Disney racked up profits in ancillary markets as well. While the Great Depression ravaged the American economy as a whole, Mickey Mouse and company sold tie-ins by the zillions, from watches and pencils to hairbrushes and hot-water bottles. "New applause is heard for...Mickey the Big Business Man, the world's super-salesman" reported The New York Times Magazine in 1935. "He finds work for jobless folk. He lifts corporations out of bankruptcy. Wherever he scampers...prosperity breaks through the clouds."
Even as feature filmmaking and big-time merchandising captured headlines, Disney's growing empire had to keep up the flow of more modest entertainments that remained the studio's main fare. Almost twenty animated Disney shorts reached the screen in 1938, and three (Good Scouts, Brave Little Tailor, and Ferdinand the Bull) won statuettes on Oscar night. Among the summer releases was The Whalers, an agreeable entry in the Mickey Mouse series. Made long before whaling became the subject of heated debates about environmentalism and animal rights, the cartoon plunks Disney's biggest animated stars - amiable Mickey, cantankerous Donald Duck, and goofy Goofy - onto an oceangoing vessel hunting for the title animal. Fortunately for the whale community, the hunters do not fare well.
The chaos begins when Donald wakes from a nap in the crow's nest, pulls a boloney sandwich from under his hat, and prepares to take the first delicious bite. A bunch of hungry seagulls have other ideas, and although Donald manages to save his lunch from them, a crafty pelican snatches it from his hand and scoffs it down. In another part of the boat, Mickey tries to pour a bucketful of bilge water into the sea, but it keeps boomeranging back at him. Why? Because hey, this is a cartoon!
Goofy enters the picture when Donald sights a whale. Loading the harpoon gun is Goofy's job - it's more of a harpoon cannon, actually - but trying to light the fuse, he sets his finger and pants on fire instead. He finally gets off a shot, harpooning Donald rather than the whale, and when he tries again by replacing the harpoon with the ship's anchor, he gets tangled in a rope and winds up in the belly of the very beast he's been hunting. This will remind Bible readers of Jonah's famous ordeal, and it will remind moviegoers of Pinocchio, the superb feature that Disney's artists started animating just as The Whalers opened in theaters. David Hand and Dick Huemer, who directed The Whalers, didn't work on Pinocchio, but ideas for the two films surely crossed paths when they were in development. In any case, Pinocchio premiered in 1940, when The Whalers was just a memory.
Disney had another big year in 1939, when Pinocchio went before the cameras, work progressed on the 1940 classic Fantasia, and construction of a new animation building got under way. The studio also released fifteen short cartoons, including Sea Scouts, a spirited adventure in the Donald Duck series. Its title is a nod to an actual organization that began around 1910 as an offshoot of the Boy Scouts movement and still exists in countries around the world. Scouting had also inspired the Disney cartoon Good Scouts in 1938.
Sea Scouts continues the watery theme of The Whalers, but now the vessel is first a little rowboat and then a big sailboat, and instead of Mickey and Goofy the crew consists of Huey, Dewey & Louie, plus Uncle Donald, who commands his underlings like a Napoleon with feathers. Once again, things do not go well for the sailors. Weighing the anchor, Donald sinks the sailboat; raising the mainsail, the nephews drop it on his head; making headway toward the sea, Donald snags his foot in a rope, flies into the air, and finds himself dangling from the sail like the tail of a huge kite. And then a shark shows up, sparking a frantic chase. Not surprisingly, the ducks come out on top, thanks in part to Donald's courageous insistence on rescuing his fancy hat from the briny deep. The finale gives the term Rear Admiral a meaning the navy never intended.
Clarence Nash provided Donald's squawky voice for scores of Disney animations, starting in 1934, and in Sea Scouts he does Huey, Dewey & Louie as well. The relatively simple plot required an animation crew just half as large as the team behind The Whalers, but the results are no less striking, and both films have a spectacular Technicolor look. If you'll allow me a really ridiculous pun, The Whalers and Sea Scouts make a truly aqua-quack-tic double bill.
The Whalers
Directors: David Hand, Dick Huemer
Producer: Walt Disney
Music: Albert Hay Malotte
With: Voices of Clarence Nash (Donald Duck), Pinto Colvig (Goofy), Walt Disney (Mickey Mouse)
Technicolor-8m.
Sea Scouts
Director: Dick Lundy
Producer: Walt Disney
Screenplay: Carl Barks
Music: Oliver Wallace
With: Voice of Clarence Nash (Donald Duck, Huey, Dewey, Louie)
Technicolor-8m.
by David Sterritt
