Los Angeles  – He’s irascible yet innocent, clumsy but somehow elegant, stinky yet lovable.

Donald Duck, one of the most popular cartoon characters of all time, turns 75 on June 9, and remains as remarkably recognizable to the youth of the digital generation as he was to their grandparents growing up in the shadow of the Second World War.

Donald Fauntelroy Duck, to give him his official name in the folklore of the Disney empire, was born to act as a counterweight to the angelic innocence personified in Disney’s other great cartoon character, Mickey Mouse. As Walt Disney astutely realized, his canon of characters needed a rogue, and Donald’s persona was built around his quickly-triggered exasperation at life’s inevitable challenges.

Disney got the idea for Donald after hearing Clarence Nash use the voice that would become forever identified with Donald in 1931, singing the nursery rhyme Mary Had A Little Lamb. Nash, by the way, continued to voice the character till 1984.

Donald made his screen debut three years later in the cartoon The Wise Little Hen, in which he plays an unhelpful friend. His look was remarkably similar to his modern image, complete with blue sailor shirt and hat. It was in his next cartoon, Orphan’s Benefit, that audiences first got a taste of his explosive temper as a group of mischievous orphans repeatedly eat his pie.

Donald got a makeover in 1936 to be a little fuller-figured and somewhat cuter. By 1938 polls showed that he was even more popular than his arch rival Mickey Mouse though Mickey retook the lead after he was also redesigned for the 1938 film Fantasia.

Donald served his country during World War II, starring in dozens of propaganda shorts, and winning an Academy Award for the 1942 film Der Fuehrer’s Face in which he dreams he is an oppressed production line worker in Nazi Germany.

At the end of the war, Donald’s role changed and he became the brunt of other character’s jokes, most often his mischievous nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie.

He also expanded into what is now considered his most important market, Germany, where comic books in which he stars still sell thousands of copies each week. The comics were creative translations of the US comics created by legendary cartoonist Carl Barks, whose stories portrayed Donald as the quintessential everyman struggling against the vicissitudes of every day life.

Unlike many other Disney characters, Donald has aged well. The veteran of 18 feature films, over 150 shorts and eight television series, he also has starred in 21 video games.

According to Barks, it is the anthropomorphic duck’s essential humanity that makes him so popular.

“There was no difference between my characters and the life my readers were going to have to face,” Barks once said. He perfected this element with Donald.

“Instead of making just a quarrelsome little guy out of him, I made a sympathetic character. He was sometimes a villain, and he was often a real good guy and at all times he was just a blundering person like the average human being, and I think that is one of the reasons people like the duck,” he said. (dpa)