Voice of Bambi refused to kill animals

Jamie Portman
CanWest News Service
March 7, 2005

Don Dunagan was a crack shot during his quarter century in the U.S. Marine Corps. And he remains a crack shot today.

But don't ever ask him to take aim at an animal. They're off limits -- and it's all because 65 years ago he helped Walt Disney bring immortality to Bambi, both vocally and visually.

Dunagan turned 70 a few months ago, but he still remembers those childhood days in a sound booth -- "with these huge bomber-pilot earphones on my ears" -- supplying the voice of the young Bambi for perhaps the most beloved of Disney's animated classics. And now, even more memories are flooding back, because he's had the chance to view Disney Home Entertainment's informative new Special Edition DVD.

"What a wonderful portrayal of the Disney secrets they have held onto for years," he says by phone from his home in West Texas. "This DVD is magnificent. And here I am, a beat-up old gunfighter, talking 65 years later once more about Bambi."

His attitudes in adult life were shaped by one of the most devastating sequences in the Disney canon -- the death of Bambi's mother by gunshot. A few weeks ago, he slipped the Bambi disc in the DVD player and once again listened to his own childish treble on the soundtrack fearfully crying out "Mother, Mother, MOTHER!" in the famous scene where the young Bambi has successfully fled the hunters only to discover that his mother is no longer with him. And he was struck anew by the uncompromising power of those moments.

When he recorded the scene, the Disney people deliberately avoided telling the 51/2-year-old Donnie that Bambi's mother was going to be shot dead. He was simply told to imagine that his mother was missing.

"You've lost your mother, you've lost your mother, there's danger," they told him. "Where's your mother? Ask for your mother. Call for your mother."

That's all he was told. "Nobody said -- hey kid, we're going to waste your mother!" It was only later at a special screening prior to Bambi's 1942 release that he fully realized what had been happening.

As an adult he came to understand that the death of Bambi's mother -- even though it occurs offscreen and is communicated through the sound of gunshots -- was a watershed moment in popular culture. In fact, he suggests, it in many ways was "the death of the century" because of its continuing impact over the decades.

And it turned him off blood sports.

"That moment is still real to me, and I'll tell you how real it is. When I was in the marine corps I was a shooter. I was a shooter big time, so I'd be invited on hunting trips."

He remembers going on one that had two meat hunters and two trophy hunters. The meat hunters he could accept because they planned to donate the meat to churches in destitute areas for people who really needed it.

"The trophy hunters bothered me deeply. They do today. From that point forward, I've never shot an animal -- ever."

The only shooting of animals he performs these days is with a camera -- and Dunagan says the repugnance he feels toward hunting is firmly rooted in his childhood experience with Bambi

Dunagan sees Bambi today as a classic coming-of-age film because of the message of the second half which sees the orphaned deer grow to adulthood. He can't remember now whether he cried at Bambi's mother's death, "but I do remember the rest of the film being a real representation of what life is: you gotta get up, you gotta put your face to the wind and keep going.

"At the end of the film, I was just delighted. I'm 61/2, just watching it and proud to be in it. Since then, I've seen Bambi many times with all sorts of people and the reaction is always the same."

Dunagan knows that Disney was a tough boss: "Putting a business together in a depression -- wimps don't need to apply for that!" But he says that Disney was terrific with kids and wonderful toward him. He also considers Disney a man of courage in making a movie that was less than favourable toward the hunting fraternity. He cites the later frightening sequence depicting a forest fire caused by careless hunters. "That took guts, and I admired him for that."