Less frequently mentioned than the evolution of Donald or Mickey is the evolution of the nephews. I mean, Mickey’s only sometimes get mentioned, but Donald’s start out as just obnoxious and sort of shift into their cunning and often put-upon selves. For a stretch in there, Donald wasn’t entirely wrong to be so angry at them; they frequently played some fairly awful pranks on him, and only sometimes were they in retaliation for awful things that Donald had done to them. I don’t like these cartoons much, but I like Donald better in them.

Here, he’s spending a peaceful evening at home. The radio announces that a killer gorilla has escaped from the zoo, and Donald uses a pair of fake gorilla hands to scare the boys. They, in turn, use a gorilla suit that happened to be around the house to scare Donald. Just a little wacky fun in cartoon land until the real Ajax the Gorilla breaks into their house, because of course he does. And naturally, Donald initially thinks the real gorilla is the boys.

It’s interesting how often gorillas in fiction are vicious killers, given that real-world gorillas are mostly peaceful creatures. Oh, they’ll battle one another if it comes to that, but they’re even primarily vegetarian. But I’m not sure I can think of a single fictional gorilla that’s not vicious except Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s Professor Bobo, who is . . . in his own category. And yet we think of chimpanzees, which are much more likely to be vicious as adults, as harmlessly wacky. Gorillas are also considerably smaller than our fictional version; the average height of a male gorilla is about the size of Tom Cruise, albeit with a considerably greater armspan and weight. But Tom Cruise is scarier anyway.

This is one of those cartoons that feels as though they got to a certain point and didn’t know what to do about it from there. The ending’s a bit abrupt. Almost as if everyone concerned threw their hands up in the air and said, “Well, I guess that’s long enough.” No one had any ideas for anything else in it, and they were willing to just go on with it. At the same time, I guess no one had an idea for a cartoon to do instead?

To my great astonishment, no one knows who voiced the radio announcer. Credits in cartoons have long been uneven things. (Over at Warners, famously, it was considered “low class” or something for the cartoonists to have nicknames, which is why you get I. Freleng and Charles M. Jones for so long.) This cartoon, too, has a long array of “uncredited,” including Clarence Nash as all the ducks and Carl Barks as one of the writers. But literally, no one to this day can tell you who the radio announcer is, which doesn’t seem fair. It’s a small part, but still. Credit where credit is due, except I guess not here.

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