Stop us if you’ve heard this one: A director noted for combining well-received comedy with groundbreaking technological innovations has just signed on for a new project at Disney, in which a wise-cracking cartoon rabbit will interact with live-action human characters. You guessed it: Jon Favreau’s making an Oswald The Lucky Rabbit TV show.
Oswald is, of course, that trivia factoid that semi-serious Disney nerds love to pelt you with once your defenses have dropped a bit after their initial onslaughts: Created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks in the 1920s, when Walt Disney Studio was still under contract with Universal Pictures, Disney lost the rights to the character when he and Iwerks struck out on their own in 1928. (The results of their efforts to create a character they would retain the rights to have, sadly, been lost to the distant annals of animation history.) Oswald languished in obscurity for the next 75 years, until a very weird set of circumstances caused him to be returned to Disney’s custody: Video game developers came up with a Mickey Mouse video game idea about Mickey reuniting with a forgotten Oswald, causing Disney CEO Bob Iger to embark on a quest to get the rights to the character back that ultimately saw him trade football announcer Al Michaels to NBC for the privilege. (The resulting video game, Epic Mickey, was terrible, while NBC got years of beloved work out of Michaels, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Anyway: Despite making a big deal out of getting the character back at the time, Disney has done very little with Oswald ever since. There’s been the occasional little piece of animation here or there, but not much more—until today, when Deadline reported that Favreau was adapting the character for a Disney+ TV show. Tying into the techno-obsessions that’ve seen Favreau devote his talents to stuff like The Lion King and The Mandalorian in recent years, the series sounds like (per our opening joke) a riff on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, with the series described as an “animation/live action hybrid.” Devoting resources to the concept is actually somewhat wild, in so far as the nearly century-old Oswald actually entered the public domain in 2023. (Ernie Hudson will supposedly star in at least one of the requisite knock-off horror parodies.) On the other hand, it’s hard to calculate just how much money Favreau has made for Disney since he directed Iron Man back in 2008, so when he says “I want Oswald The Lucky Rabbit,” you presumably get the man Oswald The Lucky Rabbit. (God help us if he wants Horace Horsecollar, too.)
