When I was a kid, we had a woman move in next door who basically didn’t trust most of the people around her. We weren’t in a particularly high-crime area, being middle class and suburban as we were, but she built a six-foot-high fence around most of her yard, thereby cutting off several of the short cuts on our block. Which was fine and her prerogative, but which definitely did not endear her to the mailman or to the family whose kitchen window now overlooked a fence and didn’t get sun during the day. The last I was there, the fence was long gone; I’m pretty sure she was as well.
Donald Duck, Aquatic Sociopath, has moved into a new house. It’s a bright, cheerful little house with one small problem. Specifically that it is next door to Pete. The Wikipedia summary (astonishingly long) says that Pete “accidentally” dumps his garbage into Donald’s yard, but that isn’t true. It’s obviously deliberate. Pete’s dog, Muncie, just doesn’t care. He digs up Donald’s flowers with a blithe disregard for property lines. Pete then proceeds to borrow the entire contents of Donald’s kitchen. Things build up to a full-on fight, complete with spectators and telecast.
Honestly, this would be a more believable short from Mickey. The idea that Donald is just cheerfully living his best life and only retaliating proportionally to Pete’s attacks is . . . not believable. Mickey would be considerably more plausible in that scenario. However, by this stage in his evolution, the idea of Mickey’s doing something was itself not entirely plausible. He puttered around Bing Crosby-like, letting things happen around him but not actually engaging with anyone. Building a spite fence is not in his wheelhouse for 1953.
It’s not difficult to imagine an animator coming up with the idea because his neighbour’s got an unpleasant dog or similar. While goodness knows there are problems with neighbours in apartments—nothing like stepping out of your apartment to a domestic dispute on your doorstep—there’s a strange sort of rivalry to the suburbs. There are lots of areas where a yard like Pete’s simply isn’t allowed because the HOA won’t permit it; it’s frankly much more believable to me to imagine Donald’s leading a particularly nitpicky HOA board that gets Pete fined for having the wrong shade of pale blue on his mailbox.
The history of spite fences is an intriguing one, and there are spite structures far beyond mere fences. Some of them are so wild they get laws put in place to prevent anything similar; a lot of places now have laws about how close you can build to the property line. This cartoon may be specifically suburban in nature, given the position of the animators at the time, but if you’ve led any suburban life, it’s all too familiar. At least laws are in place now so that the annoying Yappy Dogs down the street from us don’t wander the streets and dig up my yard, I guess.
Help me work on my own little piece of suburban Heaven; consider supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!
