There are just a wealth of possible images to present you for this short, and you won’t believe any of them. Should we go with the vaguely ethnic couple settled on to be “typical”? How about the artistic paintings of human misery? The similar paintings of happy families that look something like a magazine ad for a feminine hygiene product? Doctor Donald Duck, blessedly silent for the most part and allowing narrator Paul Frees to actually talk to us about human reproduction? The assortment of vaguely stereotypical people from around the world who are then blended together to make the vaguely ethnic couple? How do you even choose?

And yet it’s not as offensive a cartoon as it could be. A bit patronizing. Awfully sexist, for a cartoon about family planning. (Though I will say it at least admits that “man” doesn’t mean “humans,” since it explicitly mentions “woman” as being an addition to that.) And, really, what the hell is Donald Duck even doing there? Still, I don’t think it’s exactly true that the cartoon is preaching to those poor, ignorant ethnic people who are too dumb to know about this themselves, though some of that art is a bit white-man’s-burdeny. After all, it does explicitly assume that they’ll have access to medical professionals with whom to discuss the subject and is just encouraging them to do so and explaining why it’s a good thing.

You see, in the past, children died a lot. Now, they don’t. So the population is increasing, and that means people aren’t able to support their enormous families. We’d all be better off with smaller families, because the resources we have are only going to stretch so far. If we don’t limit our families, the children will have no prospect of improving their lives, and we’ll have to divide our farms up so small that our grandchildren will starve to death. They’ll be illiterate and not have radios, too.

So yeah. Obviously, the thing you need to help get this message across is the silent presence of Donald Duck, and it just wouldn’t work without it. Just as Jiminy Cricket teaches fire safety and how to be a thoughtful pedestrian in the “I’m No Fool” cartoons and Goofy teaches automotive safety in “Freeway Phobia” and “Goofy’s Freeway Troubles,” Donald Duck was the right choice to teach men about family planning.

Oh, wait—men? Yeah. Now, the cartoon does show the woman as the one who will actually go to the doctor, “health service worker,” or family planning clinic to get further information. However, while Mr. Vaguely Ethnic talks to the narrator, Mrs. Vaguely Ethnic whispers what she has to say to him, and he tells us. The cartoon seems to be suggesting that Mr. Vaguely Ethnic is the one who needs convincing that family planning is a good idea. Mrs. Vaguely Ethnic mostly just needs to know that it’s safe, which is understandable, since it’s probably going to be her burden—and it didn’t occur to Mr. Vaguely Ethnic. She also needs to know what the neighbours will think.

And she’d better go to that clinic for further information, because she’s not really getting it here. We are told vaguely that there’s some pills and devices that can be used, but it seems Disney is not inclined to go into any more detail than that. Quite right I grant you that I do not want to learn these things from Donald Duck, but this gets back into why Donald Duck appears in this short in the first place! He’s barely in it, mostly just serving to paint demonstrations for the narrator and add a bit of whimsy. And I put it to you that neither of these are necessary.

Now, Mr. Vaguely Ethnic needs to have his ego pumped—he thinks that having a lot of kids is proof of his manliness, and the narrator has to suggest to him that taking care of those kids matters more. And he’s never heard of family planning before, which seems unlikely even in 1967, even in rural areas. How rural can they be if they’re getting Donald Duck to tell them about social problems?

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