Walt Disney Family Museum: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Prototype of Mickey Mouse

Early poster of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit at the WDFM.

Some of the extensive historical artifacts on display at the Walt Disney Family Museum( WDFM) tell the little known story of the prototype of Mickey Mouse: Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Early in his career Walt Disney collaborated with M. Winkler --Margaret Winkler, who produced Pat Sullivan's Felix the Cat and Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell. She was very supportive of Walt's use of animation in live action shorts in the Alice Series and decided to produce them. There were 57 short films made between 1924 and 1927 with four different child actors starring as Alice: Virginia Davis, Dawn O'Day, Margie Gay and Lois Hardwick.

Walt then decided to focus on animation and developed together with Ub Iwerks, Oscar The Lucky Rabbit with 26 episodes made between 1927 and 1928. But all that changed when Margaret Winkler married Charles B. Mintz. In 1928 Mintz, deceived with intent to defraud  Walt Disney out of the Alice Series and Oswald. As middleman, Mintz sold Oswald to Carl Laemmle, head of Universal Pictures and asked Disney to take a cut of 500 dollars or give up the marketing rights for Oswald with Walt's staff. The deal with Mintz and Laemmle was unknown to Disney. "Take the staff!", retorted Disney Later Mintz wanted 50% of Walt's studios. "No more middleman", he vowed. All this misery for Walt paved the way to the creation of Mickey Mouse, born in 1928. On a train ride back to Hollywood, Walt discussed the idea of a mouse with his wife Lilly. He thought Mortimer sounded good, but Lilly didn't, so Mickey it was.

In 2006, Walt Disney Studios re-acquired the rights to Oswald.Stories like these are displayed in an amazing panorama of photography, film, audio, scale models, toys and documentation at the Walt Disney Family Museum which opened October 1 in the San Francisco Presidio.