As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, my kids are very into the Spanish cartoon Pocoyo. In English-language dub, it’s narrated by Stephen Fry, which is delightful. And one of the main characters is in fact a surly duck. In this case, the surly duck is named Pato, which is just Spanish for “duck.” And every once in a while, Pato has something of a meltdown. When that happens, Stephen Fry gently talks him through it and gets him to see that he’s perhaps not being the most sensible, and maybe he needs to calm down a little. I don’t think all the soothing tones of Stephen Fry in the world are enough to calm Donald Duck down when he reacts the way he did in today’s cartoon.

The nephews appear to be something like teenagers in this one. At any rate, they’re working in the service bay of Donald’s gas station, since there are no customers there, rebuilding an old jalopy because it is 1951. Over the radio comes the drawing of the winning number for the all new Zoom V-8. Donald’s ticket is one number off, and he storms off in annoyance. Only there’s been a mistake, and the wrong number was drawn. The nephews hear that Donald is the lucky winner, and he must come pick up his car within an hour in order to get the prize. They decide to surprise him. Only their car is out of gas, so they trick him with the help of a disguise and the shoddiest disguise for their car I’ve ever seen when Donald won’t spot them a buck’s worth of gas if that.

So far, so good. But here’s where we veer into dark territory. A woman from the radio station calls to let Donald know that his nephews are bringing him a big surprise. He decides he’s going to be ready for them, assuming it’s another prank. When they drive up in his fancy new car, he demolishes it. He inflates the tires until they fly away. He dumps grease all over the car, then floods it as “washing it off.” He uses the lift to smash it into the ceiling until it’s wafer thin.

The joke is that he’s destroyed his own property, which he only realizes when the radio announcer talks about what a good time he must be having out on the roads. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a horrific display of violence. Directed at an inanimate object, to be sure, and not the nephews, but so what? Any therapist in the world could tell you that it still isn’t good. Violence at an object all too often leads to violence at a person, and it’s still creating an unsafe mental health environment for the other person.

Also, you know, so he was fooled once by an incredibly shoddy disguise on the old car (and let’s just not even get into his flirting with his own nephew-of-indeterminate-age in drag, huh?), but when he’s destroying the new one, he’s got to notice that it’s, well, a different car, right? Like, a really obviously different car? When he’s fooled, he’s only seeing part of the car in any moment; when he’s destroying it, he not only sees all of it but is extremely hands-on.

Come to that, why does the woman from the radio station call? If the nephews have the ticket, which they do, that’s what counts. And if the nephews are underage, which they could be but who even knows, and they tell the whole thing about surprising their uncle, wouldn’t that make great publicity for the radio station? Wouldn’t they send a photographer or something to make a human (or, you know, anatine) interest story? It feels as though that phone call is what sets him off, and I don’t understand why that’s the case.

I mean, I can see Pato’s being irritated if Baby Bird and Caterpillar cheated him out of a buck’s worth of gas. That’s fair. (Though even with inflation, that’s less than ten bucks today!) And I can hear Stephen Fry saying, “After all, Pato, they were just trying to do something nice for you, and you wouldn’t share.” But in response to Donald, all I can hear is, “Donald, I’ve got my own mental health problems, and what I advise to you is medication and therapy.”

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