Walt Disney Treasures - The Adventures of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
DVD Review by Andrea Ippoliti
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Disney had great plans to celebrate Ozzie's comeback. Among them, the most interesting for us animation fans was the idea to devote one set of the Walt Disney Treasures line to the rabbit, collecting all the cartoons starring him they could find. The set became a reality on December 2007.
Time for confessions: When I decided to buy this limited Disney Treasures set I did it just for historical reasons, avid to own these shorts, unseen for decades, not expecting much entertaiment in return. Boy, was I wrong. All the Oswald cartoons known to survive are included here and they are unexpectedly good cartoons, with some entries being really great and loaded with funny and imaginative gags and ideas. Picture and sound's quality varies from short to short, being good or even very good, despite the 80 years that separate us from their original theatrical release. Famous composer Robert Israel provides scores created just for this release.
The cartoons, made between 1927 and 1928, are all included in the first disc, among with commentaries provided by animator Mark Kausler (it is always a delight to hear how he can identify animators' styles even in these silent obscurities) and historian Jerry Beck, alone or teamed with Leonard Maltin. The disc contains also still frame galleries plus one extremely rare minute-long fragment of characters' animation from "Sagebrush Sadie", an Oswald cartoon at this time considered lost.
The cartoons are "Trolley Troubles", "Oh Teacher", "The Mechanical Cow" "Great Guns" "All Wet" "The Ocean Hop" "Rival Romeos" (with the same goat gag later used in "Steambot Willie"!!), "Bright Lights", "Ozzie of the Mounted" (which, as Jerry Beck observes in his commentary, was later remade by Harman and Ising at WB as Bosko's vehicle "Big Man from the North"), "Oh What a Knight" (with a great sequence in which Oswald leaves his shadow to fight with swords against the villain while he goes to kiss the fair damsel), "Sky Scrappers" (later remade as AAN Mickey's "Building a Building"),"The Fox Chase" (with a finale involving a skunk-well, technically the fox disguises as a skunk- like them used in the Silly Simphony and the Donald and Goofy cartoons by the same title later made at Disney) and "Tall Timber".
Several of the cartoons cast Oswald against an early incarnation of Pete, also known with the aliases of Peg-Leg Pete (the one he was later known in Mickey Mouse dailies too), Putrid Pete, High Hat Pete, Kid Pete etc., Disney's oldest character among his famous ones, created at the time of the Alice Comedies and still popular today.
One of my favorite entries featured in the set is "Bright Lights", for which Jerry Beck and Maltin provide commentary. The short is pretty good and there's space even for a "sophisticated" gag: when a man wearing a big fur coat enters the theater to watch M.lle Zalu' s act, everyone would think that Oswald, who tried before to enter without paying the ticket, would hide inside the coat. However the lucky rabbit surpise us, hiding under the shadow that the coat creates on the floor! As unpredictable as funny!
The second disc include the marvellous 1999 documentary detailing the legacy of Ub Iwerks, "The Hand behind the Mouse", directed by his granddaughter Leslie. In one hour and a half this interesting work details Iwerk's life and carrer, highlighting not only his work at Disney (including his comeback in the 40s) but also at his very own Studio, not forgetting the many technical innovations he introduced and developed during his many years of activity.
I was indeed amazed to discover how much this documentary, which is, let's not forget it, still released on a Disney release, reveals about the real role of Iwerks for the success and development of the early Mickey Mouse. This is Iwerk's disc and in fact we also have here examples of his work: three Alice Comedies are presented, "Alice gets Stung", "Alice in the Wooly West" and "Alice's Balloon Race", plus his subsequent "one-man shows" "Plane Crazy", "Steambot Willie" and "Skeleton Dance".
So, you can't miss: if you'll get a copy of the set merely for historical reasons you'll be rewarded with a great dose of entertaiment too; if you'll buy it because you love funny classic cartoons, you sure will not be disappointed.
