I just unearthed this September 3, 1927 issue of Moving Picture World from a tub of magazines that I forgot I had. This tub hasn’t been opened for almost ten years. So I was especially happy to find this issue that has a great advertisement for Walt Disney's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit!
This ad does have me baffled as I've read that Oswald first premiered in 1927 and according to Don Markstein's Toonpedia Oswald's first officially released cartoon Trolley Troubles was released September 5, 1927. As you can see, the date on the ad is September 3. Maybe this ad was before the official release and it was used to hype the character. I wonder if Oswald premiered at the Criterion?
Also, 26 shorts were produced between 1927 and 1928, but in the fine print we see that it says "26 of them -one reel each.” I guess they're talking about other non-Oswald shorts.
The last thing is that Oswald doesn't look like himself as he's all white instead of black and he's missing his shorts. Maybe this is how he looked in his first cartoon Poor Papa that wasn't released until the next year because Universal thought he needed to be jazzed up. I haven't seen Poor Papa and I can only assume the cartoon was retooled to look like the past year’s cartoons when it was finally released in 1928.
I'm looking forward to the Disney Treasures Oswald DVD coming out this December!
Excellent article at Disney.go.com with a photo of a German poster with this version of Oswald.
Oswald at Wikipedia
Trolley Troubles on YouTube
Universal grabbed Oswald away from Walt...now he's back in the Disney fold as part of an unusual deal. NBC Universal returned the rights to Oswald, and in return Disney, the owner of ABC, allowed sportscaster Al Michaels to go over to NBC.
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