Ludwig Von Drake’s Strangest Role — Duck in a Proxy War
Walt’s favorite Professor in an unexpected film to Disney stockholders.
The Walt Disney Company seems to have another Proxy Shareholder War on their hands and they are pulling out the stops to make sure that activist investors from Trian Fund Management and Blackwells Capital are not able to seat their proposed members on the Walt Disney Company Board of Directors.
And by “pulling out the stops,” I mean they’ve involved this guy:
In a very strange, and perhaps slightly tone deaf, move, Disney has made a short film for shareholders where Professor Ludwig Von Drake instructs them, represented by film clips of the population of King Stefan and Queen Leah’s kingdom from Sleeping Beauty (1959), how to vote their shares for the Board.
Here it is:
Whatever your thoughts about the proxy fight, there is something both delightful and disturbing about this return of a character, rarely used for the last quarter century — and hardly at all after a few sporadic appearances in the 2017 DuckTales revival.
But hey, at least someone at Disney is doing some 2D animation of a classic cartoon character, right?
Well, no.
All of the footage of Von Drake is lifted from a 1961 episode of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, the ABC television program. Short clips were cut out of the hour-long show and Paul Frees’ vocal performance was redubbed, assumedly by current Drake-voice Corey Burton, for the short stockholder film. The original episode, The Hunting Instinct, is not terribly hard to find and is an absolute delight. And that’s what I want to discuss here.
One of the earliest appearances of Ludwig Von Drake, a character notable as one of the few in Walt Disney’s lifetime to be created specifically for television, this episode shows the first fully-formed version of the Professor. He is, according to Walt Disney, a relative of Donald Duck, “from the paternal side of the Duck family clan.” He is a blustering professor-type with a vaguely Austrian accent who can barely contain his enthusiasm for whatever it is upon which he’s lecturing. Here, it’s man’s instinctual need to hunt… sorta. Erupting onto the scene with a burst of energy and a torrent of babble, the performance is a tour-de-force for Frees who navigates Drake’s need to shift directions, often doubling back on himself with contradictions, effortlessly.
The animation is surprisingly good for a television show and the interaction between animated Von Drake and his physical surroundings is surprisingly accomplished.
“Can I help you, Professor?” asks Walt.
“Sure, you’re gonna help me! You’re gonna sit down and be quiet, that’s how you’re gonna help me!” replies Von Drake as he swings a real-life chair behind Disney and pushes Walt down into it.
The interplay between the two performers is giddy and, as Von Drake takes center stage for the core of the show — a lecture using classic Disney shorts to help make his points — he proves that he is a strong enough character — and Frees a facile enough performer — to anchor an entire hour, even one that is essentially a clips show.
This episode of this series that, under one name or another (Disneyland/Wonderful World of Color/Wonderful World of Disney), has run sporadically for seventy years, has everything that is great about this particular kind of mid-century entertainment: fast-paced narrative, visual innovation, brilliant character-acting, a folksy and likable center in Walt Disney himself and heaping portions of early-sixties kitsch. Something about the show is just so… right. It’s of its time — comes by its camp honestly — but it still works.
The Disney Company reaching into its vaults for a way to instruct shareholders on how to vote to show that they believe that the Company’s Board has continued to be worthy stewards of the Walt Disney legacy has a certain amount of sense attached to it. A continuity — a bridge to the past — is useful to help shareholders see that the company is the same one it was in, say, 1961.
But let’s consider this one episode of television, briefly. Could the company have made it now?
Do they have the 2D animation facilities? Not really, they’d be forced to farm the production out.
Do they have this kind of character acting? No, but to be fair this kind of performance is a relic from another time; that said when we are discussing the levels of attempted grim realism across the Marvel and Star Wars universes, the idea of some broad schtick does have an appeal.
Do they have the kind of playfulness that would involve their CEO being manhandled by a cartoon duck? If we’re asking whether or not Bob Iger would be willing to do this, the better question might be, would we even want to see it if he was? And if we are asking if there is a Walt Disney in the company, of course, there is not. No company has that luxury.
Let’s be careful not to let the kind of entertainment, the kind of industry, that Walt Disney participated in over a half-century ago be its goal now; it’s an unreasonable expectation. Rather, let’s consider the company as it was in the American mid-century as more of an inspiration. The current Board and its CEO are working through a traumatic time in American culture and adding more trauma to the company through radical re-organizations may not be a wise move right now, but if the company is looking for inspiration to fortify who they are — who they have always been — an episode of television from 1961 is not a bad place to start.
You already have one of the greatest legacies in entertainment, Mr. Iger. You were looking right at it when you made this stockholder film. Keep moving forward, but before you do, maybe spend a little time with a duck.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times