Donald Duck made his screen debut
On this day · 9 June 1934
A bit player with a temper and an unintelligible squawk waddled into a barnyard cartoon and never left.
On the release date credited by distributor United Artists, June 9, 1934, Donald Duck made his screen debut in the Walt Disney Silly Symphony short The Wise Little Hen. He was a supporting player: a lazy duck who, alongside Peter Pig, fakes a bellyache to dodge planting and harvesting corn, only to be denied the cornbread at the end.
Nobody expected the bit part to matter. Yet the sailor-suited duck, voiced from the start by Clarence “Ducky” Nash in a famously garbled squawk, had a temper that read on screen where calmer characters did not.
Within a few years the irascible duck was outpacing Mickey Mouse in cartoon appearances.
The cartoon itself was based on the folk tale The Little Red Hen, with Donald grafted on as comic relief. His quick rise made him one of animation’s most enduring stars, soon anchoring his own series and, eventually, a sprawling family of nephews, cousins, and a notoriously rich uncle named Scrooge.
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