Who The Hell Is Oswald?

Even though I don't watch much TV, I'm a big fan of cartoons. While I can enjoy the new stuff like Spongebob Squarepants, I prefer cartoons made between the 1920s and 1960s. That's a wide time frame, but it includes all of my favorites -- Tom & Jerry, the Looney Tunes gang, Yogi Bear, etc. But that time period also includes the "golden era" of Disney shorts.

The Walt Disney Company doesn't make many shorts these days, leaving that task up to studios like Pixar, but back in the day Disney put out some of the most entertaining featurettes around. To this day, if there's a cartoon on involving Mickey, Donald, or Goofy, or so help me, all three, I'm going to drop what I'm doing and give it my full attention. But while Mickey and the gang were being made into stars that would shine for generations, one of Walt Disney's earlier creations was quietly rotting away in the mothballs...

In 1927, Walt Disney created a series of animated shorts featuring a character known as Oswald The Lucky Rabbit to be distributed by Universal Pictures. Life would be good for Disney as Universal had a hit on their hands with Oswald. A year later, Disney would go to one of the big wigs at Universal asking for an increase in the budget for the production of Oswald cartoons. Somewhat surprisingly, Universal said no and actually slashed the budget for the Oswald shorts. To make a long story short, that move didn't sit well with Disney and a few other animators, who decided to create their own company along with another character -- you may know him as Mickey Mouse. The rest, they say, is history.

But what happened to Oswald? Not much. After the last Oswald cartoon was produced in 1943, Oswald was -- very similar to Bosko and his successors -- "locked away in the tower" never to be heard from again. It wouldn't be until 2006 to where Oswald would be heard from again. As part of the deal that sent Al Michaels to NBC (which is part of the GE-Universal conglomerate) from ABC (which is owned by Disney), Disney was able to acquire the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, bringing him back into the Disney fold.

So here we are in 2009, three years after the "trade" and still, most of the world has no clue who Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is. What gives? More after a short cartoon break...

Disney has been waiting for the "right moment" to reintroduce Oswald as part of the Disney family. While he hasn't appeared in life size form at a Disney park or on a t-shirt recently, Oswald is scheduled to make his first appearance under the Disney banner as one of the main characters in the upcoming "Epic Mickey" game for the Nintendo Wii.

In the game's fiction Yen Sid, the sorcerer first seen in 1940's Fantasia during The Sorcerer's Apprentice, creates a Cartoon Wasteland for Disney's forgotten and retired creations. The first inhabitant of this wasteland is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Walt Disney's first cartoon star created in 1927.

As the years pass Oswald starts to resent Mickey's growing fame. When Disney's mouse accidentally warps Oswald's Cartoon Wasteland by spilling paint thinner on it, Mickey is drawn into the warped world.

Sounds like a role Oswald was born to play. Even if he's playing the role of the bad guy, it's good to see that the little rabbit is finally getting his time in the limelight.