explore the concept of "personality animation", in which cartoon characters were defined as individuals through their movements, mannerisms, and acting, instead of simply through their design. Around this period, Disney had expressed: "I want the characters to be somebody. I don't want them just to be a drawing". Not only were gags used, but his humor differed in terms of what he used to make people laugh. He presented physical humor, used situations to his advantage and presented situational humor in general and frustration comedy best shown in the cartoon The Mechanical Cow. He would use animal limbs to solve problems and even use his own limbs as props and gags. He could be squished as if he was made of rubber and could turn anything into a tool. His distinct personality was inspired by Douglas Fairbanks for his courageous and adventurous attitude as seen in the cartoon short Oh, What a Knight.
In regard to Oswald's personality, Disney historian David Gerstein describes the difference between Mickey and Oswald: "Imagine Mickey if he were a little more egotistical or fallible, or imagine Bugs Bunny if he talked the talk but wasn't as good at walking the walk".
In order to make his Oswald cartoons look "real", Disney turned away from the styles of Felix the Cat, Koko the Clown, Krazy Kat, and Julius the Cat and began emulating the camera angles, effects, and editing of live-action films. To learn how to base gags on personality and how to build comic routines, rather than heaping one gag after another, he studied Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton. In order to stir emotion in an audience, Disney studied and scrutinized the shadow effects, cross-cutting, and staging of action in films featuring Douglas Fairbanks and Lon Chaney.
Over several cartoons, Disney and his animators would develop Oswald's persona: an "emotive, fast-moving wise guy, alternately ebullient and grouchy".
Walt Disney did not want for Oswald to simply be "a rabbit character animated and shown in the same light as the commonly known cat characters", as well as merely just a peg for gags. Instead, his stated intention was "to make Oswald peculiarly and typically OSWALD".
History Creation In 1927, because of cost and technical restrictions, Disney and his chief animator Ub Iwerks ended their work on the Alice Comedies series. Around the same time, Charles Mintz got word that Universal Pictures wanted to get into the cartoon business, so he told Disney to create a new rabbit character that he could sell to Universal, because there were too many cat characters (Krazy Kat, Felix the Cat, etc.). After Oswald was created, Winkler signed a contract with Universal on March 4 the same year, which would guarantee 26 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons."Oswald Comes Home" (DVD). (2007). Walt Disney Treasures: The Adventures of Oswald The Lucky Rabbit (Disc 1). Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Inc. Work on both the character and series began soon after Disney moved his studio to Hyperion Avenue. As with the Alice Comedies series, Disney operated the studio while Winkler produced the films.
Universal executives rejected the first Oswald cartoon, Poor Papa, for its poor production quality and the sloppiness and age of Oswald."Poor Papa". Big Cartoon DataBase, April 13, 2012 Disney, together with Iwerks, created a second cartoon titled Trolley Troubles featuring a much younger, neater Oswald. The short, released on September 5, 1927, officially launched the series and proved to be Universal's greatest success to date. Poor Papa was later released in 1928 and the storyline was reused in a Mickey Mouse short five years later, in Mickey's Nightmare. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit became Universal's first major hit in 1927, rivaling other popular cartoon characters, such as former Winkler series Felix the Cat and Koko the Clown.
The success of the Oswald series allowed Disney's studio to grow to a staff of nearly twenty. Walt's weekly salary from the series was $100 while Roy Disney's was $65. The Disney brothers earned $500 per Oswald short and split the year-end profits, with Walt receiving 60% ($5,361), and Roy receiving 40% ($3,574). With income gained from the Oswald series, Walt and Roy purchased ten acres of land in the desert. They also invested in an oil-drilling venture. Iwerks also invested his income in several stone mills to crush paint pigment he used to make paint formulas that were utilized by animators for decades.
Oswald's success also resulted in Universal and Winkler signing another contract in February 1928, guaranteeing three more years of Oswald cartoons.
As time passed, Disney feared that Mintz would forgo renewal of the contract, partly due to Iwerks informing Disney that George Winkler, at the behest of Mintz, had been going behind Disney's back during pick-up runs for Oswald reels and hiring away his animators. Eventually, Disney traveled with his wife Lilly to New York to find other potential distributors for his studio's cartoons, including Fox and MGM, prior to meetings with Mintz. As Walt later recalled, he placed two Oswald prints under one arm and—feeling "like a hick"—marched "one half-block north" on Broadway to MGM to visit Fred Quimby. During this period, Walt and Lillian attended the premier of the Oswald short Rival Romeos, which debuted at the Colony on 53rd and Broadway.
In February 1928, Disney traveled to New York City in hopes of negotiating a more profitable contract with his producer Charles Mintz. As economic problems were apparent at the time, Mintz figured Disney should settle for a 20% cut, although large turnarounds were promised if the studio's finances showed considerable growth. While most of his fellow animators left for Mintz's studio, Disney quit working on the Oswald cartoons. On his long train ride home, he came up with an idea to create another character, and retain the rights to it. He and Iwerks would go on to develop a new cartoon in secret, starring a new character which would soon become the most successful cartoon character in film history, and later became the foundation of a global entertainment empire. The first Mickey Mouse cartoon to be filmed was Plane Crazy in the summer of 1928, but it was produced as a silent and held back from release. The first Mickey Mouse film with a synchronized soundtrack, Steamboat Willie, reached the screen that fall and became a major hit, eclipsing Oswald. Plane Crazy was later given its own synchronized soundtrack and released on March 17, 1929.
Walter Lantz takes control
Mintz, meanwhile, opened his own studio (later known as Screen Gems) consisting primarily of former Disney employees, where he continued to produce Oswald cartoons, among them the first Oswald with sound, Hen Fruit (1929). Coincidentally, Disney and Mintz each produced nine cartoons the first year and 17 the next, before others took over Oswald. Animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, unhappy with Mintz, asked Universal head Carl Laemmle to remove Mintz, suggesting they would be the ones to continue the Oswald series. Laemmle terminated Mintz's contract but, instead of hiring Harman and Ising, he opted to have the Oswald cartoons produced right on the Universal lot. Laemmle selected Walter Lantz and Bill Nolan to produce the new series of Oswald shorts (the first of which was 1929's Race Riot). The Universal-produced Oswalds had a decidedly different tone and aesthetic than the Disney shorts, with more slapstick and surreal visual gags, some contributed by Nolan unit animator Tex Avery. Avery and Lantz unit animator Manuel Moreno were handed shorts to co-direct as their creative control gradually increased. Over the next decade, Lantz produced 142 Oswald cartoons, for a total of 194 films featuring the character, spanning the work of all three producers. Walt Disney reacted positively to Lantz's takeover of the series, holding Lantz's work in high regard and forming a friendly rivalry that lasted until his death.
As Walt Disney popularized sound cartoons with Mickey Mouse, Lantz's cartoons began to feature actual dialogue for Oswald, although most of the cartoons were still silent to begin with. Animator Bill Nolan performed the voice of Oswald in Cold Turkey (1930), the first Lantz cartoon with dialogue, and the following year Pinto Colvig, who was working as an animator and gag man at the studio, started voicing Oswald. When Colvig left the studio in 1931, child actor Mickey Rooney took over the voicing of Oswald until early in the following year. Starting in 1932, Lantz ceased to use a regular voice actor for Oswald, and many studio staff members (including Lantz himself) would take turns in voicing the character over the years. June Foray provided Oswald's voice in The Egg Cracker Suite (1943), which was the final theatrical short to feature him. She later voiced him again for an unaired radio pilot, Sally in Hollywoodland (1947)."This is What A Woody Woodpecker Show Would Have Sounded Like". Retrieved 2018-04-19. Oswald made a silent cameo appearance in the first animated sequence with both sound and color (two-strip Technicolor), a 2½-minute animated sequence of the live action movie The King of Jazz (1930), produced by Laemmle for Universal. It was not until 1934 that Oswald got his own color sound cartoons in two-strip Technicolor, Toyland Premiere (1934) and Springtime Serenade (1935).