Donald Duck: How Children (Mainly Boys) Viewed Their Parents (Mainly Fathers), 1943-1960

Abstract

Donald DuckHow Children (Mainly Boys) Viewed Their Parents (Mainly Fathers), 1943-1960* James A. Freeman (bio) Children show no trace of the arrogance which urges adult civilized men to draw a hard-and-fast line between their own nature and that of all other animals. Children have no scruples over allowing animals to rank as their full equals. Uninhibited as they are in the avowal of their bodily needs, they no doubt feel themselves more akin to animals than to their elders, who well may be a puzzle to them.1 It seems ungrateful to seriously analyze the Donald Duck adventures which I read in Walt Disney's Comics & Stories from 1943 until the early 1960s. As uncounted millions of other young Americans, I turned to them, the first stories in each issue, for the simple pleasure of watching hapless Donald as he pursued impossible dreams. Although fame, fortune, and triumph usually eluded him, his perfervid struggles elated me. I don't think I was any crueler than any of my preadolescent pals. Indeed we all were pleased as we read and reread how Donald's nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, tried to save him from disaster. Month after month he was nearly overwhelmed by a gorgeous gallery of opponents: Scrooge McDuck, Gladstone Gander, neighbor Jones, cavemen, spies, smugglers, irate employers, intractable animals, and, consistently, his own rash enthusiasms. Yet he emerged at the end of each story in roughly the same condition as he had entered it, battered perhaps but not much more sunk into the world he only dimly comprehended. Whatever our reasons for appreciating Donald then, they were largely unarticulated. He was ours for ten cents, a friend and a clown whom we all understood. Recently, however, after years of studying books without pictures, I reread my collection of Disney Comics. Carefully preserved for this later, more analytical age, the Duck stories resemble those Egyptian statues that were to spring to life when the revived pharaoh needed them. While the adventures are still entertaining, I experienced a shock that few kings would have welcomed. The overt situations that engaged us so many years ago [End Page 150] spring, oddly, not from the supposed preoccupations of children. Rather they deal almost exclusively with activities that we usually label "For Adults Only": Donald is swindled in real estate; Donald loses job after job; Donald wants only a pedigreed dog (unthinkable snobbery for a kid!); Donald is pestered on his vacation by salesmen; Donald tries to impress Duckburg society by giving a lavish jungle party; and so on.2 Skillfully, but curiously, these plots deal mainly with the ambitions and perils of adults, not children. Even when the three nephews act and thus provide young readers with surrogates, their deeds are almost always responses to some crisis in Donald's career or value in his imagination. Whatever the outcome of their efforts, it has been precipitated by a grownup concern: They try to help him woo Daisy by faking feats of strength; they try to warn him against buying a salted mine; and they urge him to campaign for marshal of the Easter parade. In almost every tale the central donnée is some obsession of the adult world. Now that I was older I was at a loss to explain why the enormous audience for WDC&S was composed of readers who would not shave or vote for many years. The one extended critique on Disney comics which I could find was not really about our American experience with these magazines. (Richard Schickel's The Disney Version is mainly about films and fan journals are mostly nostalgic, not evaluative.) The commentary had been penned, with vigor and outrage, by two Marxistsfrom Chile whoblame the Latin-American "Pato Donald" for indoctrinating their countrymen with the imperialist ideology that eventually toppled Allende.3 True or not, their analysis does not reveal what got to us as we sat on our beds, barricaded (we thought) from the world by a rampart of Disneys. The lure of Donald in those years does not seem to be based upon the same grade-school fantasies that attracted us to, say, Tarzan, Superman, Plastic Man...