Lucky New Oswald Finds

As one of my favorite research topics, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is also the subject that my longtime friends expect me to blog about most. So I generally try to keep it to a minimum—because who wants to be predictable?

Of course, sometimes an unpredictable Oswald discovery is made. Then what? When it's unpredictable and Oswald-related—but David Gerstein is blogging about it—do the unpredictability and predictability cancel each other out? (And if something's not predictable or unpredictable, what is it?)



Predictable or unpredictable, you've just seen a very rare cartoon. In fact, a lot about Oswald is rare—or worse. Of the 26 Disney-made Oswald cartoons of 1927-28, Disney could locate only 13 in time for their 2007 DVD release (a fourteenth, Poor Papa, apparently exists but was inaccessible). Of the 26 Winkler Oswalds of 1928-29, only ten seem to have surfaced in modern times; and none in sound prints, though some were originally released with sound.

It's easy to guess that the all-sound Lantz Oswald package must survive in full, but you'd be wrong; Universal has master elements on most, but not all. On the other hand, collectors often assume that what's not in the general rotation must be lost; and that's wrong, too. For example, my fellow Oswald scholar, Pietro Shakarian, recently learned that our colleague Tom Klein possessed a few titles that others did not. With Tom's kind permission, we're now able to share Broadway Folly, the cartoon shown above—and Cold Feet (1930), another classic Bill Nolan-era straggler:



Thanks, Tom! (Tom, by the way, is the author of "Walt-to-Walt Oswald" [Griffithiana 71, 2001], a seminal paper on the character's early days—crucial reading.)

So which Lantz Oswald cartoons are still MIA? Here's what Pietro and I believe to be a definitive list—with summaries based on the original copyright synopses. Anyone want to help us find these?

Cold Turkey (released 10/15/29; production number 5043, © MP 728)

Synopsis: Taking time off the job to dance with his "best girl," waiter Oswald is interrupted by an irate customer who wants an order of duck for dinner. Oswald obliges, but the duck resists death by decapitation and hanging. Oswald finally solves the situation by shooting the duck with a cannon, leaving it "done to a turn—and well roasted." Oswald: "Want some?" Girl: "I bite!"
Note: If the synopsis is accurate regarding dialogue, this would seem to be the first Lantz cartoon with spoken words (during this period, Lantz and his crew otherwise largely relied on a slide whistle to perform Oswald's voice).

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Pussy Willie (released 10/28/29; production number 5063, © MP 758)

Synopsis: Oswald heads to his girlfriend's house and is faced with the problem of her "kid brother," who gives Oswald no end of trouble. Willie's misdeeds include putting pepper in the flowers that Oswald gives his girl. Fed up, Oswald throws "the imp off a dock." The kid returns and finds Oswald and his girl—desperate for privacy—locked in a safe. Willie uses TNT to blast them to Heaven—and comes along with them to slam the pearly gates in their faces.
Note: We're presuming "Pussy Willie" is the same bratty little cat who debuts in Disney's All Wet (1927)—then reappears as Homeless Homer in the eponymous Winkler title (1928), and once again as the girlfriend's kid brother in Lantz's The Fireman (1931). Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising reused him at Warner as Bosko's foil, renaming him "Wilbur"; you have to wonder if Oswald paid Bosko to take him.

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Nutty Notes (released 12/9/29; production number 5062, © MP 855)

Synopsis: When Oswald gets a new job at a music store, his "bruin" boss tasks him with hoisting a piano to "Ozzie's girl's" apartment—on the top floor of a skyscraper! After several efforts fail, Oswald tricks a goat into kicking the piano upward, but the kick is delivered with "too much English," and the hurtling piano rips the roof off the building. Upon Oswald's descent, he is united with his girl and the two kiss happily.
Note: The poster survives, as illustrated at right. While the copyright description calls Oswald's boss a bear, the poster pictures a cat.

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Ozzie of the Circus (released 12/23/29; production number 5024, © MP 938)

Synopsis: Oswald spends a day at the circus where he runs into a smart-aleck pup. The dog trips the barker, causes problems for the "two-headed sax player," and ties Oswald's tail to a strength-test indicator. After getting loose, Oswald chases the pup but soon finds himself pursued by an angry gorilla. The chase goes on and on; carrying over to the closing title, where "we leave them hotfooting it around the Universal universe—a dangerous triangle going around in circles!"
Note: Erroneously thought to be the first-released Lantz Oswald short until research in 2005 proved otherwise.

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Kisses and Kurses (released 2/17/30; production number 5127, © MP 1147)

Synopsis: Oswald is part of a showboat troupe, with his girlfriend Fanny as leading lady in a melodrama. "Little Blue Eyes, the heroine, live[s] with her aged father in a wee cabin down on the Swanee. Simon Hardheart [played by Pete] demand[s] her hand in marriage, but Blue Eyes spurn[s] him. In fury, Simon tie[s] her to a railroad track and vows to run over her with an old locomotive called The General." She is rescued by Oswald, who splits the track—and by extension, the train and villain—in half! The show is a success and Oswald and Fanny embrace for the closer.
Note: The General got its name compliments, no doubt, of Buster Keaton!

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Bowery Bimboes (released 3/18/30; production number 5154, © LP 1162)

Synopsis: Oswald is a cop on the beat in the Bowery. A girl catches his eye and the two engage in a rough Apache dance. But the girl is kidnapped by a tough-guy rat who spirits her to a skyscraper and hoists her to the top. Oswald comes to the rescue with an extension ladder; he saves her, but the ladder breaks. The two end up falling to the ground—but revive in time for a closing kiss.
Note: It seems likely to us that the tough-guy rat is the one who's also in The Prison Panic (1930). While the picture element for Bowery Bimboes is presently lost, an original soundtrack disc survives in my personal collection. Thanks to Ron Hutchinson's tech support, I'm honored to present it to you here:

Hey, that's not the end of the Ramapith audio selection for today. I'd be remiss if I didn't share Billy Murray's and Aileen Stanley's priceless performance of "Down By the Winegar Woiks" (1925), the song that you (appropriately) heard over Bowery Bimboes' opening titles:



And how about "Hi-Lee, Hi-Lo," as heard in Cold Feet? This one is all over 1930s cartoons—Donald Duck sings it in On Ice (1935), and it even survives as his theme in a couple of period comics (example at right from 1936 Sunday page: story by Ted Osborne, art by Al Taliaferro). Here's George P. Watson covering it in 1909:



Pietro, meanwhile, has caught studio musician David Broekman enlivening Broadway Folly with "Hittin' the Ceiling," a tune from Universal's rare part-Technicolor musical Broadway (1929). Carrying on in the same spirit, Broekman colleague Bert Fiske used the Broadway number "Sing a Little Love Song" for the marriage-proposal scene of Oswald's Oil's Well (1929; see sequence starting at 1:53).

I'd be remiss not to mention Pietro's contributions to Golden Age Cartoons' Walter Lantz Cartune Encyclopedia, where he informs me he's just now adding our new Oswald discoveries to the 1929 and 1930 pages. Hop on over, rabbit-style, to read more about them.

Update, September 3: I'd be remiss, too, not to link us to the first new Disney animation of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in 82 years. Nope, it's not what some of you would have expected...

D23's Love Bug Will Bite You

And now a quick word from our "sponsor"—well, Disney's D23 website isn't actually responsible for anything on this blog. But I love the way they explore Disney lore, and have had the fun of writing a couple of articles for them (one published thus far). So I'm proud to spread the word about their upcoming Expo via some candid vault raider footage...



But hey, this wouldn't be a Ramapith posting without a little homegrown history. We've just had a close Herbie encounter—but did you know the "Love Bug's" nickname came from a classic song that already had a Disney connection? Courtesy of the nearly all-encompassing British Pathe and WPA stock footage libraries, here's Aussie comic Albert Whelan in 1940, mimicking Ned Sparks and Gordon Harker on "You Can't Fool an Old Hoss Fly," Will Fyffe on "I Belong to Glasgow"—and our old pal Donald Duck, among others, on the original "Love Bug Will Bite You (If You Don't Watch Out!)"



Haven't had enough yet? Oh, awright. I'm feeling generous, so here's "Hoss Fly" as rendered by the stellar 1920s team of Billy Jones and Ernest Hare...



...and a 1929 recording of Will Fyffe's original "I Belong to Glasgow."



I belong to Santa Barbara, but I left my heart in Copenhagen. And now I'm recommending you go to Anaheim...

Making New Donald Duck Adventures: Tamers of Nonhuman Threats! (Part One)

I've spoken much on this blog about favorite creations of the past—but as a comics editor and writer, I've personally had the honor and privilege of working with some stellar creators in the present. One of my most exciting experiences began in the summer of 1999 at an Egmont Creative task force meeting, where I learned about a project provisionally called "Goosebusters."

What: A strange (in the good sense) branded series starring Donald and Cousin Fethry as paranormal investigators/"men in black"/secret agents.

Egmont is a Denmark-based Disney licensee. Every year they produce several thousand pages of Disney comics stories, written and drawn by talents around the world. From 1997 to 2004, I was part of the Egmont editorial team, supervising some of these writers and artists under Editor-In-Chief Anna Maria Vind and Creative Director Byron Erickson. My "unit," as I called it—I was the only editor to use animation studio terminology!—included talents such as Stefan Petrucha, Sarah Kinney, and Don Markstein, and we produced more Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Uncle Scrooge stories than anything else. But there was room to expand. In 1998, for example, I was on hand for the revival of Fethry Duck.

Story Type: Comedy/Adventure (predominately a lot of fantasy).

Fethry, as past readers of this blog will know, is Donald's obsessively nerdy cousin. In classic 1960s comics created by Dick Kinney and Al Hubbard (example from "Weaving and Ducking" [1964], right), this geek gained fame through his highly unique mix of creativity, selflessness, and unwitting thoughtlessness. But it was a hard balance to pull off just right. By the late 1970s, many Fethry stories featured a distorted duck, often shown as dumb and egotistical. In 1992, Egmont ceased using the character, determining that this version was more unpleasant than funny. A few years later, though, the question came up: could the original, more interesting Fethry be brought back?

The Purpose of the Series: In general, to take advantage of ongoing reader interest in [science fiction] stories.

As a longtime aficionado of the Kinney-Hubbard stories, I wanted to give this a try. With my writer friend, Fethry expert Lars Jensen (left)—then working under a different editor—I created a character guide on the "classic" Fethry; scripted a few short stories myself, then handed the character over to writers in my unit. Still, the results were only three- to six-page tales at first; and working with my then-regular team, I could not involve Lars at the time. I wanted to produce more ambitious Fethry projects and see Lars get a crack at them, too.

Supporting Characters: The Head (maybe a literal alien head) of a secret non-specific-government organization, and maybe other members of this organization. The main Disney Duck characters have roles only as appropriate to individual stories.

Which brings us back to that 1999 editors' meeting. While we Egmonters decided on many of the themes for our story production from scratch, this time our publishers had given us some rough plotlines upon which they wished to see new ongoing story subseries—or "branded series"—based. One was provisionally titled "Computer Kids": tales about Donald's nephews in a computer club. One was called "Football": Mickey's nephews, Morty and Ferdie, were to join a soccer team. And then there was "Goosebusters," the series I volunteered to edit. Publishers wanted to capitalize on the popularity of science-fiction media—Ghostbusters, Men in Black, Goosebumps, The X-Files—and show Donald and Fethry as part of a huge, secret monster-, ghost-, and alien-hunting organization.

The Tone of the Series: The key word is "fun", but not camp... Donald might know what a loon Fethry is sometimes, and the Head might get ulcers from Fethry’s doings (if he had a stomach), but the point is not to do stories in which the only purpose is to point to Fethry and laugh at what a moron he is. This same point is also true of Donald...

Adventure stories featuring Fethry? Wak! I was there. Then again—wait a minute. Donald is a duck bent on self-preservation. And Fethry drives Donald crazy, however unknowingly. Now Donald was willingly going to subject himself to a dangerous monster-fighting job... with Fethry as his partner? Making this believable would be part of the assignment, just like making any comic book plotline relatively convincing. I needed to work with a writer who knew Fethry well and was up for a challenge! It was time to get Lars Jensen—and though he didn't usually work for me, I received special permission to work with him now. Then it came time to pick an artist; who better than Lars' fellow Dane Flemming Andersen (above), whose wild, bouncy linework struck me as perfect for the lunacy of Donald-Fethry teamups. With my creative team established, then, it was soon time for writer, artist and editor to spend a week away from the Egmont office and our regular lives, brainstorming each day from morning to night...

Imagine: There’s a secret government agency that’s a combination of ghostbusters/alien-sitters and or -fighters/paranormal investigators. And imagine that, through a twisted string of circumstances, the Head of this agency gets the idea that Cousin Fethry is an expert in the field. And imagine that Fethry gets so enamored by the Head’s recruitment pitch that he accepts. Further imagine, that Fethry somehow manages to talk Donald into joining him as his partner. The result of all this imagining? All hell breaks loose!

This last paragraph marked the heart of the document I've been excerpting: the "Goosebusters" assignment sheet that Flemming, Lars, and I were given by Byron Erickson. It reflected a mixture of wishes and decisions from Byron, Maria, Egmont management, and the affiliate publishers. Now we three creators got to spend a week holed up in Copenhagen's Hotel Neptun, enjoying the perk of all the food we could eat at any restaurant I chose. The price of these luxuries? We were sworn to translate our assignment into a series—and come back with a complete series bible by the Monday following!

It was going to be fun, yet a little stressful—handling the writing and editing side, Lars and I almost felt like we were characters in a slightly tense comic book story, ourselves. And well, what do you know? After less than a day at Hotel Neptun, our tension became Donald's own. Who gets stuck with all the bad luck? Who feels like a loser compared to successful Uncle Scrooge? Who's always being run out of town due to crises he's caused—but can't afford to clean up? No one but Donald Duck, of course (whose team headgear I tried to envision in crude thumbnails, above left). So what if joining the "Goosebusters" became the answer to these problems? The flip side of the danger in being a secret agent, after all, is the feeling of being a winner when a mission goes right; the feeling of bravado when you get to handle cool secret agent gear. And if being a monster fighter also paid really, really well, Donald would have no choice but to lean on "Goosebuster" missions after his domestic Duckburg disasters caused expensive trouble.

Suddenly Donald had a reason to be a "Goosebuster"! Lars compared it to making a sick patient's body accept a complex medicine; sometimes medicines B and C are required to make medicine A go down. But do it right, and the result is health; or in this case, healthy logic. On a good day, Donald could actually enjoy his secret agent job. On a bad day, Donald would still be forced to stick with it—kvetching all the way.

And Fethry? Well, what if the Head was, in fact, halfway right about Fethry's being "an expert in the [paranormal] field"? A cryptid-obsessed Fethry might be too eccentric for a real scholar, but he could believably learn enough to be helpful to missions in spite of himself. Maybe Donald could use this...

Wow! While Lars and I were figuring those relationships out, Flemming was drawing! The images you're seeing show some of the first results this master came up with—an improved version of Donald's headgear and uniform, an elaborate interior view of what a secret government agency might look like, and then a slick lady "Goosebuster" agent. This was the heyday of early video game action heroines like Lara Croft, Jill Valentine, and Claire Redfield, so we all felt like sourcing that same trope... but with a twist. Imagine Lara, Jill, or Claire ten years further on in their lives, when the thrill of adventure has been replaced by grim world-weariness. What if such a jaded action heroine were Donald's trainer? We'd have a clash of titans! In that spirit, Lars called our frazzled senior agent Kolik, "a name that sounded rock-hard... like you could bruise yourself on it." It also sounded like colic—a kind of pain, just like she and Donald would give each other when they argued! The character first called Anya Kolik became Katrina, then Brandy, then finally Katrina again. Lars and I loved the great helmet Flemming created for her, too, though even today we haven't yet explained why she's the only agent who wears one—or how exactly it hides her huge mop of hair. Suction?

The gadgetry of "Goosebusters" quickly went beyond Kolik's helmet. Soon Lars and Flemming were devising futuristic flying scooters and the "weirdness radar," with which paranormal activity could be detected from afar. We decided agents could store their gadgets in special armbands that seemed to compress the gadgets down to a small size. But this goofy hi-tech came with problems—the "armband compressors," as we called them, almost never seemed to contain everything a mission called for. I may have been the first to sketch an armband compressor (above left), but Flemming (above right) outdid me for believability! I'm a writer; he's an artist.

Speaking of believability, you'll recollect that we were asked to make the series' characters sympathetic, not parodic or silly ("...[avoid] stories in which the only purpose is to point to Fethry and laugh..."). And this led to an important question regarding our opening setup. If we were to take the characters' situations seriously, then the "Goosebusters" had to treat their missions seriously. So how seriously could the Head ever take nerdy Fethry? Could the Head believably become convinced on his own that Fethry was an expert paranormalist, or did Fethry have extra aid or circumstances on his side? An early suggestion from Lars, preserved in my notes, plumped for the latter:

Either Fethry or Donald works for Scrooge [on a project]; somehow [the nature of the project means that] they either work opposite the Goosebuster organization or against them. At the end of the story, Scrooge manages to pass them onto the organization. They’ve caused so much destruction for the Goosebusters that the Goosebusters make them work it off, hence their continued employment.

Nope... wouldn't work. Editor Dave and Writer Lars hashed it out: after being introduced to the "Goosebusters" as visibly destructive characters, the Ducks weren't realistically very likely to be employed as agents—an obviously sensitive position—to work off their debts. And how much Scrooge/"Goosebusters" contact could take place without Scrooge learning the nature of their work—and thus becoming permanently aware of his nephews' "Goosebuster" identities? We'd been asked to create a secret agency; if other Ducks learned about it, the consequences could be serious (sketch from Lars, above right; no, not that serious).

We needed a new way for the circumstances to favor Fethry's—and, eventually, Donald's—hiring as secret agents. Version two sounded significantly better:

Night at Fethry’s; he’s watching monster movies or reading books and going on about his obsession. Shadowy figures (emissaries of the [Head]) have [a] weirdness radar that has led them there. Fethry is talking out loud about how he’d like to get Donald involved. "Are you interested in the paranormal?" comes a voice. "Yes!" gushes Fethry. [The next day we find Fethry] bursting in on Donald. Donald hears his pitch, and after first rejecting it, decides to go along—cynically saying "Great, I'll bust one ghost with [you]"; ghosts don't really exist, Donald thinks, so he isn't afraid at all.

Still a problem here, though; Fethry seemed to be the focus character, sidelining the more sympathetic Donald. There had to be a way to get Donald into this setup from the start. Third time was the charm...

In a moment of weakness, Donald has reluctantly joined Fethry for a night of movies about Fethry’s latest kick: the paranormal. After one too many installments of “The Meatloaf That Ate Vegas"... a sickened Donald pushes off for home, but overenthusiastic Fethry will not be stopped. Even alone, he continues... obsessing about his latest fad. It’s now that outside Fethry’s home, we see two shadowy figures passing by... talking to Agent Kolik on the phone [though] we won't see Kolik at all... as yet; the [agents] are in the neighborhood to watch Fethry and dialogue reveals they (or their organization) has done so from a distance for a while... "I want to investigate the paranormal!” Fethry says to no one in particular. “And I wish Cousin Donald could join me, because it's so obvious he wants to!" BANG! Next day Donald is grabbed from his garden (or wherever)...

Bingo. Rather than be recruited directly by the level-headed Head, Fethry could instead intrigue two low-level agents who would help make the case to the Head for him. Should Fethry (and by extension, Donald) then fail to live up to expectations, those other agents would take the brunt of the blame—and never forget it. In later stories, they could even become resentful rivals on the force! At first, the recruiters-turned-rivals were simply called "the two agents" or "two guys" in our notes. They spent awhile as Yin and Yang before crystallizing as Jackson and Finch, a steely-eyed Puritan and his oafish cool-dude partner. While not incompetent, Jackson and Finch are average, imperfect, and insecure enough to feel threatened by their hirees; Lars once accurately stated that "Jackson and Finch would probably be the Donald and Fethry of the group if Donald and Fethry were not there." With Donald and Fethry there, the results were dynamite!

Hmm... dynamite. As noted on our assignment sheet, the name "Goosebusters" had always been just a provisional name for our secret agency. Lars noted that despite being an obvious Disney play on ghostbusters, it "would only be believable in the context of the series if our heroes were constantly fighting Gus Goose." Over racks of ribs at Copenhagen's Hard Rock Cafe on January 19, 2000, Donald's and Fethry's paranormalist employer became TNT—initially "Terror Neutralization Taskforce" and finally Tamers of Nonhuman Threats.


I'm glad we didn't go with my earlier (joking) suggestion, "Monster Butchers." We wouldn't have been allowed to kill them off, anyway.

Hey, it's the end of the post but we're not through yet. I'll return to TNT soon to tell about how more new characters were created; how the Head got a body; and how a highly reluctant Donald got sent on his first few missions.

Sketches For Fethry Duck's First Appearance

Disney comics' "S-coded" story production program—S for Disney studio—began in 1962. George Sherman, head of Disney’s Publications Department, had heard that the Disney comic book stories being produced in the United States weren't enough to fill the overseas comics. Sherman hired Tom Golberg to supervise the making of new stories principally for foreign use. Dick Kinney, former story man on Disney shorts and numerous TV cartoons, was one of the series' chief writers. In a 1964 S-coded story, "The Health Nut," Kinney and artist Al Hubbard (Scamp, Mary Jane and Sniffles) created Fethry Duck, one of my favorite Disney characters.

Donald's faddist cousin is Duckburg’s most highly motivated citizen. To meet Fethry is to be smothered by his craze of the moment: an exciting new hobby, a protest against society’s ills, or the urge to attain enlightenment, just to name the most typical types of obsessions. Alas, while infinitely well-meaning, Fethry is also unknowingly clumsy, thoughtless, and tactless—so the more exposure one has to his interests, the more punishment one takes. Enter Donald, whom Fethry considers his favorite relative. Fethry is simply determined to expose Donald to as many of his interests as possible. Uh-oh!

Today I'm sharing the earliest Fethry drawings I know to exist. Several years ago, the Disney studio briefly sold publications development art on eBay. The intent was to unload material that had already been documented by Disney, but a previously lost box of especially early S-coded production materials was discovered in the process. Among them was Dick Kinney's scribble-script to “The Health Nut,” the first five pages of which I'm reproducing here.

While I can't be sure that (as I once presumed) these are definitely the very first sketches of Fethry, they're certainly among the first, and certainly offer a look at Kinney’s developmental process that would not have been possible before. The simple, direct drawings crackle with the life and energy of animation storyboards: we can feel the raw emotion of a New Age nerd bursting onto the scene and radically revising Donald’s existence. Of course, they don't yet contain the ingredients that final story artist Al Hubbard brought to the table. Without (or before) Hubbard, Fethry's hat is almost a yarmulke; his eyes wide, his hair very different, his aggressive enthusiasm almost pugnacious.

On the back of page three, Kinney half-sketched an early trial image of Fethry with droopy eyelids (below). But it is plainly Hubbard—whose corresponding art I'm also reproducing here—who first brought the character’s classic, improbable grace to bear, and who gave him the truly baggy-eyed, lovably flaky facial features we know today. Like many unintentionally overbearing people in real life, Fethry had two extremely doting parents.


[Thanks to Alberto Becattini for details on Golberg's role. See more of Al Hubbard's comics at Thad's and Andrea's blogs. Scans of published "Health Nut" story come from Walt Disney's Comics and Stories 638 [2003], which you can buy here.]