Oswald the Lucky Rabbit November 1928, as a replacement to compete with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created Mickey Mouse for the Walt Disney Studio. In 2003, Buena Vista Games pitched a concept for an Oswald-themed video game to Disney President and COO Bob Iger, who then became committed to bringing Oswald back to Disney. In 2006, nearly 80 years after the Disney studio broke away from Universal, The Walt Disney Company managed to acquire the intellectual property of Oswald and the catalog of Disney-produced Oswald films (with NBCUniversal effectively trading Oswald for the services of Al Michaels as play-by-play
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit stories themselves became softer. Minor changes in the drawing style would continue, too. With "Happy Scouts" (1938), the second-to-last Oswald film produced, the rabbit's fur went from being all-white to a combination of white and gray. Unlike the Disney shorts, in which Oswald did not speak, Lantz's cartoons began to feature actual dialogue for Oswald, although most of the cartoons were still silent to begin with. Animator Bill Nolan did the voice of Oswald in "Cold Turkey", the first Lantz cartoon with dialogue, and the following year Pinto Colvig, who was working as an animator and gag man at the