“Donald’s Dream Voice”

There is precedent for Don Cheadle. Long before the Oscar nominee did a brief stint on Duck Tales as a “normal” voice of Donald Duck, the Disney company produced a couple of shorts that were based at least in part on “what if Donald didn’t talk like that?” One of them seemed to operate on the premise that his temper was the bigger problem but his voice didn’t help, and the other definitely operated on the assumption that the voice was the real problem. (There’s another, where Donald is hit on the head with a flower pot and becomes a crooner, but that’s got a different voice and is that rarest of things a cartoon told from Daisy’s perspective.) You don’t have to have read a ton of my columns to know where I fall.

Still, here, Donald (Clarence Nash) is trying to make a living as a door-to-door brush salesman. Only no one will buy from him, because they can’t understand him. One woman even accuses him of using dirty words. (Fowl language, if you will.) Daisy (Ruth Clifford) encourages him to give it one more try. While he’s out, he encounters a man selling voice pills for ten cents a box. Donald figures he has nothing to lose and buys a box; the work, and he now has the voice of Leslie Denison. He sells all his brushes right away and is now determined to propose, but before he can, he spills all but one of his pills, and shenaniganery follows.

The pills work, so why are they being sold on a street corner? Okay, we find out by the end of the short that everyone ends up sounding like Leslie Denison, but still. That seems like a minor hurdle, given what else we discover in that moment. These should be studied, because there’s got to be a way for the effects to last longer or even be permanent. No, you’re not supposed to think that hard about it, but it’s such an obvious question. I know this was 1948, but it’s still a reasonable question. Clinics everywhere would love to have these things.

Honestly, the sales date the short entirely. A guy on a street corner would now be a guy with a mall kiosk, one suspects. The Fuller Brush company still exists, and I’m having a hard time figuring out if they’re now an MLM or not. Certainly it’s now illegal in a lot of places to sell door-to-door without an appointment. I’m of the opinion that I don’t care how good the brush is; if I have to contact a specific person to get it, it’s not worth my time. We live in an era where it’s trivially easy to get whatever you want whenever you want.

Donald almost never shows a Donald level of frustration in this short. I don’t know if it’s that his frustrations in this short are substantially larger, more overwhelming than just “the robot keeps taking my hat” or what have you, but until the very end, he hardly ever comes close to losing his temper. I like this version of Donald better. He actually shows some creative thinking when he’s trying to retrieve that last pill, and it’s true that it would be hard for even this more chastened Donald to be a successful salesman. That voice really would be a problem for him.