Oswald the Lucky Rabbit

Between May 1927 and August 1928, Disney’s animation studio produced 26 films featuring a slick, enthusiastic rabbit named Oswald. He was Disney’s first featured cartoon character that had been developed specifically for a starring role. The series’ financial backer was film producer Charles Mintz and the shorts were released by Universal.

With each Oswald cartoon Disney made, the quality of the animation took a leap forward. But it did come at a price. Within a year, production costs became troublesome. Disney visited Mintz to apply for a higher per-film budget. To the great amazement of Disney, Mintz instead told him that he was to cut production costs by 20%. Mintz also pointed out that Universal owned the character of Oswald. Should Disney not accept the budget cut, Mintz could produce the series without him. In preparation for this possibility, Mintz had already contracted with many of Disney’s staffers behind Disney’s back.

Disney made the decision to separate from Oswald; on the train trip home from his meeting with Mintz, he created Mickey Mouse.

As for Oswald himself, Universal eventually reassigned control of the character to former Bray studio animator Walter Lantz. Lantz’s studio made more than a hundred Oswald shorts, but took the ill-advised decision to make the character’s design cuter and simplify his formerly mischievous personality. By the late 1930s, Oswald had lost his ability to function in complex cartoons. In 1943, he made his final starring appearance on-screen.

This was not the end for the character, however. In 1942, when Lantz characters became the stars of Dell Publishing’s New Funnies comic book, Oswald immediately began to feature in stories of his own. Through the 1960s, the rabbit regularly appeared in Lantz comics titles, but by the 1970s he pretty much vanished from sight. The character made a comeback in Japan, though, thanks to new merchandise and reruns of his original cartoons on Japan’s Cartoon Network.

In February 2006, The Walt Disney Company acquired Oswald from NBC – Universal in a unique trade that involved sportscaster Al Michaels and various broadcasting rights for sporting events. Oswald recently starred in a new animated short.