Pete (Disney)

• 1. Introduction

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  Pete, the cartoon villain also called Peg Leg Pete, Bad Pete and Black Pete, first walked onto a screen on the 15th of February 1925 as Bootleg Pete. The cartoon was Alice Solves the Puzzle. His nickname pointed to his trade, smuggling alcoholic drinks during Prohibition in the United States, which ran from 1920 to 1933.

  In that cartoon, Pete arrives at a beach just as Alice is working on a crossword puzzle. It turns out that he collects crosswords, and hers is a rare one missing from his collection. The rest of the short follows his scheme to steal it from Alice and her drunken cat Julius.

  That debut makes Pete the oldest continuing Disney character. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks created him, and he later became notorious for his repeated attempts to kidnap Minnie Mouse. Yet he began life looking like an anthropomorphic bear, not the scheming cat most viewers remember.

  So how does a bootlegger from a silent-era series end up as the arch-nemesis of a mouse? Why did a villain's wooden leg keep switching sides, until animators gave up on it? And how did the same character become a used car salesman, a drill sergeant, a landlord and a boss in video games?

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• 2. Rival Studios

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  Putrid Pete and Pegleg Pete were two of the aliases the character wore in later Alice Comedies, where he kept battling Alice and Julius. The series ended, but Walt Disney still needed a villain for his new star, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

  The sixth Oswald short, The Ocean Hop, released on the 8th of September 1927, introduced Pete as Oswald's adversary. The story was apparently inspired by Charles Lindbergh. The two characters enter an aeroplane race across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Disney then left, and producer Charles Mintz moved the Oswald series to his own studio. By that point Pete had become the supporting character who appeared most consistently opposite the rabbit. He kept that role in the Oswald films made by Walter Lantz Productions, which ran until 1937.

  That made Pete essentially the only cartoon character of his day to appear regularly in shorts from two rival studios. His best-known appearance outside Disney was as a captain in Permanent Wave, released on the 29th of September 1929.

  By then Disney's own team had already started building a new hero around a mouse, and that hero needed an enemy.

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• 3. Mickey's Nemesis

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  The Gallopin' Gaucho and Steamboat Willie, both from 1928, put Pete opposite Mickey Mouse for the first time. With Mickey's arrival that year, the character was defined as a cat. In those films he still had two ordinary legs.

  His name took a while to settle. The cartoons left him unnamed, and a January 1930 comic strip called him Terrible Tom. By April 1930 he was Pegleg Pete, a new version of the old pre-Mickey bad guy.

  The peg-leg itself arrived on screen in 1930's The Cactus Kid, the cartoon in which Pete also spoke for the first time. Animator Norm Ferguson, known for developing Pluto, shaped Pete's personality in several shorts. The character was made to resemble the actor Wallace Beery.

  In Moving Day, from 1936, Pete first appeared in color, and that short dropped the peg-leg. There he plays a sheriff who serves Mickey and Donald Duck with an eviction notice. In the 1930s he could be an all-out outlaw, as in Two-Gun Mickey, or a brutal enforcer of the law.

  Symphony Hour, from 1942, turned him into a sympathetic impresario. He sponsors Mickey's orchestra in a concert that goes terribly wrong yet becomes a great success.

  As Mickey's popularity declined, Pete shifted to troubling Donald Duck, and less often Goofy and Chip 'n' Dale. Across all of this he appeared in 67 animated shorts between 1925 and 1954.

  The last of them, The Lone Chipmunks in 1954, closed a three-part Chip 'n' Dale series, with Pete playing a hardened criminal.

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• 4. The Wandering Leg

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  On the 26th of August 1930, Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse comic strip showed Pete's peg swapping from his right leg to his left between one panel and the next. It was not the only slip. The peg also sat on the left in the strip of the 11th of July, and again during the week of the 3rd to the 9th of September.

  In Gottfredson's story The Mystery at Hidden River, from 1941-42, the peg vanished altogether. When Mickey expressed surprise, Pete explained that one of his legs was a new, "streamlined, modern" artificial leg.

  In 1944, Walt Disney decided to retire the character from the shorts. Comics historian Alberto Becattini writes that this was "partly because he was concerned that it seemed to be a case of mocking the afflicted, partly because the animators could never remember which leg was the wooden one." Pete also left the comic strip for a few years, after The World of Tomorrow ran from July to September 1944.

  He did not leave the comic books. In January 1945 he was the heavy in the Donald Duck comic Frozen Gold, and in August 1945 in Mickey's The Riddle of the Red Hat. Cereal giveaway comics from 1946 and 1947, including three Cheerios premiums, kept him in circulation.

  In March 1947, Gottfredson brought him back to the strip in Pegleg Pete Reforms. His last strip appearance was The Isle of Moola-La, which ran from April to October 1952.

  In Italy he remains Pietro Gambadilegno, or simply Gambadilegno, meaning Pegleg, long after the wooden leg disappeared. In Romano Scarpa's 1959 story Topolino e la dimensione Delta, he briefly removes his artificial leg. Underneath is his old foot-high pegleg.

  His name changed from country to country. Sweden's Svarte Petter and Denmark's Sorteper both mean Black Peter. The Dutch call him Boris Boef, meaning Boris Crook. The French name Pat Hibulaire is a pun on patibulaire, meaning sinister-looking. In Germany he is Kater Karlo, since Kater means a male cat. In Turkey he is Barut, meaning gunpowder.

  When Pete returned in the 2013 short Get a Horse!, animators gave him a peg on his left leg.

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• 5. Drafted

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  During World War II, Walt Disney "drafted" Pete as the official mascot of the United States Merchant Marine. On screen, he took on a different uniform in Donald Duck's army shorts, such as Donald Gets Drafted and The Old Army Game. There he plays Donald's drill sergeant, later promoted to sergeant and jumpmaster.

  The comic strip was less cheerful about him. In the 1943 story Mickey Mouse on a Secret Mission, Pete works as an agent of Nazi Germany. He serves as the henchman of a Gestapo spy named Von Weasel, and his motive is money.

  A different kind of regime followed in 1950. In the strip The Moook Treasure, he is portrayed as the Beria-like deputy chief of intelligence in a totalitarian state on the far side of the Iron Curtain.

  Neither role was the sort of villainy his family tree might have predicted, and the comic books had a lot to say about that family.

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• 6. Family Tree

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  Attila the Hun, Blackbeard, Antonio López de Santa Anna, Billy the Kid and Cao Cao all appear as ancestors of Pete in comic book stories. In them, he descends from a long line of villains, highwaymen and outlaws.

  His mother, known only as Maw Pete, was first mentioned in October 1942, in the Carl Barks and Jack Hannah story Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold, as a resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She appears in person only in The River Pirates, published from September to November 1968. That story also introduced Li'l Pete, Black Pete's short fraternal twin brother. A different twin named Zeke appears in Double Trouble.

  In December 1998, the Mickey Mouse comic strip introduced an older sister named Petula. She hosts a cooking show called Petula's Pantry, and she seeks revenge against Mickey for condemning her "baby brother" to life imprisonment.

  The longer-lasting relatives came from Italy, created by Romano Scarpa. Trudy Van Tubb debuted on the 10th of March 1960 in Topolino e la collana Chirikawa, published in English as The Chirikawa Necklace. She is presented as a childhood acquaintance of Pete, and the two are even shown as kids kidnapping baby Mickey.

  Trudy soon became his girlfriend, partner-in-crime and roommate, whenever they live outside prison. Their bond has settled into a long-standing common-law marriage. Stories sometimes contrast it with Mickey's eternal engagement to Minnie and Goofy's determination to stay a bachelor. The couple also have two hellion nephews, Pierino and Pieretto.

  Scarpa's second creation was Pete's cousin Portis, a criminal scientist. Portis first appeared on the 9th of January 1977 in Topolino e il Pippo-lupo, published in English as The Weregoof's Curse. His Italian name is Plottigat, and the English name was first used in 2008.

  Ed Nofziger created a rival girlfriend named Chirpy Bird, who debuted in December 1981 and starred in eight stories from 1981 to 1984. French editions treat Chirpy and Trudy as one character, renaming both Gertrude, even though Trudy is a cat and Chirpy is a canary.

  The 1961 story Mickey's Strange Mission gives Pete the genteel full name Percy P. Percival. Perhaps the odder relative, though, is the grandma in the 1998 Italian story Topolino e il diario di zia Topolinda. She is the only honest member of the family.

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• 7. Television Faces

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  In the first season of the 1987 series DuckTales, a different Pete appeared in each of a few episodes, always voiced by Will Ryan. He was Captain Pietro in Duck in the Iron Mask, Captain Blackheart in Time Teasers, Dogface Pete in Merit-Time Adventure and Sharkey in Pearl of Wisdom. Two of them lived in different time periods, and Scrooge never recognizes him. In some episodes he makes peace with Scrooge's group.

  Goof Troop, from 1992, gave Pete a completely new life. He had a wife named Peg, two children named Pete Junior, called PJ, and Pistol, and a dog named Chainsaw. He took on a more canine appearance. He lived next door to Goofy, who had gone to high school with him, and ran a used car dealership.

  The pilot episode Forever Goof explains one reason Pete dislikes Goofy. When Pete was a high school quarterback in a big game, Goofy, on the cheerleading squad, accidentally hit him in the face with a pom pom. Pete fumbled the ball and lost the game. In the series he is often the victim of Goofy's clumsiness, though he still schemes and exploits his good-hearted friend. His son PJ, meanwhile, is a complete opposite of his father in behavior.

  Mickey Mouse Works restored his wicked ways, with Pete bullying the other characters and occasionally kidnapping Minnie. The series also gave him a cousin named Zeke, who is wary of Pete's attempts to double-cross him "Just like old Times". In House of Mouse, which ran from 2001 to 2003, he became the evil landlord who tries to close the club by sabotaging its shows.

  The 2013 Mickey Mouse series and its 2020 spin-off, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, return to his early look, peg-leg included. In Mickey Mouse Funhouse, his counterparts include Pete the Mighty, a demigod hero, and Octopete, a version with octopus legs. Mayor Franken-Pete speaks in the style of Boris Karloff.

  The revival Mickey Mouse Clubhouse+ adds more, including Chef Pete in The Late Late Show. He makes peanut butter and jellybean sandwiches at Goofy's request so everyone can stay up for a meteor shower.

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• 8. Films and Games

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  In the 1983 short Mickey's Christmas Carol, adapting Charles Dickens' novel A Christmas Carol, Pete was cast as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. In The Prince and the Pauper, from 1990, he was the primary villain, serving as the English king's captain of the guard. With a band of weasel guards, he terrorizes the villagers while the king declines.

  He mistakes a disguised Prince for the peasant boy Mickey and kicks him out of the kingdom. Pete later captures the real Prince and locks him in the dungeon. On coronation day, Pete plots to crown Mickey as king while controlling him. His plan ends in the throne room, when a chandelier bundles the weasels together and sends them rolling into Pete. He tumbles through a stained glass window.

  A Goofy Movie in 1995 and An Extremely Goofy Movie in 2000 are based on Goof Troop, so Pete is still snooty but much lighter in tone. In 1999's Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas, he is the neighbor who tells Max that Santa Claus cannot exist, and later Mickey's boss selling Christmas trees.

  In the 2004 film The Three Musketeers, he is Peg-Leg Pete, Captain of the Musketeers. He aims to take over France with Clarabelle Cow and the Beagle Boys. He hires Mickey, Donald and Goofy as Princess Minnie's bodyguards, believing they will fail. He also gets a villain's song set to In the Hall of the Mountain King.

  He also turns up briefly elsewhere. In the 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he has a non-speaking cameo as a Toontown police officer. In 2022's Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, he is seen on the set of a bootleg Aladdin film.

  In video games, he is usually the boss. In the English version of Mickey Mousecapade, he replaces Captain Hook from the Japanese version. In the Disney's Magical Quest trilogy, he is the final boss of each game. He kidnaps Pluto in the first and Donald's nephews in the third. In the third game, he surrenders and promises to become a good person.

  In Epic Mickey, he appears as Big Bad Pete, who tells Mickey that many other Petes exist, each themed after a different zone.

  In the Kingdom Hearts series, Pete is a recurring villain. He was a steamboat captain, then captain of the Royal Musketeers until Mickey foiled his coup. Later he serves Maleficent, gathering Heartless for her. In Kingdom Hearts II, his longing to relive his steamboat years opens a portal to the Timeless River world.

  In Kingdom Hearts III, Pete and Maleficent search for a mysterious black box left by the Keyblade Master Luxu. In the post-credits scene, they watch Xigbar meet the Foretellers.

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