Saturday, June 06, 2009

Oswald the (Lucky) Rabbit

At the Seattle Comic Convention a few months back I picked up this neat old Oswald the Rabbit issue #458 from Dell comics for $1.75. I am a little surprised that I can not find a date inside, and I could not find the answer online. There is a small 53 written on the price sticker of the comic, so I am going to assume this issue is from 1953. Again, I could not find much info online about the Oswald Dell comics, but I find it pretty amazing that there were 458 issues!
This post is mostly an excuse to show the two Oswald the Lucky Rabbit items below. There used to be a great Disney blog site that I would visit almost daily to see great new items that the blogger was working on for the Disney stores (the site has since been removed on Disney's request). These two items, the Oswald Big Fig and Plush were both supposedly available though the Disney stores about a year ago, although I phoned my local Disney stores repeatedly to see if they had these two items in, and all they ever had were some awful looking Oswald Christmas ornaments. If they had ever gotten these items in, I would have happily forked over the large sum of cash I am sure they would have been charging to add these to my collection. But unfortunately they never did show up in my local stores.

4 comments:

  1. It neat to see the real Oswald. All I remeber is a 45 record that we played over and over again. It think it was call Oswald the Rabbitt Hop??? Looking to see if this was a childhood memory or for real

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  2. The comic was finish in April 53
    look on the first page of the comic , the 7th panel
    you will see this
    Oswald.O.S#458-534
    Artist - comic number - year - month
    It usually took about 3 month to go from the artist to the stand
    It was probably on the store sheves for July -Agust 1953

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  3. Thanks teddky for the info - greatly appreciated! What other comics can this info be found in? How exactly did you come to find out this great piece of info?

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  4. Teddy K, you're mostly right; but "O. S." actually stands for One Shot, not the artist's name. There was a series of these One Shots (also known as Four Color comics) published by Dell from 1939-1962.
    But they didn't all feature Oswald; he was only in it a couple of times a year. So there weren't really 458 issues of him, just a few dozen within the larger one-shot series.

    Laura, there was absolutely a song called "The Oswald Rabbit Hop." It was available both on its own and, I believe, as part of a Woody Woodpecker compilation (because for Universal, Oswald was part of the same "world" as its other, later cartoon properties).

    Ronn, as far as I know, that big figurine and stuffed animal were never produced in large quantities. Instead, there was first a figurine that looked like this, and more recently one that looks like this.
    The stuffed animal was replaced by a model with its eyes open and hands down, like this. (IMHO, this one's just as nice as the cancelled one.)

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