But will it last...?
Wide Open Spaces is a Classic Disney Short from 1947 starring Donald Duck.
The short centers on Donald driving deep in the night and deciding to sleep outside in the wilderness after refusing the pricey cot on the porch of a fully booked motel he came across. Of course, with Donald being Donald, Hilarity Ensues.
Wide Open Spaces contains examples of:
- All Balloons Have Helium: The mattress floats up in the sky while getting excessively inflated by the tree branch, even though it's being pumped with air.
- The Alleged Car: Donald's sleek convertible is turned into a sputtering Ford Model T-looking jalopy after getting squashed by the Indy Escape boulder.
- Aside Glance: Donald turns towards the audience to chuckle awkwardly about being reduced to a flattened husk after blowing into the mattress too hard, before popping back normal.
- Bad Vibrations: The boulder makes the earth and the screen tremble as it tumbles down the hill, waking Donald up in time to attempt an escape.
- Balloonacy: A variant. Donald is lifted off the ground while laying on the overpumped mattress, before it deflates flying away Magic Carpet-style back to the motel.
- Blanket Tug O' War: Donald has it with a large toothy fish he ends up sleeping with after falling underwater.
- Cactus Cushion: Where Donald ends up sleeping in the ending. For added comedic effect, the cactus is vaguely humanized, as it quite literally embraces Donald, its "head" wears a flower of femininity and appears to have a serene smiling face.
- Contrived Coincidence: The deflating mattress just happens to fly Donald all the way back to the Hold Up Motel, landing right on the cot in the porch and in a manner that makes Donald ring the doorbell to alert the owner of his presence immediately.
- Disaster Dominoes: Instead of simply putting the stone that bothered him aside, Donald angrily throws it far away, sending it up to the top of a pointy hill where it falls back and pushes an alignment of progressively larger rocks that sends a huge boulder towards him.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Donald could've simply said no and leave after being told that the cot costs 16 dollars instead of assaulting the motel owner by tying his arm into a knot. The man understandably responds with a Literal Ass-Kicking.
- Double Take: Happens when Donald realizes he's underwater next to a fish.
- Drives Like Crazy: Donald is introduced driving his car erratically going constantly off-road, due to his tiredness.
- Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy: The cause of all the poor choices Donald consistently makes throughout the short.
- Eye Pop: Donald does it several times. When he stops a high fall in mid-air and grabs a cushion for a soft landing, when he sees the boulder coming towards him, and when he and the fish freak each other out.
- The Faceless: The motel owner's face is never shown.
- From Bad to Worse: For the sake of not paying 16 dollars, Donald spends a disastrous night in the outdoors, his Cool Car gets wrecked, he barely gets any sleep and ends up giving the 16 dollars anyway before being promptly dumped onto a cactus.
- Fur Is Clothing: While flying through the air on the deflating mattress Donald's blanket and shirt are blown back, exposing his body, at which point his "coating" of feathers is also pulled back in the same fashion.
- Heavy Sleeper: Going underwater doesn't wake Donald up, neither does flying in mid-air on top of the deflating mattress or falling head first and ending up in the thorny embrace of a cactus.
- Hollywood Darkness: A woodland with no street lights should be pretty dark even on a clear night, instead everything is visibly lit in a moody shade of blue.
- Horrible Camping Trip: The short is about Donald trying to sleep in the woods on an air mattress, and how he manages to mess it up due to his propensity of troubling himself with inanimate things.
- Inflating Body Gag: After failing to pump up the mattress twice, Donald decides to blow it up himself, inhaling a massive amount of air that balloons his body before puffing it all in.
- Laser-Guided Karma:
- What was Donald expecting to happen after assaulting the motel owner other than getting a good old kick in the butt and have him take a level in jerkass in the ending?
- On a minor instance, it doesn't occur to him that the air mattress is giving him a hard time with Amusing Injuries each time it deflates because he keeps pumping it too much.
- Throwing the small rock so far away instead of just putting it aside causes a Disaster Dominoes that wrecks Donald's car.
- Due to his Vacuum Mouth and Super-Breath snoring, Donald gets smacked by the wobbly branch of a pine tree. Instead of simply distancing himself a little, Donald places a fallen branch vertically to keep it away... but then he snores horizontally unblocking the pine's branch, which snaps onto the pump and wobbles vigorously inflating the mattress to an enormous size until it pops off and with a Gale-force deflation flies Donald back to the motel, where the vindictive owner makes him pay 16,98 dollars before getting a Cactus Cushion.
- Mickey Mousing: When the mattress deflates sending back all the air Donald pumped, the handle of the pump beats his butt whilst synchronized to a musical drumming.
- Murphy's Bed: The air mattress proves difficult to inflate, randomly swells up to make Donald fall off a cliff and takes him back to the motel almost in retaliation for causing the excessive pumping it received from the tree branch.
- 1-Dimensional Thinking: Donald never considers turning his car to any side to get out of the boulder's path.
- Recycled Animation: The animation of Donald's car traveling in the distance as he's arriving at the motel is repurposed when he drives towards the woodland after a Scene Transition.
- Rubber-Hose Limbs: The motel owner appears to be a Rubber Man given how his arm gets tied into a knot and then he kicks Donald away with a very stretchy leg.
- Rule of Funny:
- Donald accidentally bends the rod that goes into the pump, but instead of straightening it back, he bends the whole pump giving it the same crooked shape the rod has. And it works.
- Upon noticing the boulder coming at him, Donald has Wheel o' Feet when he runs away in a panic, which is to be expected... but then the wheels of his car do it too when he speeds up.
- The mattress randomly swelling up to put Donald on a vertical position and have his opening and closing beak sleepwalk him over a cliff and fall into the body of water below.
- Sleepless Alarm Clock: The motel owner rings an alarm clock against Donald's head mere seconds after making him hand over the 16 dollars because the time to use the cot has run out.
- Squashed Flat: A variation. Donald becomes paper-thin after blowing into the inflatable mattress too intensely, emptying himself.
- Wacky Sound Effect: The air mattress makes an ascending xylophone sound when Donald unrolls it, and then produces strange, flatulent rubber razzer-like noises while getting pumped the first time. In the end, as Donald overturns towards the cactus, honking noises are heard.
- Watch the Paint Job: It's Donald Duck. Of course if he's introduced driving a big, fancy looking car it's NOT gonna stay that way.
- Water Wake Up: Averted. Falling to the bottom of a lake doesn't wake Donald up, he continues to sleep with Super Not-Drowning Skills next to a fish.
- Wipe: Used for three scene transitions throughout the short.
- Wraparound Background: Occurs when Donald attempts to flee from the boulder and during the flight on the deflating mattress.
