Wide Open Spaces (1947 film)

Synopsis

The short opens late at night in front of the "Hold-Up Motel" where Donald, exhausted and looking for a place where to sleep, pulls over to spend the night there. The motel owner informs him that all the beds are occupied and the only option he has is sleeping outside on the cot on the porch. Donald accepts, but before he can hop on the cot, the motel owner adds that it costs 16 dollars, causing Donald to overractingly refuse and tie the man's arm into a knot. In response to this, the motel owner kicks Donald sending him flying into his car.

Donald drives deeper into the woodland and finds a spot where to sleep on an air mattress. After struggling to get the mattress inflated (failing twice with a tire pump before blowing it up himself) Donald gets ready to rest but is bothered by a rock underneath the mattress. He throws the rock away sending it up to a hill where it causes a chain reaction that sends a huge boulder towards Donald, who is woken up and panics trying to escape on his car. The boulder crushes him against a tree and Donald's vehicle is turned into a 1800s car-looking wreck.

Donald returns to bed and falls asleep, but as he snores, the mattress balloons putting Donald on a vertical position sustained by his opening and closing beak, which leads Donald over a cliff and into the river below. Donald continues to slumber underwater next to a large sleeping fish that aspires Donald's head near its jaws each time it inhales. Donald realizes where he is only when he and the fish struggle for the blanket and swims back to shore much to the fish's astonishment.

The springy branch of a nearby pine tree bothers Donald in his sleep and is smacked back by it when he tries to shove it away. Angered, Donald fixes a dry tree branch under the pine's branch to keep it away. As Donald sleeps, however, his exhalations make the dry tree branch lose hold on the pine's branch, causing it to hit the pump (with the hose still attached to the mattress' valve) and wobble up and down with the handle, pumping fast and strongly. This causes Donald's mattress to get excessively inflated until it dispatches and takes off, deflating away while Donald continues to sleep.

As the mattress deflates in mind-air, it propels all the way back to the Hold-Up Motel landing right on its porch's cot. The owner comes out, believing that Donald has spent the entire night on the cot, and asks him the 16 dollars, which Donald absently gives. Right after paying, the time for using the cot expires and so the motel owner shoves Donald out of the porch making him lie down on a cactus. Despite that, Donald keeps sleeping.

Credits