As an inhabitant of the silent era, the mischievous Oswald the Lucky Rabbit didn’t, as animation scholar and frequent D23 contributor David Gerstein notes, have to “stop everything to play music on barrels and lily pads twice a minute.” To Gerstein, the silence was golden, giving animators more time to spend on gags and story. And Bright Lights, the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit short released on this day in 1928, doesn’t disappoint. In short order, Oswald sneaks backstage to pursue a follies girl, is chased under the bright lights of a live stage and takes refuge in a box, only to discover that it’s actually a tiger cage. Oswald escapes through the cage bars, but the tiger and a lion do, too, chasing our rabbit into the frightened audience, which empties quickly. “Bright Lights, with its elaborate stage show and multiple-character action, looks like the kind of picture that won audiences to the series and gave [distributor] Charles Mintz apoplectic fits,” Gerstein says, imagining the distributor wondering aloud, “Why couldn’t this be done cheaper? The rubes will never know the difference!”
