Oswald the Lucky Rabbit has been getting more attention lately than he’s had in over 50 years. Now that the Disney Company bought him back so he could have a major role in the “Epic Mickey” video game, one could say this is the best Oswald’s career has been since its start.
It’s fitting, then, that one of the early shorts featuring him has just been discovered in a film archive in the United Kingdom. The Reuters news agency reports that employees from Huntley Film Archives, one of the U.K.’s largest, discovered the old cartoon this year when doing a normal cataloging exercise.
These inventories are common, and it’s also not unheard of to find rare films during them. Huntley has around 80,000 films and only about 40,000 are accounted for, thus the regular bouts of cataloguing.
Oswald shorts aren’t entirely rare, or at least, it’s not that difficult to see them. A quick YouTube search revealed several. However, most of the shorts in existence (including the ones on YouTube) were made by Universal Pictures, not by Walt Disney. Finding a cartoon of him from 1928, then, is more special because it’s one of the few remaining that was made under Walt Disney’s direction.
Oswald has an interesting history, one that, once understood, makes this particular discovery that much more significant. He was created by Walt Disney and cartoonist Ub Iwerks in 1927. However, they made him for Universal Pictures (Disney didn’t have much of his own company yet). Their first short with him wasn’t that popular, but the second, “Trolley Troubles,” was.
Walt Disney then began showing more of an interest in Oswald, taking a larger role in cartoons made with the rabbit. A series of Oswald-starring shorts beginning with one called “Hungry Hobos” are those most associated with Walt Disney, because it was soon after these that Disney relinquished all control of Oswald to Universal and focused instead on Mickey Mouse.
The short discovered by the staff at Huntley is “Hungry Hobos.” This makes it one of, if not the only, Oswald cartoons still in existence that can be directly linked to Disney.
See, when Oswald came back a few years ago he was touted as Mickey Mouse’s older brother, the one who was abandoned in favor of the now-famous Mouse (this misunderstanding owes a lot to the plot line of “Epic Mickey”). But that’s not entirely the case.
Walt Disney never had complete control over Oswald. The rabbit was a joint venture with another animator made for a different studio. Disney never had full rights to him, nor did he even have that much involvement with all of the Oswald shorts made before Disney handed over all of his rights in 1928.
In fact, Disney didn’t necessarily give up Oswald because he instead wanted to focus on Mickey. In 1928 Disney demanded a raise from Universal, threatening to walk if he didn’t get it. In turn Universal told Disney to go ahead – if he did so, they would retain the rights to Oswald. Disney did, and that’s why he had to create a new character (one with a suspicious resemblance to Oswald that might have gotten him sued nowadays; Mickey in his earliest form might as well be Oswald with rounded ears, right down to his wardrobe).
One final still more interesting note before I end the story: although Disney made “Hungry Hobos,” it didn’t air until after the famous cartoonist walked; its airdate was May 14, 1928. That’s the day before Disney first screen tested Mickey Mouse.
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