Good Scouts

The short names its location before it puts Donald to work in it. Yellowstone National Park, pines and rock, and then the scoutmaster himself marching his troop of three through the scenery, chest out. Most Donald Duck shorts of the late thirties took place in a kitchen, a backyard, or some unnamed patch of countryside. Good Scouts named a real place and made the geography do work. The bear is a Yellowstone bear, the geyser is a Yellowstone geyser under the alias Old Reliable, a joke the 1938 audience would have caught at once, and the whole second half depends on the park's most famous feature keeping to its noon schedule.

Donald's first job is to teach woodcraft, and he fails at every part of it. He cannot get the tent up, cannot drop a tree where he meant to, cannot get three small boys to admire him. The comedy in this stretch is quiet and observational, the sort of thing Jack King's unit did well: a grown duck losing an argument with equipment while children watch with folded arms. It is not yet a chase. The film is patient about that, and the patience is why the back half lands as hard as it does.

The turn comes when Donald decides that if he cannot earn the boys' respect he will settle for their pity. He smears ketchup on himself and plays wounded. The nephews respond with the thoroughness of children who have read the manual, wrapping him from crown to tail until he cannot see. Blind, he wanders into a pot of honey. The honey brings a grizzly. From that moment the short stops being a satire of bad leadership and becomes a machine, and the machine runs without a single wasted part.

Eight minutes, one line of dominoes, and not a gag left on the floor.

The story credit belongs to Carl Barks and Harry Reeves, and the plotting reads like an early draft of the cause-and-effect discipline Barks later brought to the Donald Duck comic books. Nothing digresses. Each gag pays for the next, and the final image, Donald and the bear still circling the balanced boulder after dark while the boys sleep in a heap, is a punchline that also happens to be the logical end of every choice made since the ketchup.

Huey, Dewey and Louie had been on screen exactly once before, in Donald's Nephews that April, where they operated as a plague of small hooligans. Less than three months later they arrived in Yellowstone as a different act. They still needle their uncle, and they plainly enjoy the bandaging more than any medic should, but the second half hands them a rescue to run, and they run it with real competence. Log, stones, boulder: their solutions escalate in the same order the film escalates its problems.

That change mattered for the series. Nephews as pure menace would have burned out within a few shorts. Nephews as a small, capable unit that sometimes sides with Donald and sometimes does not gave the writers a dynamic they could return to for years, and it is essentially the one Barks used in print for the next three decades. Good Scouts is where that version of the boys first shows up on film, and it is one reason the short holds up better than several louder Donald entries from the same year.

Jack King directed, two years into his second stint at the studio; he had come back in April 1936 and would eventually direct more than forty Donald Duck films before leaving in 1948. Oliver Wallace wrote the score, and Clarence Nash voiced all four ducks, which means the arguments between uncle and nephews are one man interrupting himself. The animators listed are Paul Allen, Al Eugster, Frank Follmer, Ed Love and Jack Hannah, the last of whom would go on to direct Donald himself from late 1944 onward. The bear has no credit and needs none; his timing is the best in the picture.

What the credits do not show is how much the film relies on staging over dialogue. Once the bandages go on, Donald barely speaks in words. His performance is posture, panic and the way his wrapped body rebounds off the water column. For a character whose voice is his signature, that is a bold allocation of screen time, and it pays off.

The short was nominated for the cartoon short subject award at the 11th Academy Awards, the first nomination the Donald Duck series had received. It lost to Ferdinand the Bull, released that November, which meant the studio competed against itself and won either way. Seen now, the two films make an odd pair: one is a gentle picture book about a flower-sniffing bull, the other is a duck being shot out of the ground by a geyser while a bear waits. The Academy chose the picture book. That says something about 1938 taste, not about which film is more alive.

Disney's promotion campaign is a footnote worth keeping. The studio sent drawings to the Chief Scout Executive and a thousand scout executives, mailed press releases to 5,400 newspapers, and notified 38,000 Scoutmasters. In other words, it sold a cartoon about a hopeless scoutmaster to the Boy Scouts of America, and the Scouts evidently took it in good humour. The film earned that goodwill. Donald is the fool, but the troop comes out looking like the best-trained unit in the park.