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Jimmy MacDonald is a featured article, which means it has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Disney Wiki community. If you see a way this page can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, please feel free to contribute.

John James "Jimmy" MacDonald was a British-born American foley artist, voice actor, musician, conductor, and the original head of Walt Disney Productions' sound effects department. He was also the voice of Mickey Mouse from 1947 to 1976.[1]

In addition to directing sounds for animated shorts as aurally complicated as Mickey's Trailer, MacDonald developed many original inventions and contraptions to achieve expressive sounds for characters, like Evinrude the dragonfly from The Rescuers, the bees in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, and Spike the bee who gets the best of Donald Duck in the 1950s cartoon shorts.

MacDonald also added voice effects, like on-screen humming for Kirk Douglas in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

By 1947, Walt Disney was getting too busy and too hoarse from smoking to continue voicing Mickey Mouse, so he was replaced by MacDonald, after the film Fun and Fancy Free. (A common misconception is that MacDonald had voiced additional dialogue shared with Disney in that film.) MacDonald voiced the mouse on a regular basis until 1953 (Disney had briefly taken over for The Mickey Mouse Club) and a recurring one until his retirement in 1977, when he was replaced by young Disney sound effects man Wayne Allwine for The New Mickey Mouse Club; Allwine's first theatrical role for Mickey was in Mickey's Christmas Carol.

MacDonald was also the voice of Goofy at one time, where he provided his voice in the 1960s Disney record album Donald Duck and His Friends.

MacDonald also provided the voice for Jaq and Gus and Bruno the dog in Cinderella and Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse's Birthday Party, the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland, Humphrey the Bear, and the Wolf in The Sword in the Stone. He also appeared in Toby Tyler as a circus band drummer but was uncredited.

MacDonald also played drums for the Firehouse Five Plus Two jazz band on and off from its inception until it was disbanded in the early 1970s.

In 1993, he was posthumously inducted as a Disney Legend.

Disney Roles[]

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