Tea for Two Hundred is a Donald Duck animated short that was released in 1948.
Title[]
The title is an allusion to the song title Tea for Two.
Synopsis[]
While camping in the mountains, Donald Duck sits down to eat a picnic. Soon a line of ants emerges from a nearby bush and marches past Donald, each carrying a grain harvested in the wild. Donald takes interest in the straggler, a small ant who seems to be carrying a bean several times his body weight. Donald begins to test the ant to see how much he can take. The ant, seemingly unaware of Donald, continues to march. Finally Donald balances several food items from his picnic on the ant, which the ant carries. But when Donald makes the ant walk a tight rope, Donald plucks the string causing the ant to fall into a large custard pie.
The ant is angry with Donald at first, but when he tastes the pie and sees all of Donald's food, he becomes elated. He enthusiastically runs back to the ant colony and tells the ants about all of Donald's food. The ants call the colony together using mushrooms as drums.
Later, while Donald is sleeping against a tree next to his picnic basket, a small team of ants sneak up on him. They open the basket, but Donald, still asleep, instinctively puts his hand over the basket to keep the ants out. Then all of the ants fill in around Donald and pick him up. They carry him over to a cliff where they throw him off into the water.
As an angry Donald races back up the cliff, the ants are carrying food items out of his basket into their hole. In a mock game of football Donald is steamrolled by the ants. As he tries grab his food directly from their hole, the ants pull of Donald's shirt as well. He then puts on a barrel to protect his modesty, and shoves several sticks of dynamite down the anthill and ignites it. Immediately after the explosion, Donald laughs that he has seemingly had the last say against the ants. Yet moments later, the ground around Donald starts to crack. Donald is standing near the cliff, and the explosion of the dynamite causes a large part of the cliff to fall away, and Donald falls into the water a second time, screaming as he does.
In the final scene, the ant colony congregates around a large cupcake. The little ant whom Donald had been harassing runs to the top and takes a big bite out of the cherry.
Characters[]
- Donald Duck (voiced by Clarence Nash)
- The Ants (voiced by Pinto Colvig)
Releases[]
Television[]
- Disneyland, episode #1.4: "The Donald Duck Story"
- The Mouse Factory, episode #1: "Vacations"
- Walt Disney's Mickey and Donald, episode #65
- Walt Disney, episode #28.21: "A Disney Vacation"
- Good Morning, Mickey, episode #54
- Donald Takes a Holiday
- The Sword in the Stone (Syndication Airing)
- Mickey's Mouse Tracks, episode #18
- Donald's Quack Attack, episode #88
Home video[]
VHS
- Walt Disney Cartoon Classics: Limited Gold Editions: Donald's Bee Pictures
- Walt Disney Cartoon Classics - Special Edition: Happy Summer Days
Laserdisc
- Walt Disney Cartoon Classics - Special Edition: Happy Summer Days / Fun on the Job! / The Goofy World of Sports
DVD
- Walt Disney Treasures: The Chronological Donald, Volume 3
Trivia[]
- Nominated for an Academy Award in 1949, but lost to The Little Orphan, an MGM Tom and Jerry film.
- Animation from the short was later used in Uncle Donald's Ants.
- The Pink Elephants on Parade music from Dumbo is also heard in this cartoon.
- This short contains outdated racial stereotypes, since the ants are portrayed as indegenous African "cannibals" as well as "Rochester"-type slowpokes.
- Some of the ants' gibberish sound effects from this cartoon are later reused as stock sound effects in the Donald Duck cartoon Uncle Donald's Ants, as well as in Sleeping Beauty in the scene when Maleficent's goons ambush Prince Phillip from said film. Co-incidentally, some of Maleficent's goons were even voiced by Pinto Colvig, much like the ants themselves.
Gallery[]
External links[]