

I could not wait to go to Disney because that’s where all the fun people that made the cartoons were. After he called, my mother made some phone calls around and found out more about it. I got excited. I mean I wanted to play with my puppy dog and ride a bicycle, right? But this was different. After four or five movies as a child and not being in school only to do, work, work, work, work, work, some of the movies were a bit boring for a kid. We had been with Universal and RKO on 6 or 7 films.

Disney called my mother personally on the kitchen phone and invited us to come up to be the facial model, not the voice, for a deer. “I’m in my home with my mother in Westwood, California and Mr.

Thumper bambi romantic movie#
“The artists were hard at work,” Behn said, “I knew I was a little rabbit but I didn’t really know that much more in total about the movie until later when I saw it.”ĭunagan was originally invited to Disney Studios to be a face model for Bambi. The first time I saw it was at the premiere which was in 1942, and until then I didn’t really know exactly what the storyline was because the recordings were done individually and in segments.” As for Thumper’s adorable bubbly laugh, “There was something that caused that laughter to come out. I was kind of a rambunctious kid and pretty vocal about various things so it probably wasn’t that difficult to get me to laugh.”īehn remembers touring the animation studio to see some of the drawings the animators were working on.

In interviews, Dunagan and Behn spoke about their experiences in making the film and what has kept it so meaningful to them over the years.īehn was so young that he does not remember much about the recording sessions. “I remember going into the sound studio with a sound director and he would read the lines with the inflection that they wanted and then I would repeat the lines back. I wasn’t a really heavy reader in those days. For each pairing, respondents were asked to indicate the “cuter” character of the two (telling them “cute” means behaviors or traits that are “cuddly, affectionate, playful, and so on.” The characters were then scored based on their “win percentage” (i.e., how often were they selected as cuter in a head-to-head matchup).Disney’s 1942 classic Bambi featured two of the most memorable voices in animated movie history, both from very young children. The title character, a young deer, was voiced by Donnie Dunagan, already a veteran of seven movies at age seven, and Bambi’s friend Thumper was voiced by Peter Behn, a first-time performer who was only four years old when he started recording. The two boys recorded their performances separately and never met until a couple of years ago when they appeared together on an episode of The View. adults, randomly assigning each respondent 20 different characters, which appeared in 10 head-to-head matchups. Those two were followed by Lady, Patch, Winnie the Pooh, Lucky, Tweety, Simba, Nala and Dumbo.įor the survey, YouGov generated a list of 114 characters based on suggestions from 448 panelists only fictional, non-human characters were included. The company plans to launch a “Cuteness Tracker” on its website, which will be populated in the coming months with new characters, in the hopes it “will have a special kind of resonance,” the rep said.įor the record, the overall winner across all age groups was Thumper - by a nose, beating out Bambi by just one-tenth of a percentage point. Much of the recent research from U.K.-based YouGov has centered around the COVID-19 crisis, and the firm decided the project would serve as some welcome “counterprogramming,” according to a spokesperson. What inspired this urgent examination of the question over which of Hollywood’s anthropomorphic toons are the most appealing?
