THE MECHANICAL MAN (1931)

Oswald the Rabbit and his girlfriend Kitty are playing the piano together. On their piano are a dancing candle stand and two mice playing the accordion as bookends.

At a laboratory only a few miles away, Pegleg Pete completes the construction of a robot and activates it. To his surprise, the robot begins to swing punches at him. Pete, 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 Pete 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 are the trousers of Pete who later appears in spotted shorts.

Back at the laboratory, Pete 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, Pete waits for the little rabbit's arrival, preparing to swing his ax. Pete 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 defense, Oswald picks up a nearby urn. There was indeed a skeleton innocently sitting on a rocking chair by the left corner. Pete, who was coming from the corridor in that direction, pulls out, and walks into the intersection. Upon seeing what entered his hallway, Oswald tosses the urn. Pete is hit 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 Pete above the floor.

Oswald, at last, finds the chamber where Kitty was held. He loosens the vise and frees her. Later, a goat aids them by wrecking the mechanical man and starts eating its tin parts. Oswald and Kitty both laugh about it and kiss. Pete is the precursor to Mickey Mouse's Pegleg Pete, as Oswald was a harbinger to Mickey. Disney sold Oswald to Laemlle of Universal. Sorry for the blurriness in the middle of the video.