EASTER WEEKEND SPECIAL: "The Egg-Cracker Suite" (1943) (Patreon)

Click here to watch the video. 

I wanted to make this post special by providing animator sheets for this cartoon, but as of now, the UCLA Special Collections that holds the Walter Lantz Animation Archive is still closed. I hope that you will like this post just the same.

The Egg-Cracker Suite, released March 22, 1943, marks the final theatrical appearance of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, until Get a Horse! (2013). In the previous year, this design of Oswald had appeared in Dell Comics' line of New Funnies that primarily featured Lantz characters. After the release of Egg-Cracker, Oswald had continued making appearances in comic book stories for Dell up to the early 1960s. 

This film was directed by Emery Hawkins and Ben Hardaway—Hawkins also directed the Woody Woodpecker cartoon Ration Bored (1943) with Milt Schaffer, credited for story on Egg-Cracker. In an interview with John Canemaker, Hawkins shared that he hated such responsibilities: “I tried directing at Lantz and almost went out of my head. Well, every night I’d go home and you know how it feels if you start yelling with a waste basket over your head—we don’t do that very often—but I mean that reverberation. That’s what I would have and my face would be hot because all I was doing was talking and it’s not for me.”

In one of her earliest roles in animated cartoons, June Foray provides the voice of Oswald Rabbit here, bearing a slight resemblance to Rocket J. Squirrel. Also, we are treated to another interpretation of Franz Lizst’s second Hungarian Rhapsody, accompanied by clucking hens.

Presented here is a home movie print distributed by Castle Films, courtesy of Steve Stanchfield. As a subsidiary of Universal Pictures, Castle Films obtained the rights to some of Lantz’s cartoons and issued them for the non-theatrical market.