Mechanical Man is a 1932 cartoon short by Walter Lantz that features Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. It is the 54th Oswald short by Lantz and the 107th in the entire series.
Plot
The cartoon begins inside a house. In there, Oswald and his girlfriend Kitty are playing a piano together. On their instrument are a dancing candle stand and two mice playing the accordion. At a laboratory only a few miles away, a mad scientist completes construction of a robot and activates it. To his surprise, the robot begins to swing punches at him. The mad scientist, however, is able to evade the attacks and stops the humanoid machine with a punch of his own. He soon learns that his creation needs one more thing: a heart. Back in Oswald's place, the two friends decide to play hide-and-seek. Oswald is "it" and Kitty is the one to hide. While the rabbit counts, his playmate looks for a hiding place. Without warning, Kitty gets captured through an opened window by the mad scientist who then leaves a sack inside before fleeing. Convinced that she is hiding in the bag, Oswald approaches and opens it. To his amusement, what comes out is a marching flute player. As the rabbit goes to find his friend, he notices a strand of thread on the window sill which he follows. The thread is in fact the trousers of the mad scientist who later appears in spotted shorts. At the laboratory, the mad scientist has Kitty wedged in a vise and attempts to perform surgery on her, i.e. take out her heart and place it in the robot. But before he could start, the nefarious inventor sees through his surveillance device that someone came to his facility. Oswald reaches just outside the laboratory after following the whole thread. Upon knocking on the door, a trap activates, causing him to fall into a chute, leading towards the basement. In an attempt to slaughter Oswald, the mad scientist waits for the little rabbit's arrival at other end of the shoot, preparing to swing an axe. The mad scientist swings but misses. From there, the chase begins. Oswald runs through several corridors of the laboratory. While approaching an intersection, he sees something white popping in and out of the left corner. For his defence, Oswald picks up a nearby urn. There was indeed a skeleton innocently sitting on a rocking chair by the left corner, but the mad scientist, who was coming from the corridor in that direction, pulls it away, and walks into the intersection. Upon seeing what entered his hallway, Oswald tosses the urn. The mad scientist is struck right in the head and is knocked cold. Oswald finds a rope and ties one end of it around his pursuer's leg, with the other end around a lion's tail. The lion runs in place, hanging the mad scientist above the floor. Oswald, at last, finds the chamber where Kitty was held. He loosens the vise and frees her. Later, a goat comes along and pulls a mechanical part out of his mouth and drops it. Oswald and Kitty both laugh about it.
Copyright status
The copyright for Mechanical Man expired in 1960. Therefore, it is in the public domain. A number of Oswald shorts and other cartoons produced by Walter Lantz Production also ended up in similar status.
Differences in the VHS version
Walter Lantz and Universal released the cartoon on a VHS video tape on public known as the Guild/Firelight reissue print, which had better quality and better audio, but still had the re-used title. However, many scenes were cut, like the scene where Pete says "This thing needs a human heart, I'll get one"; the scene where Pete tells a skunk to "get busy"; and the final scene cut shows Pete taking the heart out of Kitty's mouth, however the heart later gets back in. Even though it was released on VHS, it was never released on DVD at all, or its first re-used version print or even the original version of the print at all.
