Casey Junior
- “All aboard! Let's go!”
- ―Casey Junior[src]
Casey Junior is a minor character in Disney's 1941 animated feature film Dumbo and the main character of his segment in The Reluctant Dragon. He is a young, anthropomorphic steam locomotive and his name is a direct reference to Casey Jones, the famous railroad engineer who had lost his life in a train collision in 1900.
Casey Junior is a 2-4-0 American steam tender locomotive hauling the WDP Circus train, and he even has his own theme song and appears frequently throughout the film. He is shown to be somewhat sentient and speaks through his whistle. For example, when the Ringmaster calls, "All aboard! All aboard!", he says in response, "All aboard! Let's go!"
As is the case with most of Disney's early cartoon vehicles, Casey has the ability to move more fluidly than real-life locomotives, and his boiler is often seen bending and twisting like rubber when in motion. In addition, he can twist and flex his metal body to express motion. He uses his steam cylinders like limbs, giving him the ability to shrug, point and make other gestures.
While the sound of the voice resembles that of one processed through a vocoder, it was actually done with a more primitive device, a Sonovox, which uses one or two small loudspeakers in contact with the throat, which allowed Margaret Wright, the 'voice actor', to "speak" by modulating an artificially produced sound with her mouth.
Casey is a 2-4-0 American steam tender locomotive with a small, four-wheeled tender full of coal at the back, a big, tall smokestack, a small headlamp in an engineer's cap-shaped casing, a tall steam dome with a whistle on top, and a small cowcatcher on his front. The latter has a vague shape of a face, with two headlights in place of eyes and a cylinder-shaped structure protruding forward functioning as his nose. He also occasionally is drawn with a mouth, but only occasionally, and his "expression" never changes on screen; instead, his mouth only changes between shots. His wheel pistons are often used as "arms", like when he has to climb up a difficult mountain.
At the beginning of the film, the circus workers get all the animals ready on Casey's circus train, including Mrs. Jumbo. After all the animals successfully board the circus cars, the Ringmaster then shouts "All aboard" so that Casey can get ready to travel to the spot where the WDP circus will perform. Although anxious to get started at first, Casey travels across the American countryside from the Winter Headquarters very bravely. Meanwhile, Mr. Stork arrives late and flies towards Casey Junior, where Mrs. Jumbo is waiting in the Elephant car as he delivers her a newborn baby elephant named "Jumbo Junior" by his mother, whom the elephants made fun of his ears and call him "Dumbo". Later that stormy night, Casey climbs up and down a hill and makes it to town. After a long ride, he stops at the station where the circus will be built at for the next day. He hits the brakes so hard that the cars he is hauling bump into one another and bounce the animals around, waking them up for work. Moments later, Casey starts to rest in for the night and the workers and animals begin setting up the circus tent.
Later in the film, after Dumbo was unable to reach the top of the pyramid of elephants in the act, due to the tent collapsing, Casey travels sadly throughout a rainy night whistling a sad melody as the elephants exclude Dumbo from their act and he is put into the clown act.
At the end of the film where Dumbo becomes a circus star, a happy Casey is seen wearing a wreath of flowers around him, smiling with joy. He is also pulling another car, a private car for Dumbo, assumably behind the caboose. While the Crows and Elephants are singing a reprise of "When I See an Elephant Fly", Casey's steam whistle is heard adding to the harmonization of the song. Dumbo happily reunites with his mother and as Casey happily travels to the next destination, the crows bid a farewell to Dumbo, wishing him good luck.
In this live-action/animated tour of the Walt Disney Studios in 1941, a work-in-progress scene of Casey is used to demonstrate the creation of sound effects for animation as well as the vocoder device used to create his voice. This demonstration not only marks the character's on screen debut, as Dumbo wasn't released until that October, but also takes the form of an extended train journey, though it is hard to say whether this was truly a deleted scene from an early version of Dumbo or simply new animation created for the purposes of the demonstration.
In this scene, Casey was, in fact, pulling a passenger train to Cleveland, Ohio. At one point during the excursion, he gets into conflict with a steamboat over the right of way on a drawbridge that spans the river, before overcoming him and causing the drawbridge to close on and push down on the steamboat into the water and comes up again coughing up all the water in him. Later on, Casey encounters a streamlined train charging towards him and closing in fast, at which he desperately called for a nearby railroad switch lever to wake up and change the track, which it did. He thereafter crashes after an effort to jump the chasm left by a broken bridge in a storm.
Casey's design in this film differs from his prior appearance in Dumbo and thus features many changes. For starters, coupling rods were connected to his foremost driving axle. He also had a roof-mounted bell and was not as stubby. When he was hired for the circus train, he had a few changes: his coupling rods were extended and moved to his rear driving wheels, his bell was removed, and he became stubbier. This implies that he was overhauled after the accident and bought by a railroad based in Florida that served the southeastern United States.
In 1955, 14 years after both of his feature film appearances, Walt Disney himself wrote and published a book based on Casey called "The Story of Casey Jr.", this takes place after the events of his Reluctant Dragon appearance and before the events of Dumbo, where Casey, now with a "For Sale" sign on him, got bought by the WDP circus and started working for them, with them taking the mick out of Casey, much like the elephant that would come later, but, not because of his ears (as Casey doesn't have them, duh), but due to his small size, with a rabbit who though Casey was a bee telling him to go back to the toy shop he came from, which hurt Casey's feelings, even saving them from certain death after jumping over a bridge in a experience that, to him, was like what led to his crash in his debut in The Reluctant Dragon, but, this time, he survived, made it across and saved everyone, gaining the respect he wanted
Casey makes a cameo in the Donald Duck cartoon Spare the Rod as a silhouetted train crossing a bridge.
Casey makes a brief cameo in the 1988 film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He appears during the final scene.
In Kronk's New Groove, the sequel to The Emperor's New Groove, Kronk has a miniature model train set of Casey in his new home, complete with scaled-down models of the carriages featured in Dumbo.
Casey makes two cameo appearances in the Mickey Mouse TV shorts. In the episode Tokyo Go, he appears at the end of the episode as a miniature train piloted by Mickey Mouse as a children's attraction, in reference to Walt Disney's backyard Carolwood Pacific Railroad, complete with Walt's barn (a photo of Walt in the cab of Disneyland Railroad locomotive E. P. Ripley also appears in the scene). Casey also appears in the episode "New Shoes", with his namesake, Casey Jones, engineering, riding with Dumbo, Timothy Q. Mouse, and the Crows.
Casey makes a cameo at the beginning of the 2016 live-action remake of The Jungle Book during its opening Disney logo (recreated using traditional animation instead of CGI, thus replacing the realistic train from the original version of the current logo), where he is seen as a silhouetted train crossing a trestle over a river behind an amusement park just right before the castle is shown. This is the same logo used for the 2019 remake of The Lion King; however, unlike in The Jungle Book, the logo does not back into a jungle and instead fades away. Coincidentally, both films are live-action remakes directed by Jon Favreau.
A non-anthropomorphic Casey also appeared in the 2019 live-action remake of Dumbo.
In the Me & Mickey episode "Mickey's Train", Casey appears as the miniature train piloted by Mickey. But Casey had one eye, his steam dome does not have the whistle on top, and he's hauling a blue open-top chair car, and a caboose which were the two same cars that Casey hauls on the Casey Jr. Circus Train ride. In "Halloween Train Ride", Casey retains the same appearance but in Halloween colors.
Casey appears in the video game Mickey's Racing Adventure as the train which brings the characters to their racing grounds. In the game, Casey is not anthropomorphic but he maintains the same name and appearance he had in Dumbo.
Casey makes a brief cameo in Where's My Mickey?
Casey appears in Disney Emoji Blitz as an unplayable character during the Dumbo Team Event.
Casey appears in Kinect: Disneyland Adventures as part of the Casey Jr. Circus Train which is one of the attractions that's not featured in the game.
A Disneyland attraction named the Casey Jr. Circus Train is based on Casey, with a kids roller coaster version running at Disneyland Paris. Casey Jr. Splash & Soak Station, a water play area themed around him, was added to the Magic Kingdom in 2012 in the Storybook Circus section of the park's new Fantasyland.
Casey is the lead float (second prior to 2017) in the Main Street Electrical Parade. He, driven by Goofy, pulls a drum with the parade logo, along with Mickey and Minnie Mouse.
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