Walt Disney Productions released 'The Wise Little Hen,' the animated short in which Donald Duck first appeared on screen, voiced by Clarence Nash. Donald's cocky, temperamental personality contrasted sharply with the wholesome earnestness of Mickey Mouse, and audiences responded immediately. Within a few years he had eclipsed Mickey as Disney's most popular character, eventually starring in more films than any other Disney character of the era.
Clarence Nash had been performing his squawky, half-intelligible duck voice for years, using it to sell goat milk, before a Disney story man happened to hear him do it and brought him in for an audition. Walt Disney was reportedly delighted, and the voice became the basis for an entirely new character built around comic frustration rather than Mickey's cheerful competence.
In 'The Wise Little Hen,' adapted loosely from the fable of the same name, Donald and his friend Peter Pig try to dodge farm work and pay the price when the industrious hen refuses to share her harvested corn with the lazy. Donald's role was small, but his personality, vain, short-tempered, prone to unintelligible tantrums, was fully formed from the start.
Audiences loved the contrast. Where Mickey Mouse embodied idealized decency, Donald embodied something more recognizably human: bad moods, sore losing, comic overreaction. Disney animators found him far more elastic and expressive to draw than the increasingly iconic and thus constrained Mickey, and Donald went on to star in more theatrical shorts than any other Disney character, becoming one of the most merchandised cartoon figures in history.
Key people: Walt Disney, Clarence Nash