Adventures Of Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, The: Walt Disney Treasures Limited Edition

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The gold tin says it all.

Other Walt Disney Treasures have come in plain silver-colored tins, but the Disney folks have a special fondness for "The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit." Oswald is like the long-lost relative who's finally come home.

Disney's first cartoon series ("Alice," 1926) was a mix of live-action and animation featuring an annoying little girl, but his distributor over at Universal wanted pure animation. So in 1927, a year before Mickey Mouse was even a gleam in his creator's eye, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was born. Ironically, he was anything but lucky for young Disney and his equally young team of "cartoonists," as they were called back then.

After a year of success which saw Oswald rival "Felix the Cat" in presence and popularity, Disney traveled to New York in 1928 to negotiate a new contract with Charles Mintz. But Mintz decided to play hardball and exercised Universal's right-by-contract to dictate budgets and staff. He wanted Disney to take a 20 percent cut for this series, and Disney refused. But they had approached his staff and had gotten all but one of them to sign contracts agreeing to the new terms, which left Disney without a character and without a staff . . . except for Ub Iwerks.

As it turned out, Disney was resilient. Out of the House of Louse rose the House of Mouse. On the return train ride from New York, Disney got the idea for a new character and he immediately put his lead (and now, only) cartoonist to work. Iwerks, who had been developed Oswald, worked furiously in secret and produced some 700 drawings per day in order to create the character who would become an American icon: Mickey Mouse.

The rest, of course, is history. But with this release, and with Roy Disney's probable prodding, the Walt Disney corporation is finally acknowledging the tremendous debt that it owes to Ub Iwerks. If there was no Ub, there's no Mickey, plain and simple. And if there's no Mickey, there's no Disneyland, no TV show . . . no nothing. We're told on one of the bonus features that Walt always felt an emptiness that Oswald was taken from him, and though it took roughly 80 years, nephew Roy finally negotiated a deal that brought the rights to Oswald back to Disney in February of 2006.

Twenty-six silent animated Oswald shorts were produced, but only 13 survived over the years. And if you watch these things, sometimes Oswald's kissable, detachable rabbit's foot (yes, there's a kind of an Itchy & Scratchy element here) results in a happy ending, while other times he ends up in the same sort of feckless finale as that other rabbit who'd hit the screen years later for Warner Bros. So I don't exactly get the "lucky" bit. But in several frames where Oswald's long ears are cropped out of the picture, you can really see Mickey. After all, the same man who created Oswald created Mickey, and the face is absolutely similar. You especially notice this in a cartoon where Oswald cranks the tail of a farm animal as if it were a hurdy-gurdy, smiles, and puckers his mouth in a familiar whistle. When you watch Oswald interact with anthropomorphic airplanes you can't help but think of similar Mickey cartoons. Same with "Sky Scrappers" which puts Oswald on a construction site with a steam shovel that will make you recall a 1933 Mickey short, or even a 1954 Chip 'n' Dale cartoon. And when you see a wolfish character with a peg leg, you can't help but think of Mickey's later nemesis, Pete.

But as Leonard Maltin, who introduces the set to us, and others point out, Oswald was a character who mostly had things happen to him. Mickey had more personality, and he had his own volition. What's nice about this set is that one bonus feature is really a collection of six cartoon shorts, three of them pre-Oswald ("Alice") and three of them post-Oswald ("Mickey"), so you can see how crucial the Oswald cartoons were in the evolution of Disney animation.

Let's face it, though. This set is mostly for serious students and devotees of animation and it's development, or for diehard fans of anything Disney. Because there are only 19 short cartoons (including the bonus ones), what we're really talking about is an unusual situation where it feels as if the bulk of this Walt Disney Treasures set is supplementary material. I'm not saying that the Oswald cartoons aren't entertaining. They are, but in a totally black-and-white, silent movie sort of way. The backgrounds are so Spartan that the cartoons look more like flip-books or storyboards than they do finished cartoons. And because the characters and objects are jet-black against a plain white background, these cartoons often feel like Victorian-era silhouette puppets.

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