Trivia / Oswald the Lucky Rabbit

• Cross-Dressing Voices: At least two confirmed examples — Bernice Hansen on several of the Lantz entries in the mid-late 1930s, and then June Foray on the final Oswald short, "The Egg Cracker Suite" — and a bunch of other instances in 1930s cartoons where Oswald was clearly voiced by women.
• Exiled from Continuity:
  • Despite Disney buying him in 2006, Oswald is not considered to be a part of the Mickey and Friends brand and outside of the Epic Mickey sub-franchise, he is effectively forbidden from appearing in any other Mickey Mouse related media outside of minor cameos.
  • He is also prohibited from appearing in Kingdom Hearts, as Tetsuya Nomura wanted to include him in Kingdom Hearts III, but was shot down by Disney.
• God Does Not Own This World: Essentially why Walt was no longer able to use him until his company bought him back long after he passed.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The bulk of the Walter Lantz Oswald shorts still exist in some form, but only a select handful have seen any kind of DVD release outside of the two Woody Woodpecker collections.
• Lost Him in a Card Game: In a meta-example, this was how Lantz gained the rights to Oswald from Universal founder Carl Laemmle.
• Marth Debuted in "Smash Bros.": You can bet your left foot that most people who are aware of Oswald's existence owe it to the series Epic Mickey (which was intentionally made as a comeback vehicle for both him and his brother, and the games at least acknowledge Oswald's original cartoons), or Friday Night Funkin' mods (either by Jakeneutron's mod or Oswald's involvement on Wednesday's Infidelity as a D-Side character). Adding to the issue is that while half of his cartoons are available on DVD, said set only got a limited release, and wasn't released in other countries.
• The Merch: Per the Disney tradition, you can now buy Oswald plushies at the Disney Store.
• Missing Episode:
  • 8 of the 26 Disney-made Oswald cartoons are possibly lost forever, and even some footage of the Oswald cartoons that were found for the DVD collection had to be taken from reissued versions which arranged and/or chopped out footage from the original negatives (i.e. A bit of footage near the end of Ocean Hop where the dog Oswald was flying on to win the race falls into the pen hood of a car while flying over France, gets cranked through the engine and comes out of the exhaust pipe transformed into a string of wienies). Five of the other surviving Disney Oswalds, "Hungry Hoboes", "Poor Poppa", "Africa Before Dark", "Empty Socks" and "Sleigh Bells" still exist, with the first three respectively released on Blu-Ray and/or Digital HD as bonus features for the Walt Disney Signature Collection's re-releases of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs^note "Hungry Hoboes" included with the digital copy, but not the Blu-Ray, while the next two movies included Oswald shorts on both formats., Pinocchio, and Bambi.
  • Several of the '30s Lantz Oswald shorts have been lost, too many to list as is. Some of the Charles Mintz shorts still exist, but likewise several of them have been lost as well. And even among the Charles Mintz Oswalds that do still exist, all of the ones originally produced in sound have had their soundtracks lost.
• The Other Darrin: As per a lot of other cartoon characters at the time, Oswald went through a few different voices once he started speaking in the Lantz shorts:
  • At first he started out with just a few vocal effects and the occasional line of dialogue. Sources vary on exactly who did this, though most seem to agree that Bill Nolan usually served as Oswald's voice early on, possibly also with Walter Lantz and composer Bert Fiske doing the job as needed.
  • Pinto Colvig started acting as Oswald's regular voice actor in 1930, after Lantz realised that he needed someone with actual acting and musical training due to the more musically-based direction he wanted to take the series in. He continued voicing Oswald for just over a year, before leaving for Disney.
  • Mickey Rooney took over for a few months after Colvig's departure, doing the job until early in 1932.
  • Following Rooney's departure, Lantz ceased using a regular voice actor for most of the remaining shorts. Bernice Hansen and Lantz himself were the most frequent voice actors during the 1932-38 period, though other studio staffers would voice Oswald on occasions where he only had one or two lines of dialogue in a short.
  • Finally, for his brief comeback in 1943, Lantz hired June Foray to voice Oswald. It would end up being her only occasion voicing him, but marked the beginning of a long, very fruitful career in animation for Foray.
  • Last but not least, in Disney Speedstorm, he is voiced by David Errigo Jr. instead of Frank Welker.
• The Other Marty: Oswald's voice actor would occasionally change in the middle of the cartoons. In "Confidence" for example, Oswald starts off with a fairly deep male voice, then suddenly changes to a high-pitched female voice halfway through, and then reverts back to the male voice near the end of the cartoon.
• Referenced by...: In Infinite Craft, "Oswald the Lucky Rabbit" is a possible crafting recipe.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact: The Disney Oswalds only ran for 26 shorts before falling into the ownership of Charles Mintz and later Walter Lantz (whose shorts are rarely talked about now), but in the long run, due to laying the foundation of Disney's future work and prompting the creation of Mickey Mouse, had a huge impact on changing the History of Animation forever.
• What Could Have Been: Can you imagine how things would be if Mintz had given Disney the budget bump he asked for instead of trying to screw him over?
  • Walt would never have started his own company and eighty years of animation history would have been entirely different?
    • Epic Mickey — hell, Mickey in general wouldn't have existed?
    • The entirety of the Disney Animated Canon and Disney Theme Parks. So as painful as it is to admit it, things probably worked out for the best.
  • In the 1980s, Fred Ladd was going to colorize the Lantz shorts like he did with the early Looney Tunes in the 1960s, and they colorized 1934's The Toy Shoppe as a test, but the plan was abandoned when Universal was disatisfied with the results.
  • A cameo by Oswald as a racer in Sugar Rush was considered for Wreck-It Ralph at some point in development.
  • Tetsuya Nomura wanted to include Oswald in Kingdom Hearts III, but the idea was shot down by Disney.
  • There were originally plans to do a new series of shorts for Disney+. However, it would be stuck in Development Hell for a number of years, before it was ultimately cancelled in 2021. During the shorts' development, a silent animatic for the series titled Footless & Fancy Free would become known in mid January 2023 after it was unlisted on Chris H's Youtube which dates back to November 2018.

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