ADVENTURES OF OSWALD THE LUCKY RABBIT, THE: WALT DISNEY TREASURES LIMITED EDITION - DVD review

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.

Another thing that strikes you as you watch these 1927 cartoons is the amount of violence (lots of kicking to the stomach, etc.) and "lip-lock." Old Oswald is forever planting a big one on his sweetie, and the two of them put together some pretty torrid smooches for a couple of hand-drawn bunnies. One of the cartoons, "Oh, What a Knight," has some clever gags and allusions to Douglas Fairbanks' swashbucklers, as when Oswald leaves his swashbuckler's shadow to do the fighting for him while he goes to his rabbit-in-distress girlfriend for another kiss. Umm, he is, after all, a rabbit.

Featured are six cartoons from 1927 ("Trolley Troubles," "Oh, Teacher," "The Mechanical Cow," "Great Guns!" "All Wet," "The Ocean Hop") and seven from early 1928 ("Rival Romeos," "Bright Lights," "Ozzie of the Mounted," "Oh What a Knight," "Sky Scrappers," "The Fox Chase," "Tall Timber"). New silent-movie-era music from composer Robert Israel accompanies the cartoons, played by the Robert Israel Orchestra.

Video:
These are rough artifacts, and there are moments when you see smudges that appear and then disappear. The cartoons have been cleaned up, but they still show their age and their much-traveled provenance. That said, even the animators who offer up the commentary talk about what a gorgeous print we're seeing. "Bright Lights" looks especially sharp. The quality of the bonus features is pretty decent, considering the images we're working with (I especially loved seeing an early photo of a 25-year-old Disney with his crew of cartoonists). The aspect ratio is, not surprisingly, 1.33:1 on this two-disc set.

Audio:
The audio is a function Dolby Digital 2.0, which doesn't dazzle but also doesn't disappoint. It's just there, rather than being something you notice either for good or for bad. I don't know what more to say, except that the musical backgrounds to the cartoons are nicely mixed and modulated so that there's a pleasing balance of treble and bass which still evokes a silent-era soundtrack (without the scratches, hiss, and pop).


Extras:
Disc one features the Oswald cartoon shorts and "Oswald Comes Home," a short feature about how this treasure was lost and regained. It's a splendid feature that I'd recommend watching first, before you ever take a look at the cartoons. There are six cartoon-specific commentaries as well, but once you've seen "Oswald Comes Home" and the full-length feature on disc two, these commentaries really aren't as engaging and informative as you'd hope. Mostly it's "here's what we're watching," with the animators talking about composition and Maltin trying to fit in a comment or two. Animator Mark Kausler provides commentaries for "The Ocean Hop," "Oh, Teacher," and (with Leonard Maltin) "Oh What a Knight." Jerry Beck does commentaries for "The Fox Chase," "Ozzie of the Mounted," and (with Maltin) "Bright Lights"). A rough "Sagebrush Sadie" Oswald fragment is included, along with still galleries.

Disc two has a full-length feature on "The Hand Behind the Mouse: the Ub Iwerks Story," a 1999 documentary filmed by Iwerks' granddaughter, Leslie, who produced and directed "The Pixar Story" this past year. It's a top-drawer feature that tells the whole story. And when we see how Iwerks left Disney to start his own operation in 1930 but returned to the fold eight years later after it went under, you begin to realize how these men were destined to be a team--how each needed the other. To Leslie Iwerks' credit, the documentary seems as much about the history of early animation as it does an attempt to give grandpa his due.

Also on disc two are those before and after Oswald cartoons: three from the Alice series ("Alice Gets Stung," "Alice in the Wooly West," "Alice's Balloon Race") and three early Mickey cartoons ("Plane Crazy," "Steamboat Willie," "Skeleton Dance").

As with most of the releases in this tin-boxed series, there's a handsome booklet that gives you a full menu, along with various advertisements and a suitable-for-framing postcard that shows some early images of the pencil-drawn Oswald (and reminds us that this was the "first Disney character licensed to merchandisers. The floppy-eared rabbit appeared on candy bars, a stencil set and a pin-back button." A replica of that button is included.

Bottom Line:
I don't know how much value this set holds for the casual lover of cartoons, but it's essential for those who have an interest in the history of animation. Given the importance of Oswald to the Disney empire, the gold tin couldn't be more appropriate.