The Strange Case of Oswald the Rabbit

May 16. 2009

A recent tour through Disneyland via the Internet revealed that in some of the park gift shops an appearance was made of Oswald the Rabbit T-Shirts?  "Who is Oswald the Rabbit?" you might ask.  Well, the little guy has a bit of a strange story.

Oswald the Rabbit was Walt Disney's first semi-successful animated character even pre-dating the creation of Mickey Mouse (if you gave Oswald round ears, he even kind of looks like Mickey).  In his early days in Hollywood (1927), Walt was a independent animator working for a couple of Universal Studios contract producers.  Walt and his staff produced about two dozen Oswald cartoon shorts and it became a pretty successful franchise for Universal.  As always, Walt wanted the best for his creations and sought a 20% increase in budget to continue to produce the Oswald cartoons.  The tight fisted producers countered Walt's demand for an increase and offered him a 20% decrease in his budget take it or leave it.  Walt left it and left Oswald behind with Universal Studios who owned the rights to the character and Oswald eventually just faded away.

So what happened to Oswald?  Now follow me here - Universal Studios and the NBC television network are owned by the same parent company (General Electric).   Disney owns the ABC television network and along with ABC, it owns ESPN.

Al Michaels and John Madden were the last announcers of ABC's Monday Night Football while it was still on that network.  In the last negotiated TV contract made by the National Football League (NFL), NBC bought there way back into broadcasting games after a long absence by creating an NBC Sunday Night Football game.  Also part of the package was the moving of the old ABC Monday Night Football over to its sister network ESPN.

Now NBC wanted to make a big splash with its new Sunday Night Football and went after Michaels and Madden as its game announcers.  Madden did sign with NBC and while Michaels and Madden had a very close relationship, Michaels struggled with moving to a new network after a very long history with ABC (going back to even before his famous call of US stunning win over the Soviets in Olympic Hockey in the early 80's - the classic exclamation "Do you believe in Miracles!").  A few years ago, Disney actually made a movie called "Miracles" based on the gold medal winning hockey team.

Anyway, Al Michaels signed on to stay with ABC/ESPN and to continue as ESPN's lead Monday Night Football announcer choosing loyalty to his long-time employer over his friendship with John Madden and the opportunity of announcing football on the big Sunday night stage with a new network.  No sooner had the ink dried on Al Michael's ESPN contract that he began to have regrets and started to inquire as to how he could get out of his contract.

So the negotiations began.  Now remember, Disney owns ESPN.  Universal is part or General Electric which also owns NBC.  Now if your Disney, is there anything that Universal/NBC has that you might want in some kind of trade?  So now we're back to Walt's original cartoon character - Oswald the Rabbit.  Disney would let Al Michaels out of his signed contract if Universal would give Disney back the rights to Oswald the Rabbit (which was never developed by Universal anyway).  There were some other considerations but in essence Al Michaels, a distinguished broadcaster for over 40 years, was traded for a cartoon rabbit that no one ever heard of.

I've heard Al Michaels interviewed a couple of times about what happened and being traded for a cartoon character and he does bristle a bit over what transpired but now Disney has what they've wanted for years - Walt's original animated character.  Is Oswald going to be anything more than a character on a T-Shirt?  Hard to tell but they'll probably make more money selling Oswald merchandise than they would have paid Al Michaels and his football announcing contract.

As for Al, he's still the best football announcer going though his partner, John Madden, has now retired.