Every once in a while, there is a fad for kits to make things you probably shouldn’t make from kits. You can still buy a kit house, but their heyday is long since past now. Disney has long recognized the inherent comedy in extreme do-it-yourself projects; this is one of several cartoons on the subject. It’s also one of those ones where Mickey, Goofy, and Donald work together on some project or another, and those are another interesting phenomenon that comes and goes in popularity as time passes.

In this case, they have ordered a boat. Not for these three a dinky little dinghy. They never say, and I am not an expert, but this is a full-blown ship. It’s got to have multiple decks, and it’s forty feet long if it’s an inch. And these three goofballs are the ones putting it together, of course. Well—two goofballs; Mickey’s actually doing okay, and his only problem is ordinary vagaries of a build-it-yourself ship kit. He accidentally gets Donald all tangled up in the rudder, though, and there’s the bit where Goofy falls in love with the figurehead that is just weird.

Now, I don’t know if the predictable end of this short comes because the manufacturers or the Big Three are incompetent. I suspect it’s a little from column A, a little from column B. Now, the plans say, “So easy a child could do it,” but the fact remains that it’s a lot of work. It’s a ship large enough that the rudder alone is taller than Donald. I don’t think I’d particularly want to sail on it regardless, because only three of them are working on it. Either they took a long time or they cut corners, and I bet I know which one we’re looking at.

These cartoons are basically a bunch of slapstick gags strung together. There’s a plot, but it’s always “Mickey, Goofy, and Donald are trying to do something that would be a lot easier if they were anyone else.” Maybe here, they’re building a boat, but we’ve also seen them clean clocks, move house, and so forth. In a way, what these shorts gave birth to is the only Donald Duck shorts I really like, the ones where it’s Donald against the malign forces of the universe. Sure, Mickey gets him into trouble here, but normally, it’s just . . . life.

They’d be better off with the dinghy. That isn’t just the whole “predictable ending” bit. It’s that this is really too much ship to be crewed by these three. And we know, explicitly, that they’re th only crew in addition to the only builders. Lucky for Minnie, I suppose, that she wasn’t on the boat they named after her and was just christening it at the end. But really, they should all know better than to trust “so easy a child could do it.”

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