“Donald’s Better Self”

“Merbabies,” yes; this, no. I don’t get you, Disney+. It’s a Donald Duck cartoon. How can you go wrong with a Donald Duck cartoon? Surely more people will watch it. I know a lot of people who love Donald Duck! Oh, I’m not one of them, but you can’t count on weirdos like me for everything. I can’t imagine that the viewing stats on “Merbabies” are all that high, and I get that you’re trying to show you still care about the Silly Symphonies, but there are, you know, actual good ones. I’m not saying “Donald’s Better Self” is one of Donald’s best shorts, but so what?

Donald does not want to get up in the morning, as who can blame him. A character who serves as his conscience gets him up and gets him going. She tells him that he has to go to school, and he really does not want to. However, as he is on his way, his “anti-conscience” persuades him to play hooky and then gets him to smoke a pipe. The conscience finds them again. Initially, she refuses to fight, but when the anti-conscience beats her up, she proceeds to wipe the floor with him. Donald still doesn’t want to go to school.

Unlike most other similar appearances, these are not a shoulder angel and devil. They are the same size as Donald. Is this their first appearances as a trope? I’ve tried looking this up before and cannot find the information. Still, it’s early enough that you do get the full-size version. They are also not called an angel and a devil in the Wikipedia summary, which I find hilarious; it’s where I get “anti-conscience” from. They’re not as inclined to pop in and out of existence as similar characters would eventually do.

I don’t get why there’s so much negative about smoking in these older shorts which were all, you know, made by smokers. Oh, I’m sure there were plenty of non-smokers working at the studio, too; I can’t find statistics from those days, but even at the highest rates I can find, the smoking rate didn’t break fifty percent. But I also know that even non-smokers were around smokers all the time. I know, little though the studio likes to talk about it, that Walt smoked. But any time someone’s shown smoking for the first time, it makes them sick. Maybe it’s a commentary from the non-smokers.

In the early years of Donald as a character, they didn’t have a strong feel for how old he was. While the closest we get to a parental figure is the conscience, he’s still going to school in a way that indicates grade school. There are a lot of cartoons along those lines in the early days where you could read him as no older than perhaps fifteen. On the other hand, there are plenty where he’s shown as romancing Daisy or in some other way emulating adult activities. Then again, he remains the most childish of the Disney characters in a way I don’t mean as a compliment.