Silly Symphony (comic strip)

The original creative team for the strip was animator Earl Duvall and artist Al Taliaferro, with Duvall responsible for writing and penciling, and Taliaferro inking. Duvall, who wrote the Silly Symphony short Bugs in Love, created Bucky Bug as the hero of the new Sunday strip.[5] In the first sequence, which lasts for three months, a young bug is born and sets forth into the world to make a name for himself. Stumped for a name, he asks the readers for help, and the strip encouraged readers to write to their newspapers with name suggestions. In the strip, a big pile of letters is delivered to the bug, and he spends two weeks combing through the letters to reveal the winning name: Bucky Bug.[4] Bucky travels through the forest to make his fortune, meeting up with a "friendly tramp" named Bo, and traveling to the insect city of Junkville. Bucky falls in love with the beautiful June Bugg, and her father—the mayor of Junkville—makes Bucky a general of his army. The bug couple is happy, but just a few strips later, the alarm sounds to alert the community that war has been declared by the flies.[4]

Duvall began an epic battle against the flies which raged for 28 weeks—but just before the story ended in April 1933, Duvall suddenly left the Disney studio. Animator Jack Kinney wrote that Duvall owed Walt Disney several weeks worth of storyboards, and Duvall simply gathered his belongings one day and left the company, "leaving Walt holding the bag".[6] Alberto Becattini suggests that Duvall's hasty exit was due to owing money to his colleagues that he couldn't pay.[7] Whatever the reason for Duvall's departure, Taliaferro became the artist for the strip, and he remained in that position for six years, with Ted Osborne as the strip's writer. Osborne and Taliaferro continued the story of Bucky for another 11 months, finally ending the saga on March 4, 1934.[5]

In 1934, Taliaferro drew the Silly Symphony story arc based on the cartoon The Wise Little Hen, which featured the first appearance of Donald Duck as a secondary character. That story, which lasted on the Sunday pages from September to December 1934, gave Taliaferro a particular liking for the Duck's character.[4] He pitched the idea of a Donald strip to Walt Disney, and Disney allowed him a trial run in the Silly Symphony comic. Finishing up a "The Three Little Pigs" adaptation, Taliaferro and writer Ted Osborne began an extended run of Donald Duck gag strips from August 30, 1936, to December 5, 1937.[8] Taliaferro then pitched the idea of a solo Donald comic strip to King Features Syndicate, working with writers Merrill De Maris and Homer Brightman.[9] On February 2, 1938, the Donald Duck comic strip started appearing in daily newspapers. A Sunday version was added on December 10, 1939.[1]

For the strip's first four years—from "Bucky Bug" through "The Further Adventures of the Three Little Pigs"—all of the dialogue was written in rhyming couplets. This changed with the 15-month period from August 1936 to December 1937 when Donald Duck was featured in the strip, often performing pantomime gags with little or no dialogue at all. When Donald relinquished the strip in favor of an adaptation of the new Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs film, the dialogue was written in storybook style, without rhyming couplets, and the rhymes never returned.[10]

The Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs sequence was the first of many newspaper comic strip adaptations of newly released Disney animated features. The film's general release in February 1938 came in the middle of the newspaper continuity, which was published from December 1937 to April 1938. The strip used a number of story ideas that were ultimately abandoned in the film, including a more elaborate and comical meeting between the Prince and Snow White (in which Snow White creates a "dummy" of her dream prince, which the real Prince sneaks into), and an entire storyline in which the Evil Queen kidnaps the Prince to prevent him from saving Snow White.[11]

After the Snow White adaptation in 1938, the strip featured a mix of the three established motifs—further adaptations of Silly Symphony shorts (Farmyard Symphony, The Ugly Duckling) and animated features (Pinocchio and Bambi) and several runs of gag strips featuring a popular character, Pluto.

Pluto was given star billing in a five-week run of strips titled Pluto the Pup, which ran from February 19 to March 19, 1939. The dog's owner, Mickey Mouse, was already featured in the other cartoon on the Mickey Mouse strip's Sunday page, and by this time, Donald Duck was also busy in his own strip, so in Pluto's first Silly Symphony run, he lives with Mickey's friend, Goofy. (In the first strip, Goofy complains to Pluto, "Why'd I tell Mickey I'd take care of yuh?") Later, Pluto is also seen being cared for by Minnie Mouse, Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar.[12]

Pluto's run was interrupted by a month-long adaptation of The Ugly Duckling, and then he returned for a much longer period, from April 23 to December 17, 1939. This was followed by a two-month adaptation of Pinocchio, and then Pluto returned for his third and final Silly Symphony stint, from April 14 to November 3, 1940.[12]

Starting in 1942, the strip featured José Carioca, who had recently been introduced in the film Saludos Amigos. According to comics historian Maurice Horn, "The first Sunday page opened with a panoramic tour of Rio de Janeiro before closing up on the shack that was 'the home of a young-man-about-town, a gay carefree Brazilian papagaio named José Carioca.' This marked the first U.S. appearance of the nattily-dressed, pleasure-seeking parrot... The gags were quite unsophisticated and revolved around three main themes: the antihero's scheming to get a free meal, his pursuit of the opposite sex, and his imaginative avoidance of work."[13] The strip also included José's friends João and Nestor, and featured continuing stories. Alberto Becattini notes, "In spite of always being broke, the parrot liked to attend posh restaurants and hotels, where he often met with such curvy bird-faced chicas as the wealthy María Rocha Vaz, the blonde dancer Rae, and Gloria del Orto, in a series of adventures that even led him to the Amazon forest."[14]

In April 1944, José was joined by the Mexican rooster Panchito, who would be introduced as José's companion in the 1945 film The Three Caballeros. José and Panchito competed to win the heart of the horse-riding Mimi, and a few months later, in October 1944, Panchito took over the strip.[14]

With Panchito as the main character, the action of the strip moved to Mexico, and became a gag-a-week strip featuring the rooster and his horse, Señor Martinez.[14] Horn describes this cycle as well: "José made way for another Latin-American knockabout, the fiery rooster Panchito... As energetic as José was lazy, the sombrero-hatted, gun-toting Mexican fowl was always shown riding horses, fighting bulls, and lassoing cattle, when he was not busy wooing his chick, the fickle Chiquita."[13] The final strip ran on October 7, 1945.[1]

On October 14, 1945, the strip was replaced by Uncle Remus and His Tales of Br'er Rabbit, a strip inspired by the upcoming 1946 film Song of the South. The Uncle Remus strip began, like the others, as a topper for the Mickey Mouse strip, but after the first few years, almost always appeared on its own.[15] The previous comic strip adaptations of Disney films lasted for four or five months, but the Uncle Remus strip continued for almost thirty years, telling new stories of Br'er Rabbit and friends, until the strip was discontinued on December 31, 1972.[16]

Two more Silly Symphony-style feature film adaptations appeared in the early 50s, running 16 weeks each: Cinderella (1950) and Alice in Wonderland (1951).[14]

A similar Sunday strip, Walt Disney's Treasury of Classic Tales, launched on July 13, 1952, with The Story of Robin Hood, a five-month adaptation of Disney's 1952 live-action film. The strip, which was principally a vehicle for promoting new and re-released Disney films,[17] adapted both live-action films and cartoons. The strip ran for 35 years, until February 15, 1987.[18]

The headings in the table below refer to the IDW Publishing reprint collections, Silly Symphonies: The Complete Disney Classics. Writing and art credits are from the reprint collections.

Strips from Silly Symphony were reprinted in Disney's flagship anthology comic book Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, beginning with some Pluto the Pup strips in issue #12 (September 1941),[19] followed by The Boarding-School Mystery in issue #14 (November 1941),[20] The Further Adventures of the Three Little Pigs in issue #15 (December 1941),[21] and an abridged version of Bucky Bug Gets His Name in issue #20 (May 1942).[22]

Three of the Silly Symphony stories inspired long-running features in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories.

The complete strip has been reprinted in four hardcover collections, Silly Symphonies: The Complete Disney Classics, published by IDW Publishing's Library of American Comics imprint.

The first volume, published in 2016, includes all of the strips from "Bucky Bug" (1932) to "Cookieland" (1935). Volume 2, also published in 2016, includes "Three Little Kittens" (1935) to "Timid Elmer" (1939). Volume 3, published in 2018, includes "Pluto the Pup" (1939) to "Little Hiawatha" (1942). The fourth volume, published in 2019, concludes the series with "Bambi" (1942) through "Panchito" (1945).

The copyright then passed to Fantagraphics, who started republishing the four volumes, with a different layout, beginning in April 2023.

• Silly Symphonies at the INDUCKS