“Commando Duck”

Racism is an unfortunate reality of World War II cartoons. The Popeye cartoons are the worst offenders, but the other studios aren’t immune. Donald spent most of his time in army camps, which eliminates most of it. Many of the shorts from that era are basically him and Pete, tops. And the most famous Bugs Bunny cartoon from World War II is him in the Black Forest, and while that one isn’t great toward Germans, it’s hard to imagine the Jewish Friz Freling’s being kindly disposed toward Germans in 1945. The body-shaming is a bigger issue. Still, Warners had “Tokio Jokio,” and Disney had this.

Donald is being briefed before a parachute drop into enemy territory. He is being sent on his own to destroy a Japanese air base. He is warned that the path through the jungle is perilous, but this being Donald, it will be even worse than that. Donald gets caught in a tree but thinks he’s on the ground, so he releases himself from his chute and promptly plummets toward the man-eating crocodiles. His instant boat is a rubber raft, which ends up going over a waterfall and becoming a giant water balloon.

Unfortunately, the river flows through Japanese stereotypes. There’s a line about how shooting people in the back is the traditional Japanese way. There’s your standard buck-toothed figure with thick glasses. The dialogue is appalling, full of every racially charged moment you could imagine. Donald doesn’t really interact with them, but that’s probably the only blessing. It’s really ugly from the first moment a Japanese character appears. It’s almost as though those characters were just wartime propaganda.

The only line that fully made me laugh out loud was one early in the cartoon about how Donald, who is working alone, was to “surround” the enemy. Neat trick if you can manage it. It’s quite clear that Donald has never jumped out of an airplane before in his life. He’s reading a manual on how to land if you’re parachuting somewhere. Which, uh, you’d want to read before you’re in the air, and you’d want to test repeatedly. I guess hurling a lone duck at a problem is an option, but it’s not the right one. Though my son pointed out that Donald should at least be safe from man-eating crocodiles, being a duck and all.

The homefront cartoons work best. Donald on base is inherently funnier than Donald in the jungle, because you don’t have to worry about the lives that could be lost over his incompetence. The stakes are lower, and lower stakes are funnier when it comes to Donald. He is, after all, The Worst, and you know things are going to go wrong somehow. Here, they have to figure out a way for it all to go right in the end because, you know, war. But do we want to see Donald as the hero?