I'm not a specialist on the english language, so I want to know with which accent Mickey is speaking in the Floyd Gottfredson Comics. Is it a californian accent? A texas accent? Please let me know!
Post by Monkey_Feyerabend on Feb 15, 2017 17:00:00 GMT
Interesting question. I would like to ask an even more basic question: are Gottfredson's characters speaking in accents? Each of them has his own peculiar (more or less ignorant) way to speak/spell. Which is very beautiful. But can those ways of speaking be referred to a specific geographic area? In other words, are they real accents or just different level of slungs, with elements common all over the States?
I guess there must be the answer somewhere in all those essays in the Fantagraphics books. But if I read it, clearly I forgot it!
I'm not a specialist on the english language, so I want to know with which accent Mickey is speaking in the Floyd Gottfredson Comics. Is it a californian accent? A texas accent? Please let me know!
Gottfredson's characters speak a general USA English from the 1920s to 1940s (old fashioned, like Barks and my own speech and writing). Western Publishing writers wrote in a very general national English, just as TV and announcers in general need to use. SOme dialects are not very understandable to people from other parts of USA.
The early Mickey is a small-town boy from a fairly rural area (in the first daily strip, Mickey is reclining on a haystack by a barn), so I would say that Mickey's "accent" or perhaps more appropriately, speech pattern, is that of small town America back in the 1930's. As Mickey's settings became more suburban, his speech patterns became more "educated" and Middle-class American. I like how the newer translations of Mickey's stories try to split the difference, so that Mickey sounds like a small-town country boy who has been living in the city awhile, but still retains a bit of his old "accent".
In the theaters, Mickey's voice was Walt Disney's himself for the first 18 year's. Walt had grown up in rural Missouri and then Kansas City. Disney did Mickey as shy and squeaky, because that fit the mouse persona, and later said as much on the Disney TV show. Just like Walt, Mickey maintained his enthusiasm as he adapted to suburban California.
I like how the newer translations of Mickey's stories try to split the difference, so that Mickey sounds like a small-town country boy who has been living in the city awhile, but still retains a bit of his old "accent".
Bingo. That's exactly what our team tries to do.
Mid-1930s Mickey has th' thickest dialect—y' can't walk five feet without bumpin' into an apostrophe—an' if ya don't give th' bird to all those swell Depression expressions, they'll come back an' bite ya... g'wan! Heck! Make a noise like a hoop an' roll away! Oh, fer...
Horace uses much the same idiom as Mickey at the time, and Clarabelle uses even more, with a distinctly more old-fashioned sound. Nobody's as old-fashioned, though, as Eli Squinch, who deliberately talked like a 1875 throwback in 1935.
Interestingly, 1930s Minnie uses nowhere near as much dialect as the others, suggesting that she's a little more educated and refined. It certainly matches with her various attempts to fit in with high society; and at least one strip in 1930 has Minnie's dad concerned about the cost of her college education, suggesting that she might be the only one to have spent much time in higher learning.
Mid-1930s Mickey has th' thickest dialect—y' can't walk five feet without bumpin' into an apostrophe—an' if ya don't give th' bird to all those swell Depression expressions, they'll come back an' bite ya... g'wan! Heck! Make a noise like a hoop an' roll away! Oh, fer...
Orright, that is quite interesting. So this is just some sort of countryside slang, not an exclipit dialect, isn't it?
I like how the newer translations of Mickey's stories try to split the difference, so that Mickey sounds like a small-town country boy who has been living in the city awhile, but still retains a bit of his old "accent".
Bingo. That's exactly what our team tries to do.
Mid-1930s Mickey has th' thickest dialect—y' can't walk five feet without bumpin' into an apostrophe—an' if ya don't give th' bird to all those swell Depression expressions, they'll come back an' bite ya... g'wan! Heck! Make a noise like a hoop an' roll away! Oh, fer...
Horace uses much the same idiom as Mickey at the time, and Clarabelle uses even more, with a distinctly more old-fashioned sound. Nobody's as old-fashioned, though, as Eli Squinch, who deliberately talked like a 1875 throwback in 1935.
Interestingly, 1930s Minnie uses nowhere near as much dialect as the others, suggesting that she's a little more educated and refined. It certainly matches with her various attempts to fit in with high society; and at least one strip in 1930 has Minnie's dad concerned about the cost of her college education, suggesting that she might be the only one to have spent much time in higher learning.
What about Goofy? When I started reading the Fantagraph. books I had some trouble with him. Every time he opened his mouth it took me some time and pain to get his line, sometimes ruining the rhythm of the reading. What kind of characterization were Gottfredson, Osborne and De Marris trying to provide Goofy with? Does he sounds like a boy from the slum? Or like a strongly uneducated guy? Or both? In other words, were they trying to make him look like a "naively ignorant peasant", or more like an "outsider/town freak", or even a "little rogue"? I am mainly referring to the first years, like 1933-1936.
Mid-1930s Mickey has th' thickest dialect—y' can't walk five feet without bumpin' into an apostrophe—an' if ya don't give th' bird to all those swell Depression expressions, they'll come back an' bite ya... g'wan! Heck! Make a noise like a hoop an' roll away! Oh, fer...
Horace uses much the same idiom as Mickey at the time, and Clarabelle uses even more, with a distinctly more old-fashioned sound. Nobody's as old-fashioned, though, as Eli Squinch, who deliberately talked like a 1875 throwback in 1935.
Interestingly, 1930s Minnie uses nowhere near as much dialect as the others, suggesting that she's a little more educated and refined. It certainly matches with her various attempts to fit in with high society; and at least one strip in 1930 has Minnie's dad concerned about the cost of her college education, suggesting that she might be the only one to have spent much time in higher learning.
What about Goofy? When I started reading the Fantagraph. books I had some trouble with him. Every time he opened his mouth it took me some time and pain to get his line, sometimes ruining the rhythm of the reading. What kind of characterization were Gottfredson, Osborne and De Marris trying to provide Goofy with? Does he sounds like a boy from the slum? Or like a strongly uneducated guy? Or both? In other words, were they trying to make him look like a "naively ignorant peasant", or more like an "outsider/town freak", or even a "little rogue"? I am mainly referring to the first years, like 1933-1936.
Goofy was supposed to be an uneducated farm hick, who is also very naive.
Pinto Colvig, the original voice of Goofy, claimed that the accent was supposed to make him sound specifically like an Oregon hillbilly (an "Oregon apple-knocker," as Colvig put it). Whether there's something specifically 1930s Oregonian about Goofy's enunciation, though, I can't say...
In Goofy's first cartoon appearance, Mickey's Revue (1932), his gag gimmick is sitting in an audience, laughing a little too noisily at the performance on stage—to the point where other audience members try to get even with him. Some have suggested that Goofy's voice might have something to do with the origins of that gimmick, but I don't think so. The gimmick seems be inspired by this 1910 comedy record ("The Laughing Spectator"), but there the laughing character doesn't have a regional accent, just a stuttering laugh.
I don't think Goofy has a "regional accent". It's sort of a general country, rural (hickey or "hillbilly" accent, which would be clearly understandable and recognised by all Americans and even Canadians. It doesn't sound like Appalachian or Allegheny or Ozark or Oklahoma hicks, any more than any other area. It's a generalised (southern/midwestern/western hick way of speech. We all recognised it and had no trouble understanding it, nor did we think it out of place in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. There were large Hillbilly and Okee neighbourhoods in almost all the big US cities after the closing of Appalachian mines and "The Dust Bowl" drove those poor people into the big cities to look for work, starting in The Great Depression, and even getting larger after WWII. We all knew "Goofies".
