You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …

The Product:
Public service announcement

The Promotion:

The Pitch:
Every tax dollar you send in is another Japanese soldier put in the ground!

If you’re a U.S. citizen, you’ve got two days left to send in your tax return before Uncle Sam comes looking for you. So I thought it’d be a good time to look back at how the Internal Revenue Service once tried to spur people into doing their taxes, with the aid of Walt Disney Studios.

This is an ad steeped in its historical context. Obviously, it was made while the U.S. was involved in World War II, and with the surge of patriotism getting people to sign up to fight, accept rationing and rubber shortages, and install blackout curtains in every window … well, if we can’t get them to pay their taxes now, they never will.

However, it’s also a product of how the American tax system worked at the time. The impetus for this ad was that, thanks to tax code revisions made in 1942, millions of people who’d never owed income tax before were now being asked to hand over tax dollars for the first time. And they did have to actually hand it over – this was before tax payments were taken automatically from workers’ paychecks, so paying your taxes involved actually sending a check to the IRS every few months (and hoping you had enough saved up to cover what you owed).

With tax payments being such a headache at the time, it’s no wonder the government thought the public needed some prodding and instruction to do it right. And with Disney already producing so many educational and propaganda pieces for the war effort, they were a natural fit for the message.

Though this ad’s a great reminder that Disney flicks of the Forties, for all their cutesiness and comedy, could go surprisingly hardcore. We start with goofy Donald Duck antics, but when we switch to showing the machinery of war, you can tell this is the same Disney Studio that traumatized generations with the darker bits of Fantasia and Bambi. Like, when we get to that warplane bristling with guns, including some that form a face, and sporting both a Nazi helmet and a pair of devil horns … it’s like they anticipated the 70’s science-fantasy/heavy metal aesthetic by three decades.

The imagery and voiceover are so evocative, they reused it for another short covering the same topic (paying your taxes to “bury the Axis”), but this time using what some have called a prototype for Scrooge McDuck (or, at the very least, another Duck character using the Thrifty Scotsman stereotype):

So remember, as you send in your tax returns this year, what your hard earned tax dollars are paying for:

Guns! Guns! All kinds of guns!