Mechanical Man (1932)
Rival Peg Leg Pete builds a robot that needs a heart to run, kidnaps Oswald the Lucky Rabbit's girlfriend Kitty to supply one, and chases Oswald through his booby-trapped laboratory once the rescue attempt begins.
Mechanical Man is a fairly typical entry in Walter Lantz’s Universal-era Oswald run, notable mainly for its mad-scientist premise and a generic title that has occasionally led later catalogers to confuse it with unrelated works of the same name.
Background
Mechanical Man was directed by Walter Lantz and Bill Nolan, released February 15, 1932, as the 54th Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short made under Lantz and the 107th in the character’s run overall, a series that had begun years earlier under Walt Disney before Universal moved production to Lantz’s studio. The animation staff on this one included Tex Avery, early in his career and years before he became known as a director in his own right, working alongside Manuel Moreno, Lester Kline, Ray Abrams, and Vet Anderson.
What to watch for
The plot follows series villain Peg Leg Pete building a robot in his laboratory, only to discover it needs a heart to function, which sends him through Kitty’s window to kidnap Oswald’s girlfriend as a donor; Oswald’s rescue attempt then plays out as a chase through a lab rigged with trap after trap. There is little here that distinguishes it from dozens of similar mad-scientist shorts of the period, but the booby-trapped-laboratory chase is handled with more sustained invention than the setup suggests, and it is a reasonable example of the competent, interchangeable Oswald output Lantz’s studio was turning out on a regular schedule by 1932.
