Oswald debuted in the prestigious Colony Theatre in New York on September 5, 1927. The animated short story Trolley Troubles was just over six minutes long and was the creation of Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks for Winkler Pictures, who wanted to create and sell a cartoon to Universal. They were successful; Universal’s publicity department even came up with a name for the character by drawing it out of a hat filled with suggestions.
Trolley Troubles was so well received that in the following four months eight more Oswald shorts were released, featuring the rabbit with long, expressive ears and a gaggle of rabbit children. Critics and audiences alike were taken with Oswald and his feisty and overzealous character; his success led almost immediately to the hiring of more animators and Walt and his business partner Roy were able to buy several plots of land in Silver Lake.
Universal began a marketing push on merchandise, producing a five-cent chocolate covered marshmallow candy bar, a pin back button with Oswald on it and a stencil set for drawing the character. Universal Weekly noted in 1928 that: ‘Never before in the history of short subject exploitation has there been such a tremendous tie-up as that recently effected in connection with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit… the [stencil] set will be distributed through five and ten cent stores and other chains all over the country, which means reaching millions of purchasers and movie-goers.’ None of the royalties from the merchandise went to Disney Studios, as legally they were not the owners of the character; Roy Disney even stated, “We are a movie studio, not a toy store.” Rather ironic…
But the early wave of Disney success with Oswald was in for a savage dumping. Early in 1928, Winkler producer Charles Mintz began negotiations for more Oswald shorts without Walt – he felt Disney was making too many demands. At the same time, Walt was renegotiating his contract with Winkler for an increase in his budget. Instead, Winkler told Walt to accept a 20 percent cut in the budget and if he didn’t, Universal would produce the cartoon themselves using Walt’s own animators, most of whom had already signed contracts with Winkler. The result: Universal became the owner of a character that Walt Disney had created for them. Never one to take a setback lying down, Walt created Mickey Mouse on the train ride home.
So what happened to Oswald? In July 1928, four months before the debut of Mickey Mouse, the first short produced by Winkler was released and Universal continued with their animated shorts until the late 1930s, with nearly 200 movies produced. Oswald was energetic, inventive and adventurous, causing trouble and then luckily finding his way out. He had the strange ability to disassemble his body parts at will (in one movie he detaches his leg and kisses it for good luck). He always tried to do the right thing and loved to make others laugh, all of which were personality traits that had never been seen before in a cartoon character. But when Steamboat Willie was released later in 1928, starring a talking mouse, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit took a back seat.
Many of the Oswald shorts can be found today in other languages – French, Spanish, Italian and German – because in the 1920s and ‘30s it was quite common for the studios to rent out 16mm films. The foreign markets also often edited the shorts down to smaller shorts, so a six-minute movie became three two-minute movies. Oswald’s final appearance in a cartoon was in The Egg Cracker Suite in 1943. And then he disappeared.
Today, the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit once more belong to Disney and he is represented at Disneyland in Anaheim as a meet-and-greet character next to a gas and service station that bears his name. It’s an oddly low-key presence for the character that is credited with pioneering ‘personality animation’, was taken away from Walt and inadvertently led to the creation of Mickey Mouse and the Disney empire.
