6. Peter Pig
Donald Duck made his cartoon debut in the 1934 short "The Wise Little Hen," as one of the title character's layabout neighbors. Donald went on to a long career in cartoons, engaging in all the antisocial behavior that his role-model pal Mickey had outgrown. Donald's pal, Peter Pig, faded into obscurity after a couple more appearances. It's tough to figure out why. He's almost as funny as Donald. Maybe the world found it easier to embrace a hotheaded duck than a grotesquely obese ( even by pig standards) beanie-wearing porker.
7. Foxy Loxy
As America entered World War II, Disney shifted its focus to wartime efforts, producing training films like "Food Will Win The War" and "Four Methods Of Flush Riveting." The shift was made for patriotic reasons, but it also opened up a crucial new revenue stream after the relative failure of Fantasia and Bambi helped put the brakes on feature-length Disney cartoons. But not all the efforts were for instructional purposes. Disney also kept civilians involved in the war with propaganda cartoons like "Der Fuehrer's Face" (in which Donald Duck has a nightmare that he lives in Nazi Germany) and "Chicken Little." The latter adopts the famous fable into a story about the importance of staying on guard against enemy efforts on the home front. Here, the enemy takes the form of Foxy Loxy, a villain who begins a campaign against a peaceful barnyard using techniques borrowed from Mein Kampf—here changed to a book simply called Psychology.
8. Alexander de Seversky
Walt Disney was so impressed with the arguments aviation pioneer Alexander de Seversky advanced in his 1942 book Victory Through Air Power that he rushed an animated feature version into production, drafting de Seversky for talking-head interludes. It's one of Disney's least-known yet most entertaining feature films: a superior piece of wartime propaganda that starts with a brief history of manned flight, then makes a persuasive case for bolstering our air force to weaken German and Japanese supply lines. (It's especially fascinating for the utter divorcement of military strategy from moral concerns; de Seversky sounds almost envious when he details the Nazi game plan.) But why did Disney stop at one film starring de Seversky? Why not a sequel, based on de Seversky's Electroatom Corporation, dedicated to defending against nuclear annihilation by extracting radioactive particles from the air? Victory Through Vacuuming!
9. Robert Benchley
Like de Seversky, Benchley only appeared in one Disney feature—the thrown-together, behind-the-scenes 1941 "documentary" The Reluctant Dragon—though he had a long pre-Disney career as a published humorist and the star of a series of dryly comic "how to" shorts. In The Reluctant Dragon, he plays "himself," wandering lost through the Disney studios to keep an appointment with Walt. The film was made on the quick to recoup some revenue lost when the war deprived Disney of key foreign markets, and it was released during an animator's strike, which made the mostly live-action footage seem unintentionally opportunistic. But Benchley is a delight, falling into the mode of his well-known movie character: a kindly, erudite, somewhat misbegotten "expert." When Benchley died four years later, his Hollywood popularity was in decline, though in some ways, his warm onscreen persona lived on via TV in the person of Walt Disney. Disney didn't play hapless, but otherwise, he was every bit Benchley's doughy, mustachioed middle-class gent.
10. Goldie
As the Disney enterprise grew, it became harder and harder for Walt to stay involved in all aspects of its operations. The 1935 short "The Golden Touch" marked a return to a more hands-on role. An adaptation of the King Midas story, it found Disney surprisingly unable to reach the high standards he demanded of his animators. The gags are labored, the story talky, the animation strangely lifeless, and the characters unappealing. None were less appealing than Goldie, the curse-bestowing sprite who looks like a long-lost ancestor to a Keebler elf and sounds like a long-lost ancestor to Alvin And The Chipmunks.
11. Professor Owl
The 1953 3D short "Melody" was intended to kick off of a whole "Adventures In Music" series, walking viewers through music history and theory. But only one other was ever produced: "Toot, Whistle, Plunk And Boom," an early Cinemascope effort from the same year. Both are hosted by the blue-coated, bespectacled Professor Owl, an authoritative little bird who stands in front of a classroom full of like-minded feathered friends and delivers lectures in rhyme, with a dash of jive-speak. The two shorts share some of the loose, funky animation style of the UPA studio—a shop founded by ex-Disney animators, as it happens. And though both remained beloved by Disney scholars and music buffs alike, "Melody" and "Toot, Whistle, Plunk And Boom" didn't do enough business in their day to defray the costs of their experimental techniques. So somewhere in the storage warehouses of Disneyland, a Professor Owl costume lies crumpled in a box, molting.
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