The Story
The Betrayal of Trolley Troubles
On the long train ride home from New York in February of 1928, Walt Disney had lost almost everything that mattered. His distributor Charles Mintz had taken the side of Universal; his animators had walked out the door behind his back. Universal owned Oswald now—the star of Trolley Troubles, the laughing black rabbit who had outsold Felix the Cat in 1927 and given the studio its first taste of sunshine.
Universal wouldn’t even let him keep the rabbit’s name. So Walt drew a mouse, on that same ride home, and refused to give the mouse away. And because the mouse became the most famous character who ever lived, the rabbit faded into a footnote that nobody read for the next seventy-five years.
“Imagine Mickey if he were a little more egotistical or fallible, or imagine Bugs Bunny if he talked the talk but wasn’t as good at walking the walk.”
— David Gerstein, Disney Historian
In 2006 Disney traded an NBC sports announcer named Al Michaels for Oswald’s trademark and the rights to the old films. But the original 1927 shorts— the ones with the snappy eyes, the rubber legs, and the silent-film swagger— went into the public domain on January 1, 2024. One hundred years of cartoon history, free for anyone to draw. And that’s when he came back.
Justice for Oswald is the memecoin that hands the rabbit a piece of the new internet. Every trade on PumpFun sends creator fees into three ledgers. One ledger pays the team. One ledger pays the people who stake. One ledger pays the person who, by 23:59 UTC each Saturday, scores the highest on the arcade game we built to honor our rabbit friend. Oswald doesn’t draw the latest pencil— he draws a balance sheet. And it has his name on it.