Gideon Goat: An old, obscure character

Rich Bellacera xephyr at cwnet.com
Fri Aug 29 01:09:16 CEST 2003


I wonder if anyone remembers this Giddy Goat character?  He's an old 
character probably developed by the Disney studios and was used once or 
twice by Floyd Gottfredson.

I know very little about him other than what he looked like and that he 
was a farmer.  He appears in a cartoon drawing of THE BAND CONCERT where 
he is depicted instead of the second dog-like character as a member of 
Mickey's Band.  The same image of Gideon in his band costume with 
instrument is used in a very old set of playing cards where his name is 
also stated as Giddy Goat.  He appears in some old studio gags, but 
probably his best known appearance is in the tale of Mickey's horse 
Tanglefoot where he is a farmer who bad-mouths Tanglefoot (as does 
Horace and some others) about his worth.

As I am a fan, champion and defender of some of these obscure and 
forgotten characters, I was startled when I recently bought a copy of 
TOPOLINO #2012 featuring the story UNCLE SCROOGE AND THE TERRIBLE KINGO 
KNOGO for in the second chapter there is a character, who, for all 
intents seems to be a revival of Gideon!  His first name is not given, 
but he and his wife are called "de Capronis", which, if I'm not 
mistaken, means "The Goats" in Italian.  They are chicken farmers who 
load up their truck with eggs and drive into Duckburg to sell them.  The 
husband looks very much like Gideon except that he is obviously redrawn 
in the wacky Cavazzano style.  The Capronis only appear on four pages. 
 The last two are fairly insignificant image-wise as all we see is that 
Kingo believes Mr. Caproni to be his Pappa (Kingo was raised by wild 
goats) and breaks out of his holding cell.  The Capronis run for their 
lives and that's the last we see of them.

Here are two scans from the story J 2012 showing The Capronis and a 
picture of Giddy Goat.
http://users.cwnet.com/xephyr/ART/Gideon1.jpg
http://users.cwnet.com/xephyr/ART/Gideon2.jpg
http://users.cwnet.com/xephyr/ART/GiddyGoat.gif

David or someone familiar with the story and/or Giddy Goat, could you 
possibly share what you know concerning this character?
If this is an obscure homage to Giddy Goat, can you verify it and does 
the wife have a name (other than "Mrs. Goat" that is)?

Thanks,

Rich Bellacera
xephyr at cwnet.com




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