Remembering Donnie Dunagan — The Son of Frankenstein Was 92

Picture a soundstage in 1938. The Monster is in full makeup — flat head, neck bolts, the works — and across a checkers board from him sits a four-year-old in blond curls, calmly taking his money. That was Donnie Dunagan, horror lovers, and he held his own against Boris Karloff.

Dim the lights for this one. Donnie Dunagan died on Wednesday, November 4, of lung cancer. He was 92. The news was announced today.

Quick Specs

• Born: August 16, 1934, in San Antonio, Texas
• Died: November 4, 2026 (aged 92)
• Horror credits: Son of Frankenstein (1939), Tower of London (1939)
• Also known for: The voice of young Bambi in Bambi (1942)
• Later life: U.S. Marine Corps major; three Purple Hearts

The Monster’s Smallest Co-Star

Dunagan was three when he tap-danced his way to a $100 prize at a talent contest in Memphis — huge money in those days — with an RKO talent scout in the audience. The scout put the family on a train to Los Angeles, and after an audition the boy made his screen debut in Mother Carey’s Chickens (1938).

Its director, Rowland V. Lee, then cast him as Peter von Frankenstein, the son of Basil Rathbone’s Baron Wolf, in Son of Frankenstein — the second sequel to James Whale’s 1931 classic. Between takes, Dunagan played checkers with Boris Karloff, still dressed as the Monster. He said he won four bits off him once.

Lee brought him back for Tower of London (1939), again alongside Rathbone, where Dunagan’s Baby Prince is wed in an arranged marriage ceremony played for comedy. Two Universal chillers before his sixth birthday — not a bad start.

The Secret He Kept for 25 Years

While Dunagan was at Universal, Walt Disney himself telephoned the family’s home in Westwood: he wanted the boy to help his artists put a child’s expression on a deer. Dunagan spent more than a year voicing young Bambi — his seventh and last film. Asked in 2011 about crying “Mother… Mother” in the film’s most heartbreaking scene, he remembered a coach asking how he would cry out if his own real mother was lost and in great danger. “That made it easy,” he said.

Then he walked away from Hollywood. Dunagan joined the Marines in 1952 at 18, served three tours in Vietnam, and retired as a major in 1977 with three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star — and in all that quarter-century, he never told anyone he had been Bambi. He did not want anyone calling him “Major Bambi.” Later, he called the silence “one of the biggest regrets of my life,” wishing he had told his close Marine friends he had been part of Disney’s wonderful work.

When the Disney company learned he was still alive, Dunagan became an ambassador for the film, speaking at conventions and festivals for years — the adopted grandfather of every kid who ever lost Bambi’s mother along with him. Our page on Rowland V. Lee traces the two films that started it all.

Trivia & Facts

• Dunagan was uncredited as young Bambi; adolescent Bambi was voiced by Hardie Albright.
• He believed Basil Rathbone was responsible for his casting in Tower of London, recalling Rathbone — “a gentleman, always” — objecting as scenes were cut from the script.
• His survivors include his wife, Dana, whom he married in September 1992.

Harper’s Extras

If this farewell sends you back to the Universal vaults, start with our Son of Frankenstein page, then visit Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone — the two giants the little baron’s son played between.

Rest easy, Donnie. The checkers board won’t be the same without you. Until the next nightmare, fiends.