WALT DISNEY TREASURES: THE CHRONOLOGICAL DONALD Vol. 1

By the mid-1930s, Mickey Mouse was the biggest movie star in history, but with this great popularity came great responsibility. As Walt Disney worked around the clock building a cartoon empire, he couldn't have his company's trademark drinking rotgut liquor and swinging cats around by the tail, as he had in his earlier adventures. Of course, as the little mouse became more sanitized, he became less funny. In his daily newspaper strip, cartoonist Floyd Gottfredson's solution was to make Mickey into an adventure hero Mickey went from a 1930 sequence in which tried to commit suicide to fighting Nazis ten years later. But in the cartoons, they began to cast around for less wholesome characters to surround Mickey and increase the laugh quotient.

Disney had hired a young man named Clarence Nash, who had appeared on radio doing a funny voice routine, to provide a voice for an ill-tempered little duck in two cartoons. The first was a Mousecartoon called "Orphan's Benefit" (already on the out-of-print MICKEY MOUSE IN BLACK & WHITE, which some fiends are selling used online for over $100!), which established the unnamed duck as a bit of a ham with a foul temper. This first volume of CHRONOLOGICAL DONALD starts off with the other cartoon, the fable "The Wise Little Hen", which shows us that "Donald Duck" is also lazy, dishonest and sneaky. The response to Donald was immediate, and the Disney animators had their fall guy. Mickey couldn't be anything more negative than "hapless" in the cartoons, and his buddy Goofy might be clumsy and foolish, but he was generally good natured. But Donald? That was a duck of another color. If Mickey was Disney's Superego, the duck became a Monster from the Id.

Donald was put to work supporting Mickey in his series (see the three volumes of DISNEY TREASURES devoted to the Mouse), but it soon became apparent that Donald was too big for the Little Red Britches. We next find him not in a solo cartoon, but as the costar of another Disney favorite who had already graduated to his own series in "Donald and Pluto". It's likely that the plot could have been reworked from a Mickey cartoon Donald is doing some plumbing work in Mickey's basement for some reason while Pluto gets into trouble with a magnet, with the Mouse nowhere to be seen. But when the plumber gets involved in the mayhem, it's much funnier to see Donald trying to brain Pluto with a wrench than any reaction that Mickey might have. The final shot of the dog licking Donald's face amid the wreckage gives us a fine mix of annoyance and aw-shucks bemusement, whereas Mickey would've been tickled all the way.

The first true solo effort is 1937's "Don Donald", in which Donald plays a Mexican (Donald would later become something of a good will ambassador to Latin and South America). A couple of other firsts occur in this cartoon. We first see Donald wooing an equally bad-tempered girlfriend that would eventually become Daisy. They naturally get into a fistfight right off. We also get an introduction to Donald's distinctive car, which costs him one burro.

After these experiments, director Jack King (DUMBO) and writer Carl Barks were assigned to the Donald series full time, resulting in a run of classic cartoons that not only delivered some of the wildest Disney cartoon gags, but took the unusual tack of exploring the star's personality. "Self Control" and "Donald's Better Self" are both nearly solitary exercises in which Donald tries to deal with his hair trigger mood swings. Not all of Donald's cartoons were quite so introspective for the most part, they were merely clever (as a "Fire Chief", the duck only succeeds in burning down the fire station), but always beautifully animated, and sometimes downright hilarious. In between assisting Mickey and Goofy with various ill-fated assignments, Donald also hassled with robots in "Modern Inventions", another strange bird ("Donald's Ostrich") and visiting triplets ("Donald's Nephews", who were first seen in the comic strip and would become Disney fixtures).

By the late '30s, Donald was arguably more popular than Mickey. Just witness his antics in 1939's "The Autograph Hound", in which Donald sneaks onto a studio backlot to add ink to his collection, only to be swamped by Hollywood stars seeking his autograph. In "Polar Trappers" and "The Fox Hunt", he's come full circle, sharing cartoons with Goofy as a way of spinning the dog off into his own series. But the duck had already met more apt adversaries than that dippy dog, and he was more often found in the company of his mischievous nephews. In "Good Scouts", he takes them camping as a scoutmaster Barks liked the idea of the ducks as scouts so much, he would make it a regular part of the duck comics he began writing and drawing soon after.

The rest of the cartoons in this two-disc set, which covers the first part of Donald's "career", finds the duck exasperated by his nephews and others in various situations. "Donald's Lucky Day" even borrows from Hitchcock's SABOTAGE by making him a delivery boy carrying a time bomb. It's funny to see a cartoon duck with a goofy voice lose his temper so much so that the folks at Warner Bros. gave Daffy a similar personality in contrast with new star Bugs Bunny but why did folks like him so much? It probably has a lot to do with his stubborn streak. No matter how exasperated he gets, Donald refuses to give up, and always comes back smiling for another cartoon. You gotta admire spunk like that.

The 36 cartoons on display here are given the royal treatment, restored to optimal condition without overdoing it with harmful image cleaning programs. In many shots, you can even see the shadows cast by one cel upon another, and handy subtitles are available to those unable to understand duck talk. As in other vintage Disney cartoon presentations, animation fan Leonard Maltin is on hand to introduce each disc, as well as offer occasional warnings for cartoons that might contain non-PC material like firearms. Though I'm tempted to request a warning before showing Leonard Maltin on screen, his brief explanations are infinitely preferable to having Disney edit the cartoons. Some questionable gags do slip through without comment though, as when Donald jokes about being in a concentration camp in "Timber". Maltin also narrates entries in the gallery sections, which show off posters, comic strips, storyboards and magazine covers. Unlike a lot of other DVD galleries, this audio annotation helps make the galleries here entertaining and educational features in their own right, standing in for the lack of a commentrak.

An easily found Easter Egg on disc one leads to a clip from THE RELUCTANT DRAGON in which Robert Benchley meets Florence Gill (Clara Cluck) and Clarence Nash during a recording session. Disc two's Egg gives you the 1940 fundraising cartoon "The Volunteer Worker". Disc 2 also contains a short profile on Nash.

Like the other limited edition WALT DISNEY TREASURES DVDs, this one comes with a Certificate of Authenticity, a handsome 8-page insert booklet, and a postcard sized poster reproduction. The classy design used for the double-disc keepcase is extended by housing it in a tin box. While aesthetically pleasing, these tin boxes may be overdoing it a bit it's hard to get the keepcase out of them (especially since they're easily dented), are difficult to line up on a shelf, and probably add a few more dollars to the retail price.

Ending this collection in 1941 with the surreal duck vs. recipe tale "Chef Donald" is appropriate, as the duck's next several cartoons were made during wartime, and have been included on the set WALT DISNEY TREASURES: ON THE FRONT LINES. The second volume should fill in the missing cartoons between these propaganda shorts and Donald's feature film appearances, and continue on into the 1950s. But with around 80 cartoons remaining, including educational shorts, there's likely to be another two volumes left to go. Hopefully, Disney will get Vol. 2 in our hands with the next wave of TREASURES.