Walt Disney’s first successful cartoon character has been repatriated to the Disney company in a bizarre trade with NBC.
Early in Walt Disney’s career, he had a minor success with a character named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a distant ancestor of Mickey Mouse. However, Walt lost the rights to Oswald in a sour business-deal with a distribution company (an historical film shown at the Disney parks has it that he was ripped off).
Now, nearly a century later, the Disney company has agreed to release a sports announcer named Al Michaels from its ABC network to NBC, which presently holds the rights to Oswald. NBC gave Disney a number of commercial concessions, and sweetened the deal with control over Oswald.
(Thanks, Experiment 33!)