[1] Silly Symphony initially related the adventures of Bucky Bug, the first Disney character to originate in the comics.
The bug couple is happy, but just a few strips later, the alarm sounds to alert the community that war has been declared by the flies.
[6] Alberto Becattini suggests that Duvall's hasty exit was due to owing money to his colleagues that he couldn't pay.
[5] In 1934, Taliaferro drew the Silly Symphony story arc based on the cartoon The Wise Little Hen, which featured the first appearance of Donald Duck as a secondary character.
Finishing up a "The Three Little Pigs" adaptation, Taliaferro and writer Ted Osborne began an extended run of Donald Duck gag strips from August 30, 1936, to December 5, 1937.
[8] Taliaferro then pitched the idea of a solo Donald comic strip to King Features Syndicate, working with writers Merrill De Maris and Homer Brightman.
This changed with the 15-month period from August 1936 to December 1937 when Donald Duck was featured in the strip, often performing pantomime gags with little or no dialogue at all.
[10] The Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs sequence was the first of many newspaper comic strip adaptations of newly released Disney animated features.
[12] Pluto's run was interrupted by a month-long adaptation of The Ugly Duckling, and then he returned for a much longer period, from April 23 to December 17, 1939.
This was followed by a two-month adaptation of Pinocchio, and then Pluto returned for his third and final Silly Symphony stint, from April 14 to November 3, 1940.
According to comics historian Maurice Horn: "The first Sunday page opened with a panoramic tour of Rio de Janeiro before closing up on the shack that was 'the home of a young-man-about-town, a gay carefree Brazilian papagaio named José Carioca'.
The gags were quite unsophisticated and revolved around three main themes: the antihero's scheming to get a free meal, his pursuit of the opposite sex, and his imaginative avoidance of work".
Alberto Becattini notes: "In spite of always being broke, the parrot liked to attend posh restaurants and hotels, where he often met with such curvy bird-faced chicas as the wealthy María Rocha Vaz, the blonde dancer Rae, and Gloria del Orto, in a series of adventures that even led him to the Amazon forest".
[14] Horn describes this cycle as well: "José made way for another Latin-American knockabout, the fiery rooster Panchito... As energetic as José was lazy, the sombrero-hatted, gun-toting Mexican fowl was always shown riding horses, fighting bulls, and lassoing cattle, when he was not busy wooing his chick, the fickle Chiquita".
[16] Two more Silly Symphony-style feature film adaptations appeared in the early 50s, running 16 weeks each: Cinderella (1950) and Alice in Wonderland (1951).
[18] The headings in the table below refer to the IDW Publishing reprint collections, Silly Symphonies: The Complete Disney Classics.
The series printed adaptations of a few of the Silly Symphony shorts that weren't adapted in the Sunday comic strip - The Grasshopper and the Ants, The Golden Touch and The Country Cousin - as well as stories featuring Silly Symphony characters, including Bucky Bug, Little Hiawatha, Elmer Elephant, Toby Tortoise and Spotty the Pig.
There were also adaptations of non-Symphony Disney shorts like Lambert the Sheepish Lion, Morris the Midget Moose, and Chicken Little, and a large number of stories featuring characters from other projects, including Jiminy Cricket, Dumbo, Thumper, the Seven Dwarfs, Humphrey the Bear, and Bongo the Wonder Bear from Fun and Fancy Free.
The copyright then passed to Fantagraphics, who started republishing the strips with a different layout in a new collection entitled Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies, beginning in April 2023.