Before there wasMickey , the cartoon mouse who celebrated his ninetieth birthday on November 18 , there was Oswald . Oswald the Lucky Rabbit , Disney ’s first official go back cartoon character , star in 26 shorts between 1927 through 1928 . Until recently , seven of those shorts had been lost , butSmithsonianreports that one has been reclaim from the collection of an animation historiographer in Japan .
Yasushi Watanabe , now 84 , bought a film reel label “ Mickey Manga Spide ” ( Mickey cartoon speedy ) from a securities industry in Osaka when he was a teenager . The film was a two - minute edition of a 1928 Oswald cartoon calledNeck n ’ Neckmade for 16 mm home movie projector .
Seventy years later on , Watanabe realized the short circuit was more than just a neat composition of Disney memorabilia . While read the 2017 bookOswald the Lucky Rabbit : The Search for the Lost Disney Cartoonsby Disney vitaliser David A. Bossert , he learned that a handful of Oswald the Rabbit cartoons were lost , and he had a intuition that his reel might be one of them .
After aim in touch with the Walt Disney Archives , Watanabe confirmed thatNeck n ’ Neckwas indeed one of the cartoon that had been missing for decades , and he donated it to Japan ’s Kobe Planet Film Archive . Bossert ’s book also conduct to the rediscovery of a 50 - moment clip of the same cartoon at the Toy Film Museum in Kyoto , but the original cartoon , which had been five minutes long , has yet to be unearth in its entirety .
Oswald ’s fourth dimension on the silver screen was short - lived . AfterWalt Disneyand his partnerUb Iwerkslost the right wing to the character , the pair came up withPlane Crazy , the short that introduced Mickey Mouse to the existence . Oswald ’s reconditeness means that some archivists may be holding on to the lost cartoons without even understand what they are . In2008 , The National Library of Norway discovered that an undecipherably labeled Virginia reel in their archive in reality arrest the lost Oswald shortEmpty Socks .
[ h / tSmithsonian ]
