Disney Fan Discovers That Mr. Toad Has Been Flashing Disneyland Goers for 50 Years
Winnie the Pooh isn’t the only animated animal who needs to put on some pants.
The decency standards for anthropomorphized creatures in cartoons have always been inconsistent, even within a single animated universe — as Bo Burnham famously pointed out, if Goofy and his family enjoy all the perks of personhood and the clothing options that go with them, “Why is Pluto just a fucking dog?” However, the many developmentally confusing shower shots in many Warner Bros. and Disney classics have taught us one sacred rule: If an animal character usually wears clothes, then seeing them without clothes is scandalous, even if Donald Duck’s blazer and bowtie combo never covered his junk in the first place.
Enter Mr. J. Thaddeus Toad, partner to Frog and protagonist of the 1908 children’s novel The Wind in the Willows. Universally portrayed in multiple layers of attire typical to an Englishman of the late-19th-to-early-20th-century, Toad is as prudently covered as any cartoon character could be — none of the “shirt with no pants” immodesty of the various ducks, no “uncomfortably kinky sneakers-and-white-gloves combo” of the salacious Sonic the Hedgehog, just some slacks, a sweater, a coat, a pair of loafers and an upturned collar for Toad. Despite his mischief, he is a man of decency.
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Or, so we thought, until filmmaker and theme park aficionado Matthew Serrano blew the lid off of the biggest wardrobe malfunction of 1949 when he noticed an unseemly detail during a viewing of the animated Disney adaptation of The Wind in the Willows. Mr. Toad is more of an exhibitionist than we ever could have imagined.
