More About Pete

[RMorris306@aol.com]

Quite an interesting discussion here! I heard, by the way, that Disney 
eventually decided even "Black Pete" was too politically incorrect (making 
him sound like an African-American), so they experimented with other 
sobriquets like "Big Bad Pete" before settling on just plain Pete. 
(Especially since he isn't always a total villain in more recent animation; 
the GOOF TROOP TV series and its two spinoff movies has Pete and Goofy as 
sometimes argumentative but basically friendly neighbors with sons who are 
best friends.)

In the comics, could Murry's story have been an adaptation of Gottfredson's 
"The Mystery at Hidden River?" That was the comic strip story in which Pete 
first appeared with two legs (following the cartoons), though it was 
explained as an artificial leg, which was why he sometimes has the peg in 
later Gottfredson stories and sometimes doesn't. He also used the alias 
Pierre de la Pooch in that story (a surprising one since it seems to hint 
he's a dog, like most of the other Disney characters...even though he's more 
often considered to be a cat); "Pierre" of course being the French equivalent 
of the English name Peter (for which Pete is a diminuitive), as "Pietro" is 
in Italian. Which could be why he has that name in the Murry story, whether 
it's an adaptation of the Gottfredson story or (as was sometimes the case) a 
sequel to it.

This whole discussion perhaps explains that the Italian writers and artists 
take story-to-story consistency much more seriously than the Americans (with 
a few exceptions like Barks, Gottfredson, and Rosa) ever did. One Scarpa 
story reprinted by Gladstone picked up on that point; it had Mickey and Pete 
in such an intense swordfight that ALL their clothes were torn to 
pieces...including Pete's artificial leg, so he and Mickey were both standing 
their in the altogether (no naughty bits, of course...) complete with Pete's 
peg! (The only exception being their gloves, which I can hardly remember ever 
seeing them take off, even to sleep...though Mickey did so once when he went 
swimming in an early strip written by Walt Disney, no less. True, the gloves 
would probably have been protected by the swords' hilts, but what about their 
other hands? Ah, well...)


Rich Morrissey