It’s a bit disappointing to that Disney has changed things so that Donald Duck’s birthday is never again Friday the thirteenth. It’s now officially June 9, which isn’t funny. Okay, so “The Wise Little Hen,” the first-ever appearance of Donald Duck, premiered on June 9, 1934, so it’s more historically accurate. I get that, and I understand why they did it. It’s still a little sad to me.

But in the days this short was made, they were less fussy about that sort of thing. It is March 13, presumably 1949—when the short was released—and Huey, Dewey, and Louie are looking through catalogues, trying to figure out what to get their uncle for his birthday. They settle on a box of cigars, but they don’t have the $2.98 it will cost. So okay, they settle on a way to earn the money—doing Uncle Donald’s yardwork and charging him the money. So far, so good; the problem is that he insists that they save the money. The rest of the short is the boys’ attempting to get the money back to buy the present and then Donald’s reaction to the next inevitable misunderstanding.

I mean, I’m all about teaching kids how to save money. It’s an important skill. Not enough people have it, even leaving aside that some people are in situations where it’s just not possible. But Donald actually shames his nephews for stealing from their own bank without a trace of awareness that it’s their money. They earned it. He doesn’t know that they earned it so they could buy him a birthday present, because telling him would ruin the surprise. However, he apparently won’t even consider the idea that they might have legitimate reasons for keeping their money to spend rather than saving it for a future date, and after all why did they do the unsolicited yardwork if they didn’t have a reason to want the money?

Now, I’m also thinking that having someone do as much work for you as the boys do is probably worth a whole lot more than $2.98 and would be a fine birthday present. “We don’t have money, so we did the thing.” And according to the site I use for these purposes, $2.98 in 1949 comes to roughly thirty bucks today. I am not an expert on cigars, goodness knows, but a little research suggests we’re looking at twenty-five in a box. So those cigars cost about a dime each and were probably pretty bad cigars. Okay, so Donald is unlikely to be a connoisseur, but still. Throw in a nice homemade card, and that much yardwork, and I’d count myself ahead.

Naturally, too, this is another one of those shorts where the “obvious” solution to boys’ interest in smoking is to make them smoke a whole lot. I never had the slightest interest in smoking, at least in part because I’ve long believed it killed my father. And I get that smoking that many cigars (eight or nine per, probably) would probably make you sick, especially since he’s cramming multiple cigars in the kids’ mouths at once. But I feel like this is one of those parenting things that’s probably fallen by the wayside because it’s actually a terrible idea. Maybe I’m wrong. But don’t the kids see the adult smoke and know that, eventually, you stop getting sick from smoking?

And in a last thing that’s always bothered me about the cartoon, why is the note from the boys at the bottom of the box? The short answer, of course, is so Donald can be ashamed of himself for the final gag and the emotional completion of the cartoon. But from a logistical standpoint, wouldn’t the note have been on top? I realize I’m way overthinking the whole cartoon, but it just seems to me like what we have here is another one of those cartoons where the point is Donald Duck being mean for no good reason, and that part doesn’t amuse me. So I amuse myself, and that means overthinking.