Pete (Disney)
Pete is a cartoon character created by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks of The Walt Disney Company. Pete is traditionally depicted as the villainous arch-nemesis of Mickey Mouse, and was made notorious for his repeated attempts to kidnap Minnie Mouse. Pete is the oldest continuing Disney character, having debuted in the cartoon Alice Solves the Puzzle in 1925. He originally bore the appearance of an anthropomorphic bear, but with the advent of Mickey in 1928, he was defined as a cat.
Pete appeared in 67 animated short films between 1925 and 1954, having been featured in the Alice Comedies and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons, and later in the Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy cartoons. During World War II, he played the long-suffering sergeant trying to make a soldier out of Donald Duck in a series of animated shorts.
Pete's final appearance during this era was The Lone Chipmunks, which was the final installment of a three-part Chip 'n' Dale series. He also appeared in the featurettes Mickey's Christmas Carol and The Prince and the Pauper, the feature films A Goofy Movie, An Extremely Goofy Movie, Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas, and Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers, and the short film Get a Horse!.
Pete has also made many appearances in Disney comics. He appeared as Sylvester Shyster's dimwitted sidekick in the early Mickey Mouse comic strips before evolving into the main antagonist. In the Italian comics production he has been given a girlfriend, Trudy, and has come to be the central character in some stories. Pete later made several appearances in television, most extensively in Goof Troop where he was given a different continuity, having a family and a regular job as a used car salesman and being a friend to Goofy. He reprises this incarnation in 1999's Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas. Pete also appears in House of Mouse as the greedy property owner who is always trying to exploit devious ways and loopholes to get the club shut down.
Although Pete is often typecast as a villain, he has shown great versatility within the role, playing everything from a hardened criminal to a legitimate authority figure, and from a menacing trouble maker to a victim of mischief himself. On some occasions, Pete has even played a sympathetic character, all the while maintaining his underlying menacing nature. In the animated TV series Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, which is aimed at preschoolers, he is largely a friendly character, although his antics can occasionally prove an annoyance.
Theatrical cartoons
''Alice Comedies''
Pete first appeared in the Walt Disney-produced 1920s Alice Comedies short subject series.He first appeared in Alice Solves the Puzzle as Bootleg Pete. His nickname was a reference to his career of bootlegging alcoholic beverages during Prohibition in the United States. In the cartoon, Pete's activities bring him to a beach in time to see Alice working on a crossword puzzle. Pete happens to be a collector of crossword puzzles, and identifies Alice's puzzle being a rare one missing from his collection. The rest of the short focuses on his antagonizing Alice and her drunken cat Julius to steal it.
In various later Alice Comedies, the character again battled and competed with Alice and Julius, often under the aliases Putrid Pete and Pegleg Pete.
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
Disney needed a villain to place against his new star Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and Pete was introduced to his new adversary in the sixth Oswald short The Ocean Hop. Apparently inspired by Charles Lindbergh, the two enter an aeroplane race across the Atlantic Ocean. By the time producer Charles Mintz moved production of the Oswald series to his own studio, Pete had been established as the most consistently appearing supporting character to Oswald, and the character continued to appear in that role in the Oswald films directed and produced by Walter Lantz until 1937, making him essentially the only cartoon character at the time to frequently appear in shorts produced by two rival animation studios. His most notable non-Disney appearance was as a captain in Permanent Wave.Mickey Mouse and friends
After leaving the Oswald series, Disney and his team created a cat villain for their new protagonist Mickey Mouse. Originally unnamed in the cartoons and called "Terrible Tom" in a January 1930 comic strip, the villain was called Pegleg Pete by April 1930, formalizing him as a new incarnation of the pre-Mickey bad guy. Animator Norm Ferguson, known for developing Pluto, also developed Pete's character in several shorts and he was made to resemble actor Wallace Beery. Pete appeared as Mickey's enemy beginning with the 1928 cartoons The Gallopin' Gaucho and Steamboat Willie. While he was seen with two legs in those films, he first appeared with a peg-leg in 1930's The Cactus Kid and would speak for the first time. He would first appear in color in Moving Day, which would drop the peg-leg. In the cartoons of the 1930s, Pete would be Mickey Mouse's nemesis, but would vary in professions, from an all-out outlaw to a brutal law-enforcer. In the 1942 cartoon Symphony Hour, Pete is a sympathetic impresario who sponsors Mickey's orchestra in a concert, which goes terribly wrong but is a great success. As Mickey's popularity declined, Pete would serve as an antagonist for Donald Duck and to a lesser extent Goofy and Chip 'n' Dale. In the 1940s, Pete would play the role of Donald's drill sergeant in several war-themed shortsComics
In Disney comics, Pete is consistently depicted as a professional criminal, who often teams up with Mickey Mouse enemies Sylvester Shyster, Eli Squinch, or the Phantom Blot.In a promotional strip for the Mickey Mouse comic strip in early 1930, he was announced as "Terrible Tom – The Vile Villain", but this name was never used afterwards. In the April 24, 1930 strip, Mickey refers to him as "Pegleg Pete", and the name sticks. Pete first appeared in the Mickey Mouse comic strip on April 21, 1930, in the story "Mickey Mouse in Death Valley". This appearance is the first time since the Alice Comedies that Pete has a pegleg. Floyd Gottfredson occasionally committed goofs, with the pegleg switching from Pete's right leg to his left one. In the August 26, 1930 strip, Pete's peg swaps from right to left between one panel to the next. Pete's pegleg also appears on the left in the July 11 strip, and for the week of September 3 to 9. In Gottfredson's story "The Mystery at Hidden River", the pegleg disappeared, with Pete having two normal legs: when Mickey expressed surprise at this, Pete described one of his legs as a new, "streamlined, modern" artificial leg.
In 1944, Walt Disney decided to retire the character from the shorts; comics historian Alberto Becattini writes that this was "partly because he was concerned that it seemed to be a case of mocking the afflicted, partly because the animators could never remember which leg was the wooden one." Pete also left the comic strip for a few years; his last appearance was in "The World of Tomorrow", which ran from July to September 1944.
However, Pete continued to appear in the comic books – in 1945, he was the heavy in the Donald Duck comic "Frozen Gold" and in Mickey's "The Riddle of the Red Hat". He surfaced again in a number of "giveaway" comics in 1946 and 1947 – "Mickey's Christmas Trees", "Donald and the Pirates", "Mickey Mouse and the Haunted House", "Mickey Mouse at the Rodeo", "Mickey Mouse's Helicopter" – and came back to the comic books in "Mickey Mouse and the Submarine Pirates".
With Pete still appearing in comic books, Gottfredson brought him back to the comic strip in "Pegleg Pete Reforms". His last appearance in the strip was in "The Isle of Moola-La". From then on, he made many more appearances in the comic books.
In Mickey Mouse in Death Valley and in several subsequent storylines, Pete was portrayed as Sylvester Shyster's henchman. From 1934, he gradually started to work on his own. Sometimes, Pete also teams up with other bad guys in the Disney universe, such as Scrooge McDuck's enemies, Mad Madam Mim, Captain Hook, and the Evil Queen. In various comics stories, his right-hand man is a skinny, bearded criminal named Scuttle. In Italian comics, his girlfriend Trudy is his frequent partner-in-crime. His cousin the "mad scientist" Portis is another, less frequent, accomplice.
In the 1943 comic strip story Mickey Mouse on a Secret Mission, he was an agent of Nazi Germany, working as the henchman of Gestapo spy Von Weasel. In the 1950 comic strip story The Moook Treasure, he is even portrayed as the Beria-like deputy chief of intelligence in a totalitarian state on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
His name in Italy has remained "Pietro Gambadilegno", or simply "Gambadilegno" even though it has been a long time since he was actually depicted with a pegleg in either comics or animated cartoons. In an Italian story by Romano Scarpa, "Topolino e la dimensione Delta", Pete briefly removes his artificial leg, revealing his old foot-high pegleg underneath. Usually, Gambadilegno is depicted as the antagonist of Chief Seamus O'Hara and Detective Casey and is either a rival or a partner-in-crime of the Phantom Blot.
Pete returned in the 2013 short Get a Horse!, and was animated as having a peg left leg.