Mind you, I have no problem with the concept that Donald Duck would be fully capable of setting fire to his own fire station. That’s a very Donald thing to do. What bewilders me about it, though, is how he goes about doing it. Were coal-powered fire engines ever a thing? You don’t even have the rationing issues we’d get into not long after, because this is just barely a pre-war short. And then later it’s got a gas tank so that Donald can put gas on the fire instead of water, so why does it have a coal boiler? You don’t need to heat the water. It’s weird.

Donald is the chief at station 13 13/13. His entire department is, of course, his nephews. They’re annoyed enough at his snoring so that they wake him up with the fire alarm. He makes the boys drill, a popular hobby of his, and then they’re dumping coal on the fire, for reasons, and manages to set the fire station ablaze. What follows is a series of shenanigans where Donald and the nephews completely fail to put out the fire, through their failings and the goings-on of a Disney cartoon.

There’s no real reason to take the set-up seriously. Of course there’s a fire station staffed entirely by Donald and three minors. (With one exception, the nephews are invariably shown as children.) I happen to know that it takes enormous amounts of work to control a fire hose; those things have a ton of pressure and take several strong adults to aim where you want them to go. But that’s fine; even though the cartoon makes it explicit even in its own world, we’ll just go ahead and pretend that it would be possible for the nephews, say, to control the damn thing.

I can imagine that seeing this cartoon in a crowd, when you’d never seen it before, would be more fun than watching it for the umpteenth time alone as an adult. It’s mostly Donald against the elements—literally, in this case—and the nephews are there as much as set dressing as anything else. It would be pushing plausibility even for a cartoon to have Donald as the only one to run an entire fire station, although in another decade or so it’s easy to picture the studio having a squad of Geefs attempt to do it.

Donald Duck cartoons are what they are. There’s a hint of his tyrannical nature in the fact that the nephews are in a triple-bunk bed barely big enough for them, in a vast empty room, while Donald is in a canopy bed on a dais. However, at least his reaction to their prank of waking him up is reasonable for once. After all, this is a fire station. False alarms are a big deal. You don’t want to mess around with them, and anyone working in a fire station should know that. Even if that person is a literal child too young to realistically work there.

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