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 Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising asked Universal head Carl Laemmle to remove Mintz, suggesting they would be the ones to continue the Oswald series. But Laemmle denied their requests and even terminated Mintz's contract, opting to have the Oswald cartoons produced right on the Universal lot instead. By a coincidence, Disney and Mintz each produced nine cartoons the first year and 17 the next, before Oswald was taken over by others. Laemmle selected Walter Lantz to produce the new series of Oswald shorts (the first of which was 1929's "Race Riot"). Lantz consulted Disney about Oswald and he gave Lantz