Circus Elephants

The Circus Elephants are a group of female elephants, led by the Elephant Matriarch, and the secondary characters in the 1941 Disney animated feature film Dumbo.
==Background==
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The Elephant Matriarch=
The Elephant Matriarch (voiced by Verna Felton) holds her social status due to being bigger, stronger, and having a more staunch and experienced personality. While she wasn't outright cruel to Dumbo, she initially ostracized him and disgraced him from being an elephant. She takes her job at the circus seriously, and has little to no patience for time wasters or sub par performances from fellow elephants. When she learned that Mrs. Jumbo had a baby, she announced to the others "Ah, this is a proud, proud day!" and presumably saw a new addition to the circus act. The matriarch is also business-minded and expects all members of the circus to give nothing but the best and add something to the show. Her demand directly conflicts with Dumbo's childlike nature, as she could not stand Dumbo for screwing up her performance, and her initial aloofness became full blown contempt. Despite her severe personality, she eventually accepted Dumbo once he managed to improve his performance and contribute something good to the circus. Her primary color is purple.
|-|Catty=
Catty (voiced by Noreen Gammill) is shown to be bold, cheeky, and kind of bossy. She particularly loves gossiping about the troubles of others seen as she gives Dumbo his nickname and tells Giddy, Prissy, and the Elephant Matriarch about how Mrs. Jumbo is in solitary confinement. She has little (at best) to no sympathy for Dumbo (to a point of spelling out certain words to avoid to be heard by him), especially when he's made into a clown. Despite this, Catty greatly enjoys drama. Her primary color is green.
|-|Prissy=
Prissy (voiced by Sarah Selby) is shown to be bold, but not cheeky. Prissy loves talking to the other elephants, and is one of the closest elephants to the Elephant Matriarch. She speaks with a high-pitched voice and is never short on opinions. Her primary color is red/orange.
|-|Giddy=
Giddy (voiced by Dorothy Scott) is very talkative and relatively the nicest amongst the other female elephants towards Dumbo at first when his ears were exposed. But like all the other elephants, she is still teased with Dumbo for his ears. She is excessively cheerful and loud, with a childlike demeanor. Despite her talkative ways, she has the fewest lines of all the elephants. Her primary color is blue.
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==Appearances==
===Dumbo===
The elephants appear at the beginning of the film during the loading, boarding Casey Junior's circus train with the other animals. The Matriarch taps Mrs. Jumbo in the back when she looks up and impatiently drags her into the train car. Her rump gets stuck in the train entrance while running in, but the circus employees rush up to the car to raise the hinged door and collectively push her through, which she ungratefully sneers at them for being rough on her. As the train goes on, Mr. Stork delivers Mrs. Jumbo's baby. At first, the elephants coo over the baby, but then become surprised when they see his large ears. They laugh with him and call him "Dumbo". When Casey Junior arrives at the circus grounds that night, the elephants are unloaded to help set up the circus tent. The next morning, they march down the street with the rest of the circus.
After a while, they learn that Mrs. Jumbo is in solitary confinement and discuss it; with the matriarch and Catty blaming Dumbo for it. When they see Dumbo coming, the matriarch instructs them to form a tight circle to block him out and "to pretend they don't see him". Timothy Q. Mouse, having seen everything, marches into the circle and frightens them, causing them to scramble in fear of him. He gives them a stern lecture about picking on "little guys" and calling them "overstuffed hay bags" before scaring them again while leaving.
Later, the elephants are part of an act in which they form a "Pyramid of Pachyderms". The matriarch is the base elephant standing on a large ball as the other elephants climb on top of her back, showing her true strength. Throughout the act, the matriarch tries to keep the others focused on their work instead of each other, constantly having Prissy losing her footing and falling down on her, smothering her head with her rear. When the pyramid is formed, Dumbo comes to jump onto the top as the climax, but he trips on his ears and hits the ball that the matriarch is standing on. This leads to the elephants crashing down on each other and bringing down the circus tent. After that, the elephants discuss what happened, with all of them wearing bandages, ice packs, etc... They learn through Catty that Dumbo is now a clown and that they no longer consider him an elephant, excluding Dumbo from the elephant act.
Near the end of the film, as Dumbo jumps off a burning building for his clown act, he reveals his flying ability in front of everyone. As he flies, he vacuums up some peanuts with his trunk from a peanut seller's stand and shoots them at the matriarch and the other elephants like a fighter jet as revenge for their bullying and not accepting him as an elephant. They are later shown at singing in the reprise of "When I See an Elephant Fly" at the end, implying that they have finally accepted Dumbo.
===House of Mouse===
The Elephant Matriarch, Catty, and Giddy (or Prissy with her hat dyed blue) make an appearance in the House of Mouse episode "Super Goof", where they are part of Super Goof's juggling act.
==Live-action appearances==
===Dumbo (2019)===
In the 2019 remake of the original film, there were at least two other elephants besides Dumbo and Mrs. Jumbo. However, unlike in the original film, both of them were males since Mrs. Jumbo was the circus' first female in this film. When Dumbo's ears were exposed in his first performance, both elephants panicked because of his huge ears.
==Gallery==
==Trivia==
*In some material, Giddy is sometimes known as "Giggles" or "Fidgety".
*The matriarch was a character which inspired people to create another elephant character almost like her named Eloise in Goliath II.
**Eloise and the Matriarch also share the same voice actress, along with other two Disney elephants, Winifred and Mrs. Jumbo herself.
*The animation of the gossipy elephants getting spooked by Timothy Q. Mouse was recycled for use in Goliath II for the scene with the elephant herd getting spooked by a mouse.
*Like the color of her hat, Prissy's eyes are also red/orange, but during the Pyramid scene, her eyes are blue. They switch back to orange/red by the film's climax.
*The matriarch has been shown to be incredibly strong (arguably even by elephant standards) during the Pyramid of Pachyderms scene, where she holds the weight of six similar-sized elephants on her back while standing on a large ball.
**Admittedly, the matriarch started sweating from exhaustion after the formation was complete, but she still managed to hold it until Dumbo accidentally crashed into it.
*Just as Matriarch proves her strength during the Pyramid, Prissy is shown to be strong as well as when the pyramid is completed; she is holding one elephant above her with just her trunk. Catty and another elephant were holding one elephant up with their combined trunks, but Prissy is holding up her side with just her own.
*Prissy does not apper in the As Told by Emoji version of the film.
*During the pyramid of pachyderms, Prissy is shown to be extremely clumsy compared to the other elephants as she constantly loses her footing and ends up smothering the matriarch's head with her rump.
*Some people would say that Catty seems jealous that Prissy is the closest to the Matriarch and tries to gain more favorage from her throughout the film, which can be shown as she picks on Prissy during the pyramid act, calling her a "cream puff", stepping on her head and swatting another elephant at her rear before pulling him up.
*The Golden Book based on the movie says after Dumbo's public flight, the circus was renamed "Dumbo's Flying Circus" and that Dumbo did not let the fame go to his head. The penultimate line said "Dumbo forgave all who had been mean to him before, for his heart was as big as his ears", suggesting he bears no ill will towards the Elephants or the Clowns.
**A few book/comic book adaptations also say that by the end of the film, the Elephants tried to stretch their ears so they could also fly like Dumbo and holding their own "magic feathers", but without success.
*Some early book adaptations/printed media use generic elephants wearing random hats/colors instead of the main four from the original film, although Catty did appear in a 1972/1996 coloring book by Golden Books. In other printed media, the four characters would be featured but with different colored clothing (not uncommon for book adaptations at the time). In one 1992 Little Nugget board book, Giddy and Matriarch's skin and clothing colors are erroneously switched.
Category:Elephants
Category:Females
Category:Dumbo characters
Category:Circus performers
Category:Disney characters
Category:Animated characters
Category:House of Mouse characters
Category:Adults
Category:Characters in the Disney animated features canon
Category:Neutral characters
Category:Villains
Category:Anthropomorphic characters
Category:Live-action characters