Colvig was born Vance DeBar Colvig Sr. in Jacksonville, Oregon, one of seven children of Judge William Mason Colvig and his wife, Adelaide Birdseye Colvig. Although William Colvig was a pioneer, an attorney and a distinguished Oregonian, he was never actually a judge. Pinto attended Oregon State University sporadically from 1910 to 1913. After marrying Margaret Bourke Slavin in 1916, he settled with her in San Francisco, where four of their five boys were born. A lifelong smoker, Colvig was one of the pioneers in advocating warning labels about cancer risk on cigarette packages in the United States. Colvig was the father of the character and voice actor Vance Colvig, who also later portrayed Bozo the Clown on a live TV program.
Career
In 1916, Pinto Colvig worked at the Animated Film Corp in San Francisco. The company produced animated cartoons several years before Walt Disney did and was the oldest known studio of its kind established in the West Coast. In 1922, Colvig created a newspaper cartoon panel titled "Life on the Radio Wave" for the San Francisco Chronicle. The feature ran three or four times per week on the newspaper's radio page, was syndicated nationally, and lasted six months. By the late 1920s, Colvig became associated with Walter Lantz, with whom he attempted to establish a cartoon studio, creating a character called "Bolivar, the Talking Ostrich", which would have appeared in sound shorts. When Lantz became producer of Universal's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons in 1929, Colvig was hired as an animator, also working as a storyman and voice artist, briefly voicing Oswald. In 1931, Colvig joined Walt Disney Productions as a writer, also providing sound effects, including the barks for Pluto the Pup. The following year he began voicing Goofy, originally known as Dippy Dawg. Other notable characters he voiced include Practical Pig, the pig that built the "house of bricks" in the Disney short "Three Little Pigs", and both Sleepy and Grumpy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He also provided Ichabod Crane's screams in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad in 1949. He directed the 1937 Mickey Mouse short Mickey's Amateurs. While he would be associated with Disney for most of his career, Colvig did not work for the studio between 1937 and 1940 after falling out with Disney. He was offered a job with Fleischer Studios, then planning to produce a competing feature-length animation film in the wake of Disney's success with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, moving to Miami in early 1938. For Fleischer, he worked on 1939's Gulliver's Travels, for which he voiced town crier Gabby, who was spun off into his own short-lived series. He also voiced Bluto for the studio's Popeye the Sailor cartoons, replacing Gus Wickie, who had decided to stay in New York rather than move to Miami. Colvig's departure from Disney meant that the increasingly popular Goofy went voiceless for a number of years. A select few shorts during the interim period of leave featured a soundalike voice for Goofy provided by impersonator Danny Webb, who also did the voice of Egghead in Looney Tunes. He also began working on radio, providing voices and sound effects, including the sounds of Jack Benny's Maxwell on The Jack Benny Program, later performed by Mel Blanc. After returning to California in 1939, Colvig began to devote himself to acting, appearing for the Warner Bros. animation studio and MGM, where he voiced a Munchkin in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. In 1946, Colvig was cast as Bozo the Clown for Capitol Records. He played the role for a full decade, which also included portraying the character on television. During this period, Colvig also recorded the "Filbert the Frog" song, which featured Colvig's virtuoso use of the glottal stop as a musical instrument in itself. Colvig's last known performance as Goofy for the Telephone Pavilion at Expo 67. Colvig's dialogue for this exhibit was recorded six months before his death.
