The British film archive discovered an episode of “Hungry Hobos” – an animation short by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks dated 1927. It features the Oswald character which is considered by most to be the prototype of Mickey Mouse.
Robert Dewar, commercial director of Huntley Film Archives, one of Britain’s biggest independent film libraries, said he and colleagues found the only known surviving copy of Hungry Hobos during a routine cataloguing exercise earlier this year.
“We’ve got more films than you can imagine,” he told Reuters, adding that only about 40,000 of the archive’s 80,000 films are fully accounted for.
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Amanda Huntley of the archive added: “When we checked this film we couldn’t quite believe our eyes. For an archive, finding a lost masterpiece is incredible — you just don’t think it will happen to you.”