Beyond the Trivia-Donald Duck

This is a big week for Donald Duck. The Disney animated character turned 86 on Tuesday, the day he first appeared in a cartoon, "The Wise Little Hen". The duck soon acquired a name, began looking more human and less duck-like and was given his own cartoon series. Today's trivia question asks what is Donald Duck's middle name. Is it Abercrombie, Fauntleroy, Sebastian or Walter?

Answer:

If it were Walter, that would be a way of paying tribute to Walt Disney, but it's not Walter. It's also not Abercrombie or Sebastian. Little Lord Fauntleroy was a popular rags to riches children's novel in the late 18 hundreds that provided Donald Duck with his middle name. Young Cedric Errol, the main character of the book, is a poor American who discovers his grandfather is an English earl, making the boy Lord Fauntleroy. The character has been described as the Harry Potter of his time. Fauntleroy suits with velvet cutaway coats and matching knee pants and other Fauntleroy items became quite popular in the U.S.

Donald Duck has a cutaway coat, but it's a sailor suit, deemed suitable attire for a creature that takes to the water. (Strangely enough, we almost never see Donald in water.) By his second film appearance, Donald was a temperamental foil to Mickey Mouse and he eventually replaced Mickey as the most popular Disney character. Donald Duck has appeared in more films than any other Disney character and is the world's most-published comic book character other than superheroes.

The story is that Walt Disney wanted to create an animal friend to Mickey Mouse. At the time, Australian cricket icon Donald Bradman made news after being dismissed for a duck in a match. A duck in cricket is a batsman's dismissal with a score of zero. It comes from the term "duck egg" to mean a score of zero; in America we tend to describe zero in a score as a goose egg. Anyway, apparently Disney saw a headline about Donald Bradman being dismissed for a duck and decided to name his new duck Donald.

Voice artist Clarence Nash heard that Disney was creating new animal characters and auditioned in a voice he thought would be suitable for a nervous baby goat, but Walt thought it sounded like a cartoon duck. For the rest of his life, Clarence Nash was the voice of Donald Duck.