Sub-Cult #13 Disney's Weird and Wonderful The Three Caballeros is Funny, Adventurous, Musical, Wild and Unrelentingly Horny

Many years ago, in my former life as the head writer for The A.V Club, I received an email offering an all-expense-paid trip to Brazil to cover a film festival in the rainforest from the country’s minister of culture. 

It was such an unusual and unexpected offer that I initially thought it might be some manner of online scam, a way to purloin my credit card information and then make off with some of my hard-earned cash. 

After all, people don’t just offer you fancy trips to South America to write about film festivals you’ve never heard of, do they? 

But the offer and the film festival were both legit and after renewing my passport I traveled to Brazil for a week that was both wonderful and horrible, something I will always remember as well as something I’ll always regret. 

Because when I visited one of the most magical, bewitching and straight up enchanting places on God’s green earth I was in the grips of one of the most brutal depressions of my adult life. 

I was in a very bad place with what would become You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me and feared that I would never finish it, and the shame of that failure would follow me the rest of my miserable life. 

It was the kind of agonizing, all-consuming, soul-wrenching despair that makes it damn near impossible to experience even a solitary moment of pleasure, let alone anything approaching happiness or contentment. 

My brain was incapable of experiencing joy even as I was being feted like a goddamn movie star by the Brazilian minister of culture and not an ink-stained wretch in the throes of an unbearable, overwhelming depressive episode. 

I consequently have wildly mixed, complicated memories and emotions about my sole trip to South America. To state the obvious, I wish that I had gotten such an incredible opportunity at a point in my life when I would have been able to appreciate it, when I wasn’t so hopelessly despondent that I could not enjoy myself in the most preposterously, almost unbelievably enjoyable of possible contexts. 

I feel like I let down the people who invited me to Brazil. I felt like I let down my readers. I felt like I let down myself. Hell, I feel like I let down the beautiful people of Brazil. 

But I’m glad I made the trip all the same because even though I couldn’t enjoy it at the time for a wide array of psychological reasons I made memories that will last a lifetime and I got to experience the kinds of things most folks can only dream about doing, like riding in a helicopter over the Brazilian rainforest with the director of Children of a Lesser God or having to wear someone else’s pants because I only brought shorts and the theater where films were shown had a strict policy about pants. 

During that weird week of wonder and horror I came to feel a real sense of connection to the land and its exuberant inhabitants.

It’s no exaggeration to say that literally every time I see anything even remotely related to Brazil my stupid lizard brain invariable coughs up, “I’ve been there!”, as if that is somehow news to me, the person who was there. 

Sometimes that “I’ve been there!” is uttered out loud, at which point my wife reminds me that she does, in fact, remember the time I went to Brazil.

So my appreciation of the final segment in Saludos Amigos was greatly enhanced by its introduction of a cigar-smoking, bow-tie-sporting, hat-wearing bilingual parrot named José Carioca who represents the gallant spirit of the Brazilian people. 

Having visited Brazil I can certainly appreciate that visiting Latin America for a working vacation/research trip at the behest of Nelson Rockefeller and the State Department seems to have made Disney writers, animators and artisans extremely horny.

Brazil will do that to you! Even in my depressed haze I could appreciate that there was a sensuality and an electricity to life in Brazil that is not found, for example, in the upper midwest, where I spent much of my life. 

In The Three Caballeros, traveling first to Brazil and then to Mexico brings out the horn dog in Donald Duck in a way that I found both disconcerting and, frankly, arousing. 

Just kidding! I am proud to say that watching Donald Duck maintain an R. Crumb level of unrelenting horniness for seventy-two surreal minutes did not awaken anything in me sexually, thank god. 

Somewhere between 1942’s stiff and underwhelming Saludos Amigos and 1944’s wild and wonderful The Three Caballeros the vibe went from “using animation and laughter to teach about our friends to the South” to “Donald Duck is horny for human women.” Here, and pretty much only here, he’s less Donald Duck and More Donald-Wants-to-Fuck.

I wasn’t expecting that radical of a shift in tone. It may not be terribly family-friendly, or family-friendly at all but it certainly makes for a livelier, weirder and more entertaining movie. 

Ah, but The Three Caballeros does not unleash the full force of Donald Duck’s insatiable lust for the flesh of human women right out of the gate. They knew that audiences weren’t ready for that so The Three Caballeros builds to the revelation that Huey, Dewy and Louie’s uncles is an insatiable fuck-beast who would do anything to satisfy his hunger for the human bathing beauties of Mexico and Brazil. 

Donald Duck begins the film by receiving presents, albeit not the spank mags and sex toys the pervert obviously wants. First Donald receives a film projector that he uses to watch a charming little vignette about a South Pole penguin who dreams of something more. 

The stubborn little dreamer hates the cold and loves the heat so he journeys from his icy home to a tropical island deep in South America to live out his days under the sweltering, life-supporting sun. 

Good people, this segment, and many that follow, are for the birds! And I mean that in a positive way. The Three Caballeros is an avian sensation bringing together birds of different nations in the spirit of peace, harmony and horniness.

But before that horniness can really kick into high gear we’re treated to a spirited yarn about a scruffy boy turned defiantly unreliable adult narrator who wins a race in his hometown with a flying donkey. 

Then José Carioca returns from Saludos Amigos, once again smoking a cigar and speaking untranslated Portuguese and kid’s stuff gives way to adult business. 

José Carioca, you see, is a cartoon bird that fucks, an animated avian icon with attitude. Disney characters are generally children or child-like but Jose Carioca is unmistakably adult, a grown-up romantic with a raging libido and an eye for the ladies. 

Incidentally when I wrote “bird that fucks” into my notes on iPhone it auto-corrected it to “bird that ducks”, which sounds like lyrics from a ribald parody of “I Want a New Duck.” 

In “Baía”, Carioca’s love for the ladies infects his American compatriot and together the two ogle and boogie their way through a sequence that finds the horny cartoon birds lusting after Aurora Miranda, the sister of Carmen. 

“Baia” anticipates Who Framed Roger Rabbit in its skillful, confident blending of live-action and animation as well as its aggressive sexuality and overwhelming intimations of inter-species sexuality. 

Where Saludos Amigos suffered from the stale, suffocating air of the classroom, The Three Caballeros feels loose, lively and liberated by the infectious beat of life South of the border and the sexuality of Brazilian culture. 

Down to Fuck Donald Duck and José Carioca are then joined by their fine feathered friend Panchito Pistoles, a dashing rooster from Mexico in a sombrero and spurs who gets his name from THE MULTIPLE MURDER WEAPONS ON HIS PERSON AT ALL TIMES. 

Like Jose Carioca, Panchito Pistoles cuts a decidedly different, much more adult figure than your typical Disney funny animal hero. For starter, THIS SILLY CARTOON ANIMAL IS FUCKING PACKING. 

The film’s theme song may just be the catchiest ditty ever written. Not the best song, mind you, or the most artfully constructed, but it will be a long time until I’m able to get lyrics like, “We're three happy chappies/with snappy serapes!” out of my mind. 

As it sambas happily to a conclusion, The Three Caballeros gives itself over completely to trippy abstraction and Donald’s infernal, all-consuming sex drive. A late sequence finds Donald, who honestly should be wearing some pants if he’s going to be this damn horny publicly, sexually harassing an entire beach full of flattered Mexican beauties. 

I don’t know why it took me so long to finally see The Three Caballeros. I’d always heard it was minor and skippable but it is a goddamn delight from start to finish, one of my very favorite Disney movies from this magical time period. 

As a gesture of goodwill and solidarity from the most American studio in the whole damn world to our friends to the South The Three Caballeros is lovely and sincere but it’s equally inspired as a funny, sexy and utterly unique animated musical extravaganza. 

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