In the Mystery Science Theater 3000 short “The Truck Farmer,” one of the jokes is, “Let’s bring you back to the days when DDT was legal!” I definitely remember my mom using Roundup on the blackberry vines in our backyard that produced no berries, only thorns, when I was a kid. And that was in the ’80s, when a lot of poisons were off the market. Now, you can actually buy arsenic crystals for $13 on Amazon (man, the things research does to a writer’s search history), but at the time this short was made, DDT didn’t exist yet and Mickey’s pest battle likely would’ve used actual arsenic compounds.

Mickey’s garden is completely overrun by insects. They are also already completely resistant to whatever Mickey is using to kill them, as he’s spraying like crazy and the insects keep going. In frustration, he mixes up a batch of All The Poison and goes after the bugs with it. However, he drops the sprayer and accidentally sprays himself. This submerges him into a nightmare world of giant bugs.

I don’t know a lot about gardening; I did plenty of weeding as a child and hated it, but my own yard is much more of a meadow than a garden, and that’s the way I like it. But even with that, I’m pretty sure we don’t have the bugs Mickey does in his own garden. True, we have no food plants. But even as a kid, we didn’t have as many bugs as Mickey does. It’s obviously exaggeration for effect, and that’s fine—but my mom’s only bug control method was marigolds, which didn’t work to keep the bugs away from what I can tell. But I don’t know what’s going on in Mickey’s garden.

This is honestly a scary short. My four-year-old informed me that she liked the part where Mickey had Pluto back. Which is the very end. I saw this short a lot as a kid, and it is one of the ones that plays at the Main Street Cinema at the Magic Kingdom in Disney World—it’s the first colour short where Mickey talks, but the sound isn’t terribly important. But small children are seeing what plays out as Mickey’s Bad Trip. Not that I’m familiar with those, but isn’t that explicitly what’s happening here? The large bugs are threatening, too.

My mother, who enjoys gardening, wouldn’t think of this, but I kind of wonder if gardening is the best metaphor for something full of frustration and disappointment. No matter how hard you try, you are fighting to hold back nature. You will not win. Weeds grow back; insects find your plants. Presumably someone in the Disney studios was dealing with frustration from their garden and exaggerated it into Mickey’s mad hallucinations. It’s certainly not the first time art has helped someone cope with something.

I absolutely would not use your contribution to Patreon or Ko-fi to buy arsenic.