Was Oswald really stolen from Walt?

Was Oswald really stolen from Walt?
We've all hear this but is it true? Let's take a look at what really happened with Oswald and Walt!

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The Real Story of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit

We’ve all heard the story, Oswald was stolen from Walt… but what if we tell you that Walt never owned Oswald, to begin with?
Let’s start way back in the 1920s when Walt and Ub Iwerks were still heading the Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City. They created the short film “Alice’s Wonderland” a short that combined live action footage with animated backgrounds and characters. It was a prototypical process that would later be used in Disney films like “Mary Poppins” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

After they completed the film, the studio went bankrupt and was forced to shut down so this film was never able to screen theatrically. But it served as a presentation for prospective investors.
Walt raised money by working as a freelance photographer and bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles so he could continue sending out the short film as a proposal for the Alice series, in hopes of a distribution deal.
The film caught the eye of Margaret Winkler a 28-year-old cartoon film distributor who owned Winkler Pictures. At the time, she was distributing two cartoon series: Pat Sullivan's Felix the Cat and Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell. But Fleischer was about to set up his own studio and Sullivan had been unhappy with Winkler and had some crazy demands for a new contract.

So Winkler was on the look for new cartoon series to produce when Walt presented Alice’s Wonderland. She did not think twice and she signed Walt Disney to produce the Alice Comedies.
In 1923 Walt and Roy formed “The Disney Brothers Studio” so they could produce the silent “Alice Comedies” cartoons which featured a little girl interacting with many cartoon animals, including a black cat named Julius a suggestion made by Margaret herself.

By the end of the year Walt and Ub Iwerks had produced 57 cartoons and the series was a great success.
Everything was going fine until 1924 when Winkler married a man named Charles Mintz, who had been working for her since 1922. She had a baby and retired from the business and Mintz took over.
This was a problem because Mintz was critical of the Disney Brothers Studio and thought that their cartoons were not a high enough standard and this resulted in many confrontations between him and the Disney brothers.
Still, the Alice comedies were a great success and they started featuring more and more animation as Walt’s animators started gaining lots of expertise.
Because of the success of the series, Charles Mintz was able to sign a deal with Universal to produce a new 26-episode cartoon series in 1927.
Winkler suggested to her husband that Walt and Roy should be the ones in charge of making the series and Mintz offered Walt the contract. Of course, he jumped at the opportunity. He was eager to break free of the limitations that the live-action world had and wanted to produce something else.
And so the contract was signed and it was time to get to work.
Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal, was tired of seeing so many cats in cartoons and he asked that this new series’ character was a Rabbit.
Almost every artist at the studio submitted different rabbit designs so Disney sent Mintz the group of test drawings and he approved one. This character was copyrighted for Universal and Disney was given the approval to produce the first cartoon with it. The name of the character was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
How was this name picked? Well, it was literally drawn out of a hat at random. P.D. Cochrane, the head of Universal's publicity department, gathered suggestions from the staff around the office, put them all into a hat and drew out a name.
As soon as the design and name were approved, Mintz instructed Disney, Iwerks, and their small team, to “shoot the first picture as soon as possible.”
They created the first short “Poor Papa” in a little over two weeks.
The problem?
Nobody was happy with the cartoon. Mintz complained about the look of the character, yes, the same guy who approved it.

He suggested that Oswald should be redesigned into a young and snappy looking rabbit with a monocle.
And Universal thought that the short didn’t have a clear form and story.
Walt agreed that the short and Oswald needed work,