Do kids still try to dig holes to China? I never did, but I guess I got enough digging by having to do a lot of yard work. I’m not even sure my kids have it as a concept, which is why I’m not sure the ending of this cartoon will be as much a thing as it would have been to my mom when she first saw it. Also—and no shade intended toward my mother, but she is after all eighty—my kids have had it drilled into them their whole lives that the sort of stereotypical Chinese accent used, doubtless intended to make it clear that, yes, it’s China, is inappropriate. Mom doubtless didn’t. So yeah, there’s that.

In this one, Donald’s got an orchard, and he’s happily harvesting apples. Except he starts finding a lot of just apple cores. To the surprise of no one, he discovers that Chip ‘n’ Dale are living in his orchard and eating the apples. This being Donald, he promptly declares war on them. There’s the standard back-and-forth that you always get with this kind of short, and then he turns out to have a seriously disturbing arsenal of lethal chemicals in his stores, even for the days when DDT was legal. Including something mysterious and atomic.

The problem with the main dialogue of this short is that you have three characters who are, to put it charitably, not the most articulate in the Disney catalogue. And maybe the bit of back and forth in it was something people my mom’s age would’ve known, but it’s the only place I’ve ever heard it. I got the “apple core” bit, and the “who’s your friend?” But I could never understand the first response, which research as an adult indicates is supposed to be “Baltimore.” I can only assume because it rhymes with “apple core.” It’s a weird rhyme, and I think the only point is to have an excuse to throw an apple core at someone. Which I wouldn’t accept in my kids regardless.

I recently read an entire Mary Roach book about the interactions of humans and other animals, and it turns out there’s a certain extent to which just letting animals eat some of your crops is as effective as anything else. Scarecrows if anything draw birds, because they know you only put scarecrows up if there’s something edible there. It’s a complicated scientific field, and since a pair of chipmunks appear to be the only pest animals in the entire orchard, Donald could certainly do worse except for the part where, these being Disney chipmunks, they eat far more than their body weights every day.

I have to admit that this cartoon contains probably my favourite bit of Disney wordplay in any of the shorts. Donald’s got a hen. One, from what I can tell, but never mind. Anyway, the mysterious atomic bit ends up in an egg, and Donald pronounces “ticking” to rhyme with “chicken.” It’s a tickin’ egg, and this has amused me since I was very, very young. Certainly more so than anything else in the cartoon.

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