YMMV / Down And Out With Donald Duck

• Nightmare Fuel
  • Although it's played for all the absurd comedy possible, the idea of a disgruntled actor responding to being upstaged by a rival by showing at the performance and opening fire on the audience with a machine gun is terrifying. Especially if you live in a country where mass shootings exactly like this have happened.
  • The "flashback" Donald Duck being shrunken by Mickey to the size of a bullet, loaded into a gun, and then fired into an egg. With a nearby lit candle revealing the shrunken Donald is trapped inside the egg, alive and raging. Donald even notes to his therapist that he has nightmares about the experience.
  • Fittingly enough, the nightmare sequence Donald has at the special's climax. It starts with Donald under a spotlight that turns into a giant chessboard, as giant chess pawns (in red and white rather than the traditional black and white) hem him in. He squirms free, only to back into a knight — with the face of an angry-looking horse glowering down at him. Nervously backing away from it, he then finds himself running with increasing desperation through a set of Scooby Doo Doors, which then suddenly leave him trapped in a hallway full of locked doors. Then he finds himself in front of a set of funhouse mirrors, one of which starts showing, without context, all the times in Donald's filmography he has been depicted sporting a gaping, fang-filled maw, with the last one getting right up to the mirror and laughing maniacally. The sight so unnerves Donald that he flees for his life, screaming for help. Then he finds himself on a roof, yanking open a door... only to reveal a massive, shadow-shrouded version of himself looming menacingly within, causing Donald to slam the door desperately to keep it inside. He goes running again... and ends up leaping a terrifyingly far distance from one building top to another, only saving himself at the last moment after the bricks he just manages to get ahold of start pulling out of the wall in his grasp. And he's in such a hurry that he goes charging straight off the roof. Cue montage of scenes of Donald crashing or falling, including one scene of him plummeting off a cliff with a giant boulder rolling afterwards that segue ways into a scene of him plunging into the gaping maw of a giant shark. It then transitions into myriad little Donalds falling slowly through a dark void filled with screens depicting some of Donald's more notable temper-induced freakouts. Then it changes into the infamous scene of a divinely-empowered Donald gloating over the power he has gained before letting out a fang-toothed cackle right into the screen as it gets up close to his crazed eyes. The ominous, violin-heavy music score playing through the sequence only heightens the creepiness of everything. It's no surprise that, in-universe, Donald springs up in his bed, and finally accepts that this is how he looks to everybody else.