Donald Duck hit peak popularity during his horny era

polygon.com:

As a company and a concept, Disney is synonymous with being family-friendly. A Disney movie can be animated or live-action, fantastical or realistic. But even in 2023, the assumption is that if the Walt Disney Pictures logo is slapped on the front, the film that follows won’t be edgy, salacious, or sexual. Disney entities are sexless by design.

And yet, let us consider Donald Duck — and not just to dredge up the long-standing question of why he wears a shirt and no pants. The Donald Duck of today is irascible, but also buttoned-down enough to have a girlfriend, Daisy, with whom he shares nothing more than the occasional chaste kiss that sends him reeling. But there was once a time when Donald Duck was not only very popular, but also very single — and occasionally, extremely and obviously horny.

A Century of Disney

Though Daisy made a couple sporadic appearances in Donald Duck shorts dating back to 1940, she wasn’t his girlfriend on the regular until the back half of the decade. There was a time when Donald was just a freewheeling duck in a sailor suit who went on shore leave down south. As Disney celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2023, it will also hit the 80th anniversary of one of its “package” animated features, Saludos Amigos. Both Saludos Amigos and its sibling film, The Three Caballeros from 1945, had more than just the cultural throughline of being focused on Latin America: They each explored what it was like for Donald to be a lusty duck drooling over feminine curves.

Saludos Amigos only scratches the surface of Donald’s particular itch. The Three Caballeros, released in America in February 1945, pushes him even closer to the brink of sexual mania. Showing Donald as sex-crazed was meant to make America come