A circus man who put rasps, barks and hiccups into the mouths of cartoon dwarfs, pigs and one hapless dog. Colvig is the sound of early Disney comedy, and nobody hearing Grumpy soften in Snow White would guess how many of the other voices were his.
Fi1m perspective
Grumpy folds his arms in the dwarfs' cottage, says no to the girl, and goes on saying it. Pinto Colvig gives him a voice like a gate that needs oiling, and then, over the rest of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938), lets the hinge work loose. It is the one properly written change of heart in the film and most of it happens in the throat. He is also Sleepy, and the hiccups that come out of Dopey are his too. Three of the seven, uncredited, and you would not know it.
He came to Disney sideways. Before Hollywood in 1922 he had been a circus performer, a vaudevillian doing chalk talks from 1913, a newspaper cartoonist and an animator in San Francisco. He said of his schooling, "I didn't know when I was going to school whether I wanted to be a clown, draw cartoons, write, hobo, or be a musician. So I wrapped it all up and made stew out of it." Disney took him on in 1930 as a writer and voice artist. From 1931 he was Goofy, then called Dippy Dawg, with a laugh modelled on a flagman he had watched as a boy in Oregon and on his own vaudeville turn as the Oregon Appleknocker. He voiced and co-wrote Practical Pig in Three Little Pigs (1933). After a falling-out around 1937 or 1938 he left, went to Fleischer for Bluto in the Popeye shorts and Gabby in Gulliver's Travels (1939), came back to Disney voices in 1944, and in 1946 created Bozo the Clown for Capitol Records.
What he did that other actors did not was noise. He barked for Pluto, made the animal sounds and the mechanical effects, and would lay several voices down in a single session. The studios noticed how good he was at unpleasantness and kept casting him for it: Grumpy, Bluto, the gruff and the unfriendly. The other register, the warm folksy one, went into Goofy and later into Bozo. Watching the washing scene in Snow White, in which seven small men are made to face a tub of water, we laughed out loud, and then found we were oddly moved by Grumpy's thaw, which he plays without a single line of softening dialogue, only a slower, quieter rasp.
The nearest thing to a mark against him is not his doing. After he left, Disney kept using his old Goofy recordings in shorts from 1939 to 1943, which tells you how hard the voice was to replace. He turns up in Sleeping Beauty (1959) as one of Maleficent's goons, again uncredited, and we did not pick him out. That is the trade. Put Snow White on tonight and listen for how many of the seven are one man.
Biography
Pinto Colvig, also credited as Vance DeBar Colvig or Vance DeBar Colvig Sr., was an American actor, voice actor, animator and cartoonist. Born in Jacksonville, Oregon, he worked in vaudeville and circus performance before entering animation.
He provided uncredited voices for Disney productions including Sleepy, Grumpy and Dopey (hiccups) in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1938), as well as Goofy in several shorts and features from the 1930s onwards. Colvig originated the role of Bozo the Clown on radio and television from 1946 and voiced characters such as Practical Pig in Three Little Pigs (1933) and a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz (1939). He also worked for Warner Bros., Fleischer Studios and MGM.
Colvig was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 1993 for his contributions to the studio.
