Review: Minnie Mouse – “Clogged”

 

Spoilers Belows

I have high hopes for this episode. Not only is it a Minnie-centric episode, it is also entirely in Dutch. So far this season, the foreign language episodes have been much better than the English episodes. Let’s see if this one keeps up with the trend.

“Clogged” begins with Minnie riding her bicycle home from the store while singing a cute little Dutch song. When she arrives home, she is horrified to see that her flower is dying. Her windmill, which provides water to the plant, has stopped moving. It is up to Minnie to figure out how to get the windmill sails turning again so her beloved flower can thrive once again!

She tries the basic things – blowing at the sails, pointing a fan at it, and getting a oompah band to play their instruments in the mill’s general direction. While the oompah band has a little success, none of the attempts really get the windmill moving.

Just then, Minnie sees three men bicycling past her house. (One of the men sort of looks like Don Quixote. I’m not positive if these characters are supposed to be references to the man of La Mancha but I have an overall feeling that they are.) She gets a brilliant idea to set up a bicycle inside her house to spin the windmill sails. Her first attempt to pedal the bicycle is a failure. She can’t get the pedals to budge. So she puts on a larger pair of clogs. These shoes make it a little easier for her to pedal but not enough to get the sails moving. So she puts on an even larger pair of clogs. This gets her feet pedaling really fast.

Unfortunately, she is pedaling too fast now. The wind generated by the windmill is blowing people down all over town. It even turns Donald Duck into the Little Dutch Boy. Soon, the shoes take on a life of their own. Minnie gets thrown off the bike, leaving her no way to stop the shoes from pedaling. The top of the windmill rips off her house and destructively rolls through town.

However, all of this windmilling has given plenty of water to her flower. So much water that it is now humongous. Minnie is so happy that her flower has grown that she moves it to the spot of the former windmill. The flower petals now turn, much like the windmill sails, giving water to a new flower garden.

I didn’t think this episode was quite as powerful as some of the other foreign language episodes but I did enjoy it. It would have been nice to have a few more Holland references in the episode. Maybe, if that one character was supposed to be Don Quixote, the writers could have had him try to lance the windmill into motion. Or maybe they could have had Little Dutch Boy Donald try to stick his finger into the water faucet in order to get the water to flow. As it is, this episode could have taken place anywhere in the world and no one would have been any wiser. At least the Dutch was decent.