Donald's Snow Fight

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Donald's Snow Fight

Distributed by	RKO
Release date(s)	April 10, 1942
Running time	7 minutes
Language	English
IMDb profile

Donald's Snow Fight is an animated short film featuring classic cartoon character Donald Duck engaged in a boisterous snowball fight with his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie. It was released in 1942 by Walt Disney Productions and is also known as Snowball Wars.

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

It begins with Donald wiping the fog off his glass door, excited to see snow. He opens the door and soon gets his beak frozen from the cold. He gets an overcoat and pulls a sled while singing Jingle Bells. When Donald is on top of a hill, he notices his nephews building a snowman while somewhat singing For He's A Jolly Good Fellow. Tempted, Donald crashes his sled into the snowman and thus his nephews, resulting each of them to "wear" a part of the snowman. While Donald is laughing himself silly, his nephews plot revenge.

The next scene shows the nephews piling snow and a duck-like head on a boulder. Donald is scraping snow off his foot when he hears his nephews yell, "That's Uncle Donald!" while standing by a degrading snowman of Donald. "Oh yeah?" Donald replies, and he shortly crashes himself into the snowman-disguised boulder. The shockwaves from the crash shake off all of the furs on his overcoat, save for one that Donald touches with his finger to stop its shaking and pulls out.

Now Huey, Dewey and Louie are laughing themselves silly and Donald pulls of the remains of his overcoat. He dashes off to start chasing the trio. Donald runs so fast that he blows the snow off a kissing couple. The nephews run into their fortress and Donald bounces off of the mattress door, ricocheting on the ice and crashing into a tree. Snow piles on top of him (with icicles around him) until he is "transformed" into a rhino in a cage. As a victory song, the trio sings a verse of London Bridge while spinning and jumping in a circle.

Donald bursts out of the cage and declares war on his nephews. Later on, Donald yells at his nephews from a snow battleship while the trio simply mocks him from a snow fortress. Donald starts a small barrage of snowballs, which results the nephews into becoming like bowling pins, waiting for Donald to strike them out. Donald then pulls out a bucket of water, dips a snow chunk in it, and creates what he calls "Big Bertha", an ice bullet. He launches it and it spilts his nephews' flagpole in three spots, "spanking" all three of them.

Donald asks soon after if they surrender, and they clearly refuse. They start creating snow chunks of their own, while also getting three other objects: a picnic basket, some rope, and some mouse traps. They place the mouse traps in rocket-shaped components and stick them in the picnic basket now with the string tied to it. Huey, Dewey, and Louie soon launch the basket and release the missiles, with Donald getting hit by several of them. With Huey commanding them with a wooden sword, Louie and Dewey started launching snowballs from a catapult. Donald gets his hat spun off of his head and yells, "That's unconstitutional!" before getting more snowballs launched at him. As his barrier starts shrinking with each hit, Donald looks up, gets smacked in the face, and is launched him into a smaller part of the ship.

Being the little cheaters that they are, the nephews spear hot coal onto arrows (albeit while singing the Battle Hymn of the Republic) and launch them into the area where Donald currently is, creating a skull-like structure. As a final attack, they launch a flaming snowball into a part of Donald's ship. This causes the ship to start melting and end up with Donald frozen in a fountain-shaped icicle. To celebrate their victory, the triplets perform a (stereotypical) ceremonious Native American dance around the icicle; this latter performance was edited out of later broadcasts of the clip, due to perceived political incorrectness.