Donald Duck

• 1. Introduction

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  Donald Duck recites "Mary Had a Little Lamb" before a crowd, and a pack of orphans heckles him until he explodes into a squawking fit of rage. That moment, from the 1934 cartoon Orphans' Benefit, is where a temperamental white duck in a sailor suit became a comic foil to Mickey Mouse. His first appearance had come a little earlier that same year, in The Wise Little Hen, where he was only an unhelpful friend with no real personality.

  Donald Fauntleroy Duck is a cartoon character created by the Walt Disney Company. He is an anthropomorphic white duck with a yellow-orange bill, legs, and feet, known for his semi-intelligible speech and his volatile, high-energy temper. He has appeared in more films than any other Disney character. How does a duck whose voice almost nobody can fully understand end up named an honorary university alumnus, listed as a government employee, and written in as a candidate in real elections? Why do Finns and Germans claim him as one of their own? And how did a screwball cartoon become philosophical literature in another language?

• 2. The Voice And The Temper

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  Clarence Nash auditioned for Walt Disney Studios after learning Disney wanted people to create animal sounds for his cartoons. Disney was struck by Nash's duck imitation and chose him for the new character. Nash reputedly first developed the voice as that of a "nervous baby goat" before Walt Disney heard it as a duck.

  Tony Anselmo, who later took over the role, once corrected a common belief about how the sound is made. "Most people believe that Donald's voice is done squeezing air through the cheek, that is not true," Anselmo said. He added that he could not reveal how it is actually done, but insisted it is definitely not the cheek-squeezing method used for the Hanna-Barbera character Yakky Doodle.

  Donald's personality is portrayed as impatient, immature, and arrogant, with a pessimistic streak and an insecure disposition. His two dominant traits are a fiery temper and a cynical attitude to life. He usually starts a cartoon in a jolly mood until something distresses him, and his rage often works against him when he pushes too far. Even so, he is capable of courage and perseverance, defeating threats and finishing hard tasks.

  Animator Fred Spencer summed up the appeal. "The Duck gets a big kick out of imposing on other people or annoying them, but he immediately loses his temper when the tables are turned," he said. "In other words, he can dish it out, but he can't take it." In Truant Officer Donald, tricked into thinking he killed Huey, Dewey, and Louie, he shows deep regret and blames himself, until he realizes the trick and promptly loses his temper again.

• 3. Friendly Rivalry

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  By 1938, most polls showed Donald was more popular than Mickey Mouse. That fact sits underneath the rivalry that runs through his appearances, in which he envies Mickey's success and refuses to be second banana. The dynamic resembles the rivalry between Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny.

  The Band Concert, from 1935, is one place the feud surfaces, as Donald repeatedly disrupts the Mickey Mouse Orchestra's rendition of The William Tell Overture by playing "Turkey in the Straw." In one animated short answering the "Mickey Mouse March," Donald serves as Scoutmaster to Huey, Dewey, and Louie and leads them in a chant of "D-O-N-A-L-D D-U-C-K! Donald Duck!"

  The rivalry once landed Donald in legal trouble inside the cartoons. In a 1988 TV special, a sorcerer curses Mickey to go unnoticed, the world assumes he has been kidnapped, and Donald is arrested as the chief suspect because of their feud. The charges are later dismissed for lack of evidence.

  Walt Disney played with the rivalry on his Wonderful World of Color, once presenting Donald with a giant birthday cake and noting it was "even bigger than Mickey's," which pleased Donald. That clip was rebroadcast in November 1984 during a TV special honoring Donald's 50th birthday, with Dick Van Dyke standing in for Walt. The 2001-2003 series House of Mouse pushed the feud further, with Donald wanting to rename the club House of Duck, until Daisy reminds him how Mickey has always supported him.

• 4. Duck Goes To War

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  During World War II, Donald played a worker in an artillery factory in "Nutzi Land" in the 1943 cartoon Der Fuehrer's Face. He endures long hours, tiny food rations, and a forced salute every time he passes a picture of the Führer, until he becomes a small part in a faceless machine and suffers a nervous breakdown. He wakes to find it was a dream and looks at the Statue of Liberty and the American flag with renewed appreciation. The short won the 1942 Academy Award for Animated Short Film.

  A six-film mini-series followed Donald's life in the U.S. Army, from his drafting to basic training under Sergeant Pete to a commando mission sabotaging a Japanese air base. In Donald Gets Drafted, released the 1st of May 1942, his Selective Service draft card reveals his full name: Donald Fauntleroy Duck. The series ran through Commando Duck, released the 2nd of June 1944.

  Donald's face spread far beyond the screen. He graced the nose artwork of virtually every type of World War II Allied combat aircraft, from the L-4 Grasshopper to the B-29 Superfortress. He also served as a mascot for units including the United States Army Air Forces' 309th Fighter Squadron and the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, drawn as a fierce pirate defending the American coast.

  His most famous wartime appearance was on the B-25B Mitchell bomber piloted by Lt. Ted W. Lawson of the 95th Bombardment Squadron. Named the "Ruptured Duck" and carrying Donald's face above crossed crutches, it was one of sixteen B-25Bs that took off from the carrier USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo on the 18th of April 1942, during the Doolittle Raid led by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle. Lawson survived the ditching off China with the loss of a leg and later wrote Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, made into a 1944 movie. Decades later, during the 25th Annual Torrance, California Armed Forces Day Parade, the U.S. Army retired Donald from active duty as a "Buck Sergeant."

• 5. Two Caballeros

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  During the war, Disney cartoons were banned from import into Occupied Europe because of their propagandistic content. Losing that revenue, Walt Disney decided to build a new audience in South America. He traveled through several Latin American countries with his assistants to gather impressions for two feature-length films.

  Saludos Amigos, from 1942, was the first result, made of four short segments, two of them featuring Donald. In one, he meets his parrot pal José Carioca. The Three Caballeros, from 1944, was the second, in which Donald meets his rooster friend Panchito.

• 6. The Comic Book Empire

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  In 1937, an Italian publisher named Mondadori created the first Donald Duck story intended specifically for comic books. The eighteen-page story, written by Federico Pedrocchi, was the first to cast Donald as an adventurer rather than just a comedic character. A daily comic strip drawn by Al Taliaferro and written by Bob Karp began in the United States on the 2nd of February 1938, with the Sunday strip starting the following year.

  Carl Barks soon took over the major development of the duck as both writer and illustrator. Under his pen, Donald became more adventurous, less temperamental, and more eloquent. Barks placed him in the city of Duckburg and built a host of supporting players, including Neighbor Jones in 1944, Uncle Scrooge McDuck in 1947, Gladstone Gander in 1948, the Beagle Boys in 1951, and Gyro Gearloose in 1952. By 1952, Scrooge had a comic book of his own, and Barks shifted his major efforts to the Scrooge stories.

  Don Rosa became the best-known Duck artist of his era, starting Disney comics in 1987 for the American publisher Gladstone. His stories contain many direct references to Barks, and he wrote and illustrated a 12-part series about the life of Scrooge McDuck that won him two Eisner Awards. The character's reach made him a database of names: artists across Europe and the Americas kept inventing relatives and rivals, from Donald's cousin Fethry Duck to the half-brother Rumpus McFowl revealed by William Van Horn.

• 7. A Nation's Duck

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  Donald became the most successful Disney character in the Nordic countries, where people recognize him better than Mickey Mouse. He is Kalle Anka in Sweden, Anders And in Denmark, Andrés Önd in Iceland, Donald Duck in Norway, and Aku Ankka in Finland. By 2005, around one in every four Norwegians read the Norwegian edition Donald Duck & Co. each week, roughly 1.3 million regular readers, while 434,000 Swedes read Kalle Anka & C:o weekly and the Finnish Aku Ankka sold 270,000 copies per issue.

  The affection turned political. In Finland, protest voters typically write "Donald Duck" as the candidate, and in Sweden voters often chose Donald Duck or the Donald Duck Party as a nonexistent candidate until a 2006 law banned it. Over a twenty-year span, Donald won enough votes to be, in theory, Sweden's ninth-most popular political organization, and in 1985 he received 291 votes in an election for the Parliament of Sweden.

  Hannu Raittila, an author, says Finnish people see themselves in Donald, who tries to pull himself out of "all manner of unexpected and unreasonable scrapes using only his wits and the slim resources he can put his hands on." Donald-themed comics sell an average of 250,000 copies each week in Germany. The Wall Street Journal called him "The Jerry Lewis of Germany," and his German dialogue tends to be philosophical, quoting from German literature and speaking in grammatically complex sentences, a style tied to Erika Fuchs's translations.

  In Italy, where he is named Paolino Paperino, his harsh American temper softens into a meeker, chronically unlucky everyman, forever frustrated by his lucky cousin Gladstone. To vent that frustration, the Italian version reinvented himself in 1969 as Paperinik, the Duck Avenger, a superhero alter ego created by Guido Martina. He later took on further identities, including the bumbling agent QQ7 and the suave secret agent DoubleDuck in the mold of James Bond.

• 8. The Duck Off Screen

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  Donald Duck was listed as a "hired" employee in the database of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development as late as 1978. He was given a $99,999 salary, more than double the $47,500 cap then legally set for federal civil servants, and the name went unchallenged by a computer meant to catch payroll fraud. Picked as one of thirty fictitious names by the Government Accounting Office, it was a test of whether HUD's payroll system could be manipulated to defraud the government.

  He is the only significant film and television cartoon character to serve as a mascot for a major American university, under a licensing agreement that lets the University of Oregon use his image as its "Fighting Duck." In 1984, during his 50th birthday celebration, he was named an honorary alumnus of the school. During a visit to the Eugene Airport, 3,000 to 4,000 fans gathered to present him an academic cap and gown, and thousands of area residents signed a congratulatory scroll now held in Disney's corporate archives.

  In the 1940s, Donald became the mascot of the Brazilian sports club Botafogo after Argentinean cartoonist Lorenzo Mollas drew him in the club's soccer uniform. Mollas chose him because he complains and fights for his rights, like the club's managers, and because a duck does not lose its elegance moving through water. He was eventually replaced to avoid royalties to Disney but kept the status of unofficial mascot.

  In 2005, Donald received his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6840 Hollywood Blvd. His original voice came from Clarence Nash, who performed him for 50 years, and as long as Nash was alive no one else was permitted to do the voice. Nash voiced Donald for the last time in Mickey's Christmas Carol in 1983, the only character in that film voiced by his original actor, and continued in commercials and promos until his death in 1985. Asteroid 12410 was named after him, a final marker that the screwball duck from Orphans' Benefit now has his name on a body in space.