1942 Donald Duck cartoon funded by the US Treasury exhorts you file your tax-return

Here's a great 19412 Donald Duck toon funded by the Treasury, explaining to war-torn America why they need to all file their taxes to defeat tyranny.

Help Donald Duck File His 1941 Federal Tax Return

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: animation • Business • Disney • finance • government • History • propaganda • tax • video • war • youtube

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sockdoll

The cartoon actually looks to be from 1942 (MCMXLII). America wasn’t very war-torn in 1941, except for a few weeks in December.

It definitely makes me feel like paying my taxes though.
- Coderjoe
  
  The cartoon has Donald filing his 1941 taxes, and mentions the attack on Pearl Harbor, so the project likely started shortly after the attack, and would have been shown before April 15, 1942.
  - sockdoll
    
    Exactly, thanks for helping to make my point – except that the filing deadline was March 15th from 1918 to 1954. This cartoon was made before the income tax withholding system was implemented in the US, so the government had to work a little harder to get money out of people. Within a year withholding was put into place as a wartime provision, but was never lifted.
    
    The cartoon itself is clearly dated 1942, so the rest is academic.
Donald Petersen

Ah, those were the days. Certainly blatant propaganda, but still refreshingly honest about it all. (U-boats sported fangs, didn’t they?) I mean, if you wanted to defeat the Axis, and you figured the best way to do so was by the employment of “guns, guns, all kinds of guns,” then paying one’s taxes was the way to do it.

Of course, my man the Duck has a pretty sweet rate. $13 on a $1700 adjusted income comes out to a 0.8% rate.

No doubt Grover Norquist would decry such pillaging of Donald Duck’s hard-won assets as arrant confiscatory socialism.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OAUXAA362EXWLYVMPJOKLFB5JQ Incipient Madness

Anyone else notice the giant Nazi mecha at 6:31?
- chaopoiesis
  
  … or Glenn Beck at 0:54?
goldenearth

And why couldn’t all that tax money help put some trousers on Donald?
digi_owl

Huh, taxes driving factories. Sounds almost red.
asmodeus82

I had this on VHS when I was a kid with some Woody the Woodpecker and others.
I’ve been looking for it for ages to show my mates the hilarious propaganda.
Thanks heaps for posting it.
chellberty

One Taxes to rule them and in the darkness bind them?
http://www.ianw.org/ Ian W.

This was recently mentioned on NPR’s fantastic Planet Money podcast, along with a brief history of income taxes: http://n.pr/GEwD02
http://twitter.com/sirkowski Sirkowski

Taxes will keep democracy on the march. Libertarian heads exploding in 3… 2… lol

I like the later one with Uncle Scrooge. http://youtu.be/QxCFQqNLAa4
http://twitter.com/gths Graham Freeman

What I find ironic was that Disney was a Nazi sympathiser at one stage, but changed his attitude PDQ once the US entered the war.
- CH
  
  I don’t know ironic… a lot of people were during pre-war time, without any sinister reasons (as far as I have understood). Now… post-war sympathisers…
- petronius
  
  Was Walt a Nazi? According to this, the answer is probably not. If he was, his very effective propaganda cartoons are a damn strange way of showing it.
Alfredo Correa

as.
retepslluerb

Apparently he didn’t work for his Uncle during 1941, or he wouldn’t have made more than 624 $.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Sean-Burns/845868306 Sean Burns

Disney studios shut down commercial production and went to work for the government in WWII, providing many training films and some propaganda cartoons. There is a great Disney DVD set, “On The Front Lines: The War Years”, that includes titles like “Cleanliness Brings Health” and “Planning For Good Eating”. It also includes the justly famous “Victory Through Air Power”.
http://boingboing.net/ The Life Of Bryan

I noticed that when they enumerated our freedoms at the end, the last one was “freedom from want and fear”. The times, they have a changed.
WinstonSmith2012

Federal income tax evasion was easy and extremely popular prior to 1943, the year after Disney released this propaganda film to ease the discontent at the federal government establishing automatic income tax withholding in 1943.
Lobster

In 1942, taxes were so high they even taxed wild animals who couldn’t afford a single pair of pants or speech therapy.
sweetcraspy

Taxes to keep them flying! Taxes To Keep Them Rolling! TAXES TO KEEP THEM COMING! TAXESTOBEATTOEARTHTHEEVILDESTROYEROFFREEDOMANDPEACE!!! KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

My grandparents has this as part of a collection of Donald Duck cartoons, and the propaganda totally worked on 10 year old me.
CLamb

The voiceover states that our very shores were attacked yet the map shown in the beginning omits those shores. Either they counted Hawaii as part of the USA back then or they didn’t; you can’t have it both ways.
- schr0559
  
  Propaganda films starring un-pantsed waterfowl are allowed to take what one might call “artistic license”, I think. Besides, Hawaii became a state well after the war, should they have included all territories at the time?
http://twitter.com/cicadamania Cicada Mania

Donald Duck? Is that like Dolan Duck?
BBNinja

The second part of the video needs to be reset to Pink Floyd music :P
http://dailygrail.com/ Red Pill Junkie

As always, the middle and lower class providing the war effort with their sons to fight the battles, and taxes to keep the factories running.

Meanwhile the owners of the factories, the same owners who used to sympathize with the same Axis leaders they were now fighting with, well they um… you see, ah… they provided the cartoons?

There’s no business like war business.