Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in College: A chaotic day at the track

Is it worth your seven minutes?

If you like old-school, rubber-hose animation, absolutely. It’s perfect for anyone who enjoys seeing how early animators played with perspective before computers did all the heavy lifting.

If you need a coherent story or find high-pitched 1930s vocal effects grating? You’ll probably want to skip this one. 🐰

So, College is basically a sports movie condensed into a fever dream. Oswald and Pete are at it, running hurdles and pole vaulting, but they’re also just beating the absolute tar out of each other.

There’s this moment during the track sequence where the animation shifts into a point-of-view shot as Oswald runs. It’s genuinely jarring. Most shorts back then were super static, just flat backgrounds, but this actually makes you feel like you're tripping over the hurdles right along with him.

It’s not perfect, though. The pacing is frantic, which is fine, but sometimes you lose track of who is supposed to be winning. Not that it matters, really.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of College (1931) through its definitive frames.

The gags are exactly what you’d expect from the Walter Lantz crew. Lots of stretching limbs and characters getting flattened like pancakes. It feels a lot more kinetic than something like Double Reward, which feels like it’s standing still by comparison.

Also, the ending? It’s a total classic cartoon cop-out. It’s funny, but it makes you realize the plot was never really the point. They just wanted to draw things getting smashed.

Odd details I noticed:

• The way the background just kind of loops during the running scenes. It's hypnotic in a weird way.
• The sheer amount of cheating going on. If this was a real track meet, these guys would have been banned for life in the first thirty seconds.
• The co-ed character is essentially just a prop. Not a lot of depth there, but that’s 1931 for you.

It’s not as polished as the later stuff, but it’s got grit. You can tell they were trying to push the boundaries of what a drawing could do on screen. Definitely worth a watch if you’re curious about how cartoons used to be made before everything got so clean and shiny.

Just don't go in expecting a sports drama. It’s just two guys being jerks to each other for seven minutes, and sometimes, that’s plenty.