Not many of you reading this would remember the celebration of Donald Duck turning 50. The reason is because it was way back in 1984. So hopefully many of you are hearing this story for the first time. Back on May 19th of 1984 Donald and a group of 50 live Peking ducks strolled through Magic Kingdom for the birthday celebration. What you might not know is the story about how those ducks were following Donald in a such a perfect manner for basically the entire tour. As you can imagine it’s no easy feat getting 50 ducks to follow someone through a crowded theme park of all places. The backstory is just as exciting as watching the cute ducks follow Donald on that eventful day in 1984. It goes something like this:
“According to Charlie Cook, who was Disney World’s bird guy, the only way that we could train the Peking ducks to perform this kind of behavior was if Donald was introduced to them at birth. Which is why we then arranged to have a cast member dressed as Donald Duck to be on hand at a Miami hatchery when these fuzzy little ducklings initially hatched out of their shells.
Then, to further re-enforce the bonding between these live ducklings and the costumed Donald Duck character, when these animals were finally moved on property in the early Spring of 1984, they were always fed by a cast member wearing the Donald Duck walk-around costume. Which is why these ducks then began to associate the costume with the reward of food.”
However, not everything always goes as planned when dealing with live animals. Charlie still regrets his decision to bring Donald and all 50 of those Peking ducks up to Cinderella Castle for a photo op
“We had made this giant birthday cake out of frozen corn that the ducks were supposed to nibble at. But as soon as those ducks saw the water in that moat around the Hub, that was all she wrote. It took us hours to collect them all up again, fish them out of the water.”
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