Tuesday, February 09, 2016

Beak practice

It's interesting that Walt Disney chose Donald Duck to lecture men on the virtues of birth control, given that the, er, unusual sexual proclivities of mallards are such that Stewart Lee originally called his 2007 stand-up show March Of The Mallards as a rebuttal to the "heterosexual monogamy is normal" narrative of March Of The Penguins...

The educational film verges on being outright propaganda produced for the Population Council, which continues in respectable form to this day but which was founded on eugenicist principles. No doubt Walt Disney himself, who died two years before the film was made, would have supported it, given his racist sympathies.

Incidentally, this is far from being the only time that Disney ventured into the realm of public information films. Here's one on menstruation from 1946, now preserved in the US National Film Registry.

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