I saw another “these kids and their screens!” complaint recently. Now, my kids get a lot more screentime than is generally considered healthy for them—as we speak, my eighteen-month-old daughter Irene is sitting on my lap watching that awful cartoon where Donald’s nephews buy him cigars for his birthday—but I’m frankly of a different mind on the subject than a lot of people, given I’ve read these fears before. And indeed the nephews in this cartoon are being shamed for reading instead of looking at Florida history, and you can bet their comic book isn’t giving them information about that old Spanish fort the way a device might.

Donald is taking the nephews on a scenic drive through rural Florida, surely the dream vacation of children everywhere. (And this was ’53, before Disneyland opened, much less Walt Disney World.) The boys are more interested in their comic book than the aforementioned fort. Donald is offended by this. When he sees a pool with a sign informing him that Ponce de Leon mistook it for the Fountain of Youth, he decides to teach his nephews a lesson by taking away the “mistaken for” part of the sign and pretending to have been returned to babyhood. He then manages to convince the boys that he’s really been returned to egghood by swiping an egg from a crocodile nest, which naturally does not go over well with the crocodile.

I mean, I don’t know a lot about Ponce de Leon. But isn’t that kind of a “George Washington Slept Here” equivalent? As in, likely to be a claim frequently made without proof? Especially since “Ponce de Leon sought the Fountain of Youth” is apparently a claim made without evidence in the first place? Yeah, okay, Donald Duck cartoon. But also let’s be real—this should be a tourist attraction and we all know it, even in the less populated, less touristy Florida of 1953. Also, if Donald isn’t specifically on the look out for this sort of thing, why are they on the vacation? And if they are, why doesn’t he have a guide book?

I’m also astounded by the fact that a duck can’t tell the difference between a duck egg and a crocodile egg. Okay, so not all duck eggs are duck egg blue. But there are distinct differences between bird eggs and reptile eggs that don’t get brought up that you’d think they’d be able to tell, and we’re just skipping over those for the sake of alleged comedy. The nephews, like so many other fictional characters, are as smart or as dumb as the cartoon needs them to be.

Why do I end up writing about so many Donald Duck cartoons when it’s clear I don’t like a lot of them very much? Well, for one thing, they’re easily accessible. There are a ton of them all over YouTube, wishes of the Disney people no doubt notwithstanding. They’re also short and therefore easy to watch in breaks between doing other things. It’s also true that there’s more to say about them than there is about most Mickey Mouse cartoons—referring to how, exactly, Donald currently fulfills the Donald Duck, Aquatic Sociopath label is a lot more interesting than “and then Mickey did something ordinary and suburban.” Could be why there are more Donald Duck cartoons on YouTube in the first place.

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