Officially, Donald Duck’s birthday is the ninth of June. This coincides with the release of “The Wise Little Hen,” his first appearance. And that’s fine, and that makes a certain amount of sense, if one is to celebrate the birthday of a fictional character. An argument can be made for the day he was first drawn, but that’s harder to track down. It also relies on a universal agreement for “first drawn,” and given the evolutions characters can go through, you’re unlikely to get full agreement there. Is it someone’s doodle or the fully fleshed out character chart?
The issue I have with this, however, is that in other references, Donald is revealed to have been born on Friday the thirteenth, because of course he was. Specifically, he seems to have the in-universe birthday of March 13, 1914. Which would have made him twenty in that first appearance—old for a duck, I grant you, as ducks usually live no more than about ten years, but an anthropoid duck can I suppose live longer. And twenty’s not a bad time to assume someone starts an acting career. So we’ve got a contradiction, even in official Disney sources, and the March 13 day gets quietly ignored.
It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if you could similarly track down dates like this for other Disney characters, where they were assigned birthdays for reasons not related to their release dates. It is also admittedly kind of odd to worry about it at all. What’s Kermit the Frog’s birthday? It depends. There’s the day he was made—easier to pin down, certainly, than when a character was first drawn—the day Sam and Friends debuted, and even the day of Jim Henson’s birth with the year of Kermit’s creation. Bugs Bunny is listed as his first release date, but should you or shouldn’t you include the proto-versions that appeared before the Bugs we know now?
It gets even weirder when you consider things like Snow White and the others. Do all characters in a movie have the same birthday? So are the parents and children and so forth all the same age? Obviously not. Which means assigning arbitrary birthdays and ages to everyone if you mention them at all—and in most of the movies, the characters’ ages are never given and arguably do not matter. Obviously, Aurora is turning sixteen, and one or two others explicitly state their ages, but how do we know Snow White is fourteen? Does the movie ever say?
I actually originally scheduled my article for today because I seemed to remember this as Donald’s birthday, and April Fools’ Day would make sense for him as well. Or for either Daffy or Bugs. Goofy, maybe. Gonzo. If you’re going to give your characters birthdays at all, why not just decide for yourself what day they are? And why not make them appropriate to the character? Of course Donald Duck was born on Friday the thirteenth; no matter how much his problems are often his own fault, he is also sometimes a pawn of fate.
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