Donald Duck’s first appearance on screen was the animated short titled The Wise Little Hen. He was intended as a one-off supporting character, but his immediate popularity meant Disney used him in subsequent comic stories and animated shorts.
Within a few years of his debut appearance in 1934, Donald Duck had already achieved a celebrity status comparable to Shirley Temple or Greta Garbo. His popularity is made clear in Disney’s 1939 animated short The Autograph Hound, whereby the Hollywood A-List of the time drop their studio filming commitments to seek Donald’s autograph.
By 1940, Walt Disney himself referred to Donald Duck as “the Gable of our stable” – pairing Donald’s popularity with the Hollywood superstar Clark Gable, the biggest name at MGM Studios at the time. Donald’s icon status was cemented in the 1940s the world over, from comic books in Europe and South America, to starring in US government domestic propaganda during the second world war.
