Disney Nonplussed: The Global Politics That Made The Three Caballeros

To understand why Disney would embark on a good will tour of the United States’ neighbors, you have to go back to America’s second-favorite president named Roosevelt and the geopolitics of 120 years ago. In 1905, on the heels of incidents that had seen European powers send military forces to the Western Hemisphere to collect debts in South America, Theodore Roosevelt made what has been dubbed the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. It in essence made it American foreign policy to intervene militarily in cases where instability in the Americas made it seem like other countries would invade. Roosevelt (and moneyed North American interests) didn’t want to contend with Europe for dominance of Central and South America.

It ended up being the catalyst for a lot of horrendous U.S. adventurism south of the border, with bloody interventions in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic to show for it—all of which, a scholar of history might note, ended up under ghoulish dictators in the wake of U.S. involvement. By 1934 (the nation having elected a different Roosevelt), the United States reversed course somewhat, and adopted the “Good Neighbor Policy,” a foreign policy that took the emphasis off military invention and stressed cultural and diplomatic exchange instead.

Guilt may have had something to do with it, but there was another motivation: with Europe consumed by Nazi conquest and the prospect of war looming on the horizon, the United States feared that some people in Latin America might be mobilized against the Americas.

It was against that backdrop that Disney sent animators down to Central and South America to gather material for a slate of cartoons aimed at extending a friendly hand to the United States’ neighbors. The José Carioca character actually first appeared in 1942 in the short film Saludos Amigos, which consists of a few cartoons set south of the border with other scenes of narrated travelogues of the studio’s animators. The studio used what it learned to produce the more ambitious Three Caballeros a couple of years later.

The movie sort of meanders through musical numbers until it ends, and remains memorable mostly due to how weird it is and how unforgettable the individual songs are. What’s noteworthy is that Donald’s friends have continually popped up over the years to inject some Latin flavor into his life—the sharp-eyed will even note that José is lingering in the background of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. From the occasional cameo to recurring parts in TV shows and even a full season of The Legend of the Three Caballeros in which the trio fight mythical monsters, Disney’s animators have remained determined to revive the pan-American trio and occasionally bust out their eponymous musical number. (They have quietly reworded the lyrics “We’re three caballeros/three gay caballeros,” sadly.)

Three quarters of a century later, Donald Duck’s best buds—the ones Disney made because the United States was trying to atone for colonialism and terrified of Nazi Germany and trying to court Latino viewers when courting Latino viewers was barely even a thing—are still regular cameos and reliable fan favorites. They predate Castro’s revolution and stem from the same geopolitical preamble to it and you can stream them to your living room, if you want.

Kenneth Lowe wants to know, as you Americans say, what’s cooking. You can follow him on Twitter and read more at his blog.