Hot for Hollywood

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit enters Hollywood triumphantly to see a "mammying" Al Jolson and trampish Charlie Chaplin. He's scheduled for a screen test. But is it going to turn out well?

The story of how Walt Disney had Oswald stolen out from under him, had Ub Iwerks invent Mickey Mouse, and his eventual rewriting of all of animation history to be all about Walt has been told before. It ended in the 21st Century, when Disney traded a football announcer for the rights to Oswald, erasing Walter Lantz's 14-year stewardship of the character. Here we are near the beginning, with Lantz and company -- including such future Disney stalwarts as Clyde Geronimi -- moving the Lucky Rabbit into the sound era, with a wild performance that has not, alas, withstood the test of time.

Despite Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and his cartoons being popular and well received at the time, they have been vastly overshadowed over time by succeeding animation characters. It is a shame as, while not cartoon masterpieces, they are fascinating for anybody wanting to see what very old animation looked like.

Not all the Walter Lantz cartoons are bad, 'Permanent Wave' and 'The Hash Shop' for examples are perfect proof of that, but some of them are not good representations of Oswald or Lantz and for historical interest only. There have been worse cartoons of theirs before and since 'Hot for Hollywood' but almost all the Disney and Winkler era Oswald cartoons are much better and 'Hot for Hollywood' is not a patch on the best of those two eras.

Sound quality for a cartoon so old and techniques still in its early days is not as primitive as it could have been. Some of the gags do work, enjoyed a cameo appearance from a character that looked like Charlie Chaplin's tramp.

The music is as energetic as ever too, and Oswald, while having much better material and deserving of it, is still pretty endearing. Pete is a great partner. The animation is quite good, not as crude as in some of the Lantz Oswald cartoons and Oswald's movements, expressions and gestures are well done.

'Hot for Hollywood' however drags a little from the slightly drawn out, but admittedly amusing and visually inventive, scene with the piano. Even for an Oswald cartoon (which are not exactly to be seen for their stories), to say that the story is flimsy is an understatement, it's barely there that it's easy to say that there isn't one. Some of the pacing lacks sharpness and a couple of the gags suffer from over-predictability and less than crisp timing.

In summary, decent if not great. 6/10 Bethany Cox