Donald Duck turns 90 years old. Here are 10 facts about Disney’s duck

Happy birthday, Donald Duck!

The iconic Disney cartoon character turned 90 on Sunday. To celebrate the boisterous icon’s decades of entertaining us on screen, here are 10 surprising facts about everyone’s favorite duck.

Donald Duck initially started out as a secondary character

The notoriously bad-tempered man made his first cartoon appearance on June 9, 1934, as a supporting character in the short The Wise Chicken.

“Donald Duck started out as a supporting character, but they immediately realized he was a perfect foil for Mickey Mouse,” said Becky Cline, director of the Walt Disney Archives, in a statement. video promoting the character’s 90th birthday. “He could do anything.”

There is some discrepancy about his birthday

Although June 9 is listed as his official birthday, some of Donald Duck’s films appear to list other dates as his birthday.

In the movie The Three Horsemen, His birthday is said to be “Friday the 13th,” a reference to how Donald Duck experiences a lot of bad luck in many films, according to the Hollywood Walk of Fame website. In Happy birthday from Donald, His birthday is said to be March 13th.

He was in the army

On May 1, 1942, Donald Duck made his first military appearance in the film Donald is summoned, according to Militar.com.

Cline said ABC7 is on the red carpet that the US government asked Disney to use Donald Duck in short films that tried to motivate people to pay their taxes to support the war effort during World War II.

See more information: Mickey Mouse is now in the public domain after 95 years of Disney copyright

Donald Duck has a middle name

In Donald is summoned, viewers can see his draft card, which lists his middle name as Fauntleroy, according to Military.com.

Famous voice actor can inspired the creation of the character

Clarence Nash had a talent for animal imitations, says film historian JB Kaufman NPR. The voice actor was already doing some freelance work for Disney before taking on the iconic — and often unintelligible — role of Donald Duck, according to Kaufman. Kaufman said Nash is partly grateful for the creation of Donald Duck — the voice actor had a “parlor trick of putting on the voice of a baby goat” to make “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” and when Walt Disney heard it, he imagined a duck. speaker.

Nash also voiced Donald Duck’s nephews, Scrooge McDuck, and sometimes even Mickey Mouse, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society. While Nash retired from Disney in 1971, he often performed his duck voice for children who were in hospitals. He voiced Donald Duck one last time for Mickey’s Christmas Carol in 1983, before dying of leukemia in 1985.

Since 1985, Tony Anselmo has been the main voice of Donald Duck. He was trained by Nash himself for the role, according to the Hollywood Walk of Fame website.

Donald Duck has a twin sister

While most fans know that Donald Duck has three nephews – Huey, Dewey and Louie – some may not know that he has a twin sister. Della Duck, Donald Duck’s twin and mother of Donald Duck’s three nephews, appears on the TV show Duck Tales, which premiered in 2017 as a reboot of the previous show, according to the Associated Press. Part of Della Duck’s storyline in the series is about her crash landing on the moon, which caused her to lose a leg.

He was on TV Guide’s 50 Greatest Cartoon Characters of All Time

Donald Duck ranked 43rd on the 2002 list, sharing the list with other beloved characters such as Bugs Bunny, Homer Simpson, The Grinch and SpongeBob SquarePants, CNN reported.

Donald Duck has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame

The beloved Disney character achieved Hollywood stardom in a ceremony on August 9, 2004. His star is located at 6840 Hollywood Blvd, according to the Hollywood Walk of Fame website.

He was in a movie that won an Oscar

In 1943, Donald Duck appeared in The Führer’s face, an anti-Nazi political satire short film, according to ABC7. The film won the academic award for best cartoon short.

Donald Duck inspired a school mascot

Donald Duck is the inspiration behind the University of Oregon mascot, although the official mascot is known as The Oregon duck. In an informal agreement, Disney allowed the university to use the beloved cartoon character’s image as its mascot for free, as long as “it was used in a respectable manner,” according to the newspaper. university website. When Walt Disney died in 1966, his estate and the university realized that there was no formal contract regarding the mascot, so the two parties “worked to create a written agreement describing the terms of Donald’s continued use as the official representative of the Oregon Ducks.” ,” the university said on its website.

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