Pinto Colvig
Career
In 1931, Colvig joined Walt Disney Productions as a writer, also providing sound effects, including the barks for Pluto the Pup. The following year he began voicing Goofy, originally known as Dippy Dawg. Other notable characters he voiced include Practical Pig, the pig that built the "house of bricks" in the Disney short "Three Little Pigs", and both Sleepy (originally to be voiced by Sterling Holloway) and Grumpy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He also provided Ichabod Crane's screams in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad in 1949.[citation needed] He directed (along with Erdman Penner and Walt Pfeiffer) the 1937 Mickey Mouse short Mickey's Amateurs. While he would be associated with Disney for most of his career, Colvig did not work for the studio between 1937 and 1940 after falling out with Disney. He was offered a job with Fleischer Studios, then planning to produce a competing feature-length animation film in the wake of Disney's success with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. For Fleischer, he worked on 1939's Gulliver's Travels, for which he voiced town crier Gabby, who was spun off into his own short-lived series. He also voiced Bluto for the studio's Popeye the Sailor cartoons, replacing Gus Wickie, who had decided to stay in New York rather than move to Miami. Colvig's departure from Disney meant that the increasingly popular Goofy went voiceless for a number of years. A select few shorts during the interim period of leave featured a soundalike voice for Goofy provided by impersonator Danny Webb, who also did the voice of Egghead (later to be re-named Elmer Fudd) in Looney Tunes.
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