Oswald The Lucky Rabbit - Universal Takes Direct Control

Universal Takes Direct Control

Mintz, meanwhile, opened his own studio consisting primarily of former Disney employees, where he continued to produce Oswald cartoons, among them the first Oswald with sound, Hen Fruit (1929). While things were going in Mintz's favor, animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising asked Universal head Carl Laemmle to remove Mintz, suggesting they would be the ones to continue the Oswald series. But Laemmle denied their requests and even terminated Mintz's contract, opting to have the Oswald cartoons produced right on the Universal lot instead.

By a coincidence, Disney and Mintz each produced nine cartoons the first year and 17 the next, before Oswald was taken over by others. Laemmle selected Walter Lantz to produce the new series of Oswald shorts (the first of which was 1929's Race Riot). Lantz consulted Disney about Oswald and he gave Lantz his blessing to continue the Oswald series as the Mickey Mouse shorts had become more successful, so the two became close friends.

Over the next decade, Lantz would produce 142 Oswald cartoons, making for a grand total of 194 films that the character starred in, spanning the work of all three producers. After Lantz took over production in 1929, the character's look was changed to some degree over the following years: Oswald got white gloves on his hands, shoes on his feet, a shirt, a "cuter" face with larger eyes, a bigger head, and shorter ears (pictured left). With 1935's Case of the Lost Sheep, an even more major makeover took place: the character was drawn more realistically now, with white fur rather than black, shoes are removed, plus wearing suspenders instead of a shirt and shorts. This new Oswald model was adapted directly from a non-Oswald character in another Lantz cartoon: the Cinecolor "Fox and the Rabbit" (1935), released some two months earlier as the last of the early Cartune Classics series.

The cartoons containing the new, white-furred Oswald seemed to be different from their predecessors in more than one way, as the stories themselves became softer. Minor changes in the drawing style would continue, too. With Happy Scouts (1938), the second-to-last Oswald film produced, the rabbit's fur went from being all-white to a combination of white and gray.

Unlike the Disney shorts, in which Oswald did not speak, Lantz's cartoons began to feature actual dialogue for Oswald, although most of the cartoons were still silent to begin with. Animator Bill Nolan did the voice of Oswald in Cold Turkey, the first Lantz cartoon with dialogue, and the following year Pinto Colvig, who was working as an animator and gag man at the studio, started voicing Oswald. When Colvig left the studio in 1931, Mickey Rooney took over the voicing of Oswald until early in the following year. Starting in 1932, Lantz ceased to use a regular voice actor for Oswald, and many studio staff members (including Lantz himself) would take turns in voicing the character over the years. June Foray provided Oswald's voice in The Egg Cracker Suite, which was the final theatrical short to feature the character.

Oswald made a cameo appearance in the first animated sequence with both sound and color (two-strip Technicolor), a 2½ minute animated sequence of the live action movie The King of Jazz (1930), produced by Laemmle for Universal. However, it was not until 1934 that Oswald got his own color sound cartoons in two-strip Technicolor, Toyland Premiere and Springtime Serenade. The Oswald cartoons then returned to black-and-white, except for the last one, The Egg Cracker Suite (1943), released as a part of the Swing Symphonies series. Egg Cracker was also the only Oswald cartoon to use three-strip Technicolor. But before he was permanently retired, Oswald made a final cameo appearance in The Woody Woodpecker Polka (1951), also in three-strip Technicolor, which by then had become the norm in the cartoon industry.