“Donald’s Ostrich”

I did not have “Donald gets sexually harassed by an ostrich” on my Disney Byways bingo card, but I guess we’re here now. I have previously done the research to discover how close Donald is to the chickens and/or turkeys he serves. (Chickens and turkeys are about as closely related as humans and orangutans or gorillas, which I just looked up and which took more time to figure out.) So you will not be surprised to learn that the ostrich that’s weirdly into him is as closely related to him as a human and a platypus, if I’m doing this right.

Here’s the thing—it’s not even an anthropomorphized ostrich. I talk so often about how often we talk about the layers of sentience in Disney animals that I think I said last week it was too often to start linking articles. So yeah. In this cartoon, Donald Duck, Aquatic Sociopath, is in charge of the Yahoo train station. An ostrich is dropped off as cargo. Hilarity, at least in theory, ensues. That’s it; that’s the short. The ostrich makes eyes at Donald and kisses him as well as an ostrich can kiss, and she (her name is Hortense) swallows all kinds of improbable things.

Is that a known thing about ostriches? Wikipedia says they’re omnivores, but this ostrich is eating things like a cartoon goat. She eats a concertina, an alarm clock, a radio, and probably other things I don’t remember. I have no direct, personal experience with ostriches. That’s why I used Wikipedia. And I could search the internet, but I feel as though I’ve already done sufficient research. And like, it’s funny to watch an ostrich’s neck concertina because, you know, it ate one. I just don’t know if that’s something you’d have to worry about if you had a real ostrich around.

For once for one of these shorts, there’s actually IMDb trivia, namely that there are several known deleted scenes, some of which were actually animated. And this, as people who have read Chuck Amuck can tell you, is yet another difference between Disney and Warners. A full-on clip has been found; it seems to have been deleted because the mask Donald was wearing tiptoed up to the edge of a Universal copyright. But across town in those days, animators were expected to have their cartoons exactly seven minutes long before they went onto film.

Interestingly, what was happening across town the year this cartoon was made was the debut of the other well-established cartoon duck. Donald had been around for three years at this point; this was the first cartoon listed as a Donald Duck cartoon. Mel Blanc started at Warners. So I’m not saying this was a high point in their animation, by any stretch. I’d honestly rather watch this than an Egghead short, at the very least.