Carl Barks joined the Disney Studio in 1955 and began working as an in-betweener, the starting position for animators. In-betweeners filled in the action between key character poses drawn by veteran animators. Anxious to advance himself, the Duck Artist began submitting gags for various Disney cartoons, and in 1936, he was promoted to the story department on the strength of a joke written for the Donald Duck cartoon "Modern Inventions."
“We were trying to think of things that Donald could invent or that he could get involved in, so I happened to come up with the idea of a barber chair that would automatically clip somebody's hair; and Donald, being a precocious character, sort of messed up the machinery in it by trying to get his coin back. I had no idea how the gag would be used, I just created a situation in which Donald got in the barber chair and it flipped him upside down and gave him a haircut on the wrong end.
When the gag was turned in, I had shown it all in sort of comic strip form. Walt saw it, paid me $50 for the gag, and suggested that I should be put into the story department." The gag Barks wrote led Walt and the animators to think they had enough material to make a picture on the subject, and Disney assigned Barks to write a script for the story in collaboration with Jim King, who was appointed director of the picture.
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