Studio: Walt Disney Productions
Distributor: RKO Radio Pictures
Produced by: Walt Disney
Short Synopsis
Donald Duck yawns at the sunset and goes to bed early. He bangs his head on the bedstead, moves down, fluffs his pillow, and the pillow explodes in a burst of feathers. With a new pillow, he finally settles, and the alarm clock on his bedside table starts ticking, loudly. He puts it in a drawer, and the whole drawer shakes with each tick. He throws it at the wall; it lands in a vase, and the vase shakes. He throws it out of the window; it bounces off the washing line and lands straight in his yawning mouth, and he swallows it. After several attempts to smash the clock still ticking inside him, he spits it out in pieces. Back in bed, he switches off the light, and his folding bed snaps shut with him inside, then the springs shoot him into the ceiling. He nails and ties the bed to the floor and lies down again. Then the broken clock reassembles itself just enough to ring its alarm. Donald sits up, the bed flies apart, and he lands on a board full of tacks, with a sheet wrapped round his head like a turban and a sock swaying on a spring in front of him like a charmed snake.
Why It Matters
- It is Donald's temper in its purest form: one duck, one bedroom, and a series of small objects that refuse to let him sleep. Each failure is a little bigger than the last, and the ticking clock that ends up inside him is a perfect escalation gag.
- It shows the Donald Duck unit, with Jack King directing and Carl Barks and Jack Hannah on story, refining the one-character, frustration-based formula that made Donald Disney's most prolific star of the 1940s.
Notes and Trivia
- The title comes from the proverb "Early to bed and early to rise", which the film cheerfully defeats.
- See also: Donald's Vacation (1940), Old MacDonald Duck (1941).