When Donald is grouped with Mickey and Goofy, he is more likely to be opposing the universe. I don’t know why. I suppose it’s probably that, if he were angry at Mickey and Goofy, you’d be wondering more often why they put up with him. Sure, I do anyway, but that’s not the point. As it happens, they must’ve reached their limit around this time; this is the last of the shorts about the trio doing Generic Thing to be produced, it seems. I’ve long been fascinated by lasts of this sort and how seldom you find them because you were looking and how much more often you find them because they kind of find you.
The trio are doing routine maintenance on Mickey’s tugboat. It has a mast and an engine and let us not discuss this. Anyway, Mickey hears over the radio that the good ship Gigantic is sinking. Despite not, so far as I can tell, having anything in the way of detail about this, despite being in port on a nice, clear day and not in whatever storm-tossed region the Gigantic is in, Mickey, Donald, and Goofy determine that they must go to the ship’s rescue. Naturally, their gallant little tug is opposed to this in the way of inanimate objects in these shorts.
I suspect but cannot prove that the title is a reference to Tugboat Annie, a 1933 movie set in Seattle that I have not actually seen. In fact, I know almost nothing about it except that the tug used in the movie is still preserved in Seattle and that my favourite restaurant in Olympia is named after it. (If you are ever in Olympia, it’s worth the stop; you will think you have gone too far before you reach it, and the road is improved these days from what it used to be.) Maybe the plot has some vague resemblance; it would make as much sense as anything else.
It’s one of those shorts about which there is not much to say. Mickey, Goofy, and Donald do things; they are prevented from doing things; there is some sort of comedic conclusion to their attempt to do things. There’s easily a dozen shorts following this basic structure, and while this is better than some, that doesn’t make it particularly memorable or exciting. It’s solidly fine. Why it’s on Disney+ and other, better shorts are not is part of a long rant about the accessibility of shorts available on Disney+ that I won’t be going on at this time.
Still, it’s not actually bad, and that does make it better than some of the other shorts we’ve covered for this column. It’s from the era of Disney cartoons where “solidly fine” is putting it above at least three-quarters of the rest of their content, though we’re about to hit the Genuinely Classic era of World War II shorts; I do have a fondness for the Disney propaganda years, strange as that may seem. At least when it came to propaganda, Disney gave you something to talk about.
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