Studio: Walter Lantz Productions
Distributor: Universal Pictures
Produced by: Walter Lantz
Short Synopsis
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is a circus clown, performing in the big top with his partner Kitty, a doll-like cat who is the show's star turn. Between acts the ringmaster keeps trying to get Kitty to sign a contract, and Oswald, suspecting what he is up to, keeps interrupting and getting whipped for it. The ringmaster's revenge is the cannon act: he fires Oswald from the cannon, Kitty grabs his legs, the two spin through the air like a boomerang and flatten the ringmaster. Oswald mimes an invisible car, Kitty goes up on a rope, and the ringmaster cuts it so that it will break in mid-act. Oswald, back in the cannon, sees the danger, fires himself out at the right moment and catches her as she falls, and the show ends with the villain beaten and the two performers together.
Why It Matters
- The circus is a gift to a rubber-hose animator, and the Lantz unit of 1931, which now included the young Fred Avery, fills it with elastic acrobatics: the boomerang cannonball, the pantomime car and the rope rescue are staged with real snap. Kitty, as a living doll, is one of the odder Lantz creations.
- The film is a typical Oswald of the Lantz years, in which the rabbit was a cheerful all-purpose hero rather than a personality, and it is notable now mostly as an early credit for Tex Avery, who would reinvent the cartoon at Warner Bros. a few years later, and for Lantz's habit of pairing Oswald with a human-looking female lead rather than a rabbit.
Notes and Trivia
- Shirley Reed, who voiced Kitty, was one of several young women who took the female parts in Lantz cartoons of the period.
- Avery worked as an inker and animator at Lantz from 1929 to 1935 and lost the sight of one eye there in a studio prank.
- See also: My Pal Paul (1930), Making Good (1932), Bowery Bimbos (1930).
