He is the most curmudgeonly character in a star-studded Disney menagerie that includes Mickey and Minnie Mouse, Goofy and Pluto.
Donald Duck — the irrascible but unflappable waterfowl — is preparing to be feted in grand fashion, as he turns 75 years old Tuesday.
From the beginning, fabled cartoonist Walt Disney envisioned Donald Duck as a foil to Mickey Mouse, his good-as-gold, animated star created a half-dozen years earlier.
While goody-two-shoes Mickey was most appealing to children, Disney sought to create in Donald Duck a more piquant character with adult appeal — and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
In his 75 years, his feathered anti-hero has tried his hand at more than 100 different professions, but failed at them all. Donald always seems to be short of cash and make a habit of lurching from one misadventure to the next.
But no matter how often thwarted and how deeply humiliated, Donald Duck forges on — which is what has made him such a big hit with his legions of fans.
“He’s a loser, not a quitter, and he’ll go down fighting,” wrote the Disney company in its description of the beloved character on their website.
{{/usCountry}}“He’s a loser, not a quitter, and he’ll go down fighting,” wrote the Disney company in its description of the beloved character on their website.
{{/usCountry}}Known for his barely decipherable speech and his penchant for running afoul of the other Disney characters, Donald, beneath it all, has a heart of gold, another quality that has charmed adoring fans over the decades.
The prickly duck made his celluloid debut on appeared on June 9, 1934 in a short animated feature called Little Wise Hen, a movie fable fashioned on the Little Red Hen fairy tale about a chicken who finds that help is scarce when she tries to recruit workers to plant and harvest her corn crop.