This is a rerun from 9/9/04. Nothing to add today…
I was in the hospital when it was announced that Universal and Disney had concluded a deal that would send sportscaster Al Michaels to NBC while Disney would reacquire title to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. For those of you unfamiliar with the history or confused by some of the newspaper accounts, I'll run through it for you as briskly as possible…
In 1927, Walt Disney's business was making animated cartoons of Oswald which were distributed by Universal Pictures. A gent named Charlie Mintz was the money man and go-between. When the cartoons became successful, Walt went to New York to attempt to negotiate a new contract with Mintz at a higher fee. Instead, Mintz offered him a worse deal. What's more, Mintz informed him that he had quietly signed contracts with most of Walt's key artists — pretty much everyone except Ub Iwerks — and that Universal owned Oswald. If Walt did not accept the new terms, Mintz would set up a new studio with those artists and make the Oswald cartoons without him.
Walt did not accept the new terms. He headed back to Hollywood and, legend has it, created his replacement character on the train home. Soon, the Charles Mintz Studio was making Oswald cartoons while Walt and Ub launched the new Disney star, Mickey Mouse. It is said that Walt never quite got over the shock of losing Oswald and he also learned a valuable business lesson. Thereafter, he refused all deals that might have diluted or endangered his title to studio creations, including The Mouse. Eventually, of course, Mickey was the hottest cartoon character of all time, dwarfing the popularity of Oswald, so there was some nice revenge there. Walt got a little more when Universal later dumped Mintz and handed Oswald over to Walter Lantz…and now, with the swap for Al Michaels, the justice is more or less complete.
What interests me here is that Oswald the Rabbit has a current value in spite of over fifty years of the character's owner being utterly indifferent about the bunny. The character's popularity declined throughout the thirties and in spite of a couple of complete redesigns. In 1943, Lantz stopped making Oswald cartoons altogether, preferring to focus on his other stars, including Andy Panda and Woody Woodpecker. Around this time, Lantz acquired ownership of Oswald but decades later, he sold his entire studio to Universal so they got him back. They didn't do anything with him, either. He was just a character in their merchandising catalog. When toy companies came to license Woody for some piece of merchandise, Oswald usually got tossed into the deal for nothing.
The old Oswald cartoons were rarely shown on television so for a decade or two, the only exposure the character got was in the pages of Dell Comics produced by Western Publishing. Lantz had a close relationship with Western and basically told them they could do anything they wanted with the rabbit and he would adjust his merchandising model sheets to match. As a result, he went through several more redesigns, eventually becoming a rather serious father type with two nephews, Floyd and Lloyd. It was pretty much the same relationship Mickey Mouse had with Morty and Ferdy, or that Donald Duck had with Huey, Dewey and Louie, also in Western Publishing/Dell Comics. In fact, quite a few of the scripts for the Oswald comics were revamped Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck scripts. None of the writers were too enthused over working with Oswald, so the editors would commission extra Mickey and Donald scripts and then change the names and (if necessary) the number of nephews. It was always one of their lowest-selling books.
Oswald pretty much disappeared even from the comic books in the sixties. Western had decided to give up on him before 11/22/63 but after that date, the notoriety of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald reinforced the decision. One of the editors there told me years later, "All the character was was a good name, and suddenly that name wasn't as good as before." Lantz occasionally asked Western to stick an Oswald story in the Woody Woodpecker comic book just for trademark reasons and to demonstrate that the character was still active. After Woody's comic book ended in the seventies, they didn't even have that.
So it's amazing that Oswald still has a following today. It's mostly in Japan where merchandise that harks back to the original Disney design is extremely popular…but somehow Oswald has endured and proven commercial enough that Disney wanted him back. Talk about your lucky rabbits.