Upsetting Day: Casey Bats Again (Patreon)

Casey Bats Again is a Disney short from 1954 (YouTube link). It’s also a misandrist sequel, made for no one. I watched it. I despised it. I’m now sworn to destroy Casey in this life or the next.

Casey Bats Again cashes in on a poem. Surprise: money can be cashed in in that fashion. That’s something the economy lets you do, I guess. Poems are big money? Hurry up and make Leaves 2 Grass 2 Furious before Jason Statham is attached. Look on Ozymandias’s toyetic marketability, ye Mighty, and despair that you didn’t beat out Sony’s offer of a seven picture deal. And take that, “GnomePickles” on the Discord. You suggested this as a Hot Dog column without ever considering your own financial column. You know the one. The vertical set of Excel cels listing “moviemaking riches income (to stash in tax shelter).”

The germ of this cartoon is “Casey At The Bat”. That’s a poem from 1888. It’s often described as "Americana" or “sports culture” or other shorthand for “zero artistic value”. I know. I’m a baseball fan and a book lover. (Wow: two things that almost always overlap.) As far as I can tell, “Casey At The Bat” is a popular poem because it’s about sports. It’s not otherwise good. The poem describes a man (Casey) striking out in the last at-bat of a baseball game. This strike-out makes his team’s fans sad. That’s all. It’s long by poem standards and pointless by story standards. There’s also a long tradition of mediocre writers thriving in the friendly confines and low standards of sportswriting. In my opinion, “Casey At The Bat” doesn’t even (sports metaphor based on pole vaulting incoming) clear that bar. It sucks, to me. But society disagrees. “Casey At The Bat” is immortal. Disney adapted it into a hellish cartoon in 1946.

One sure source of cursed media is a big company with little contracts. Take a moment to savor this fact. Big company plus little contract equals flunkies and bottom-tier employees handling the creative work. No equation generates surer crap. In this case, the big company is Disney. The little contract is two decades of minor early Disney deals to produce shorts. These shorts were distributed by The Sick Man Of Hollywood (RKO), until Disney got around to making their own shell company for venting artistic slurry. RKO did not turn down stuff like “poem as cartoon.” Disney liked paying no royalties to the very dead author of “Casey At The Bat”. So in 1946, Disney adapted his pointless poem into a Casey At The Bat animated short where nothing new happens. The only new idea is “the baseball players’ bodies do wacky physical things at all times.” Everyone moves like Earth got a lot closer and further from its Sun, all at once, with all the gravitational and radioactive consequences that implies.

The Casey At The Bat short also includes a few fun shots. Such as a bunch of guys achieving impossible fielding skill with a million baseballs. Also, their character design for Casey is fine. He looks how that big lug could look.

Either way, this short came and went in theaters. It did no harm. Because it premiered in 1946, every theatergoer was probably too busy with foreplay or conception to view it. Americans in 1946 were baby-making, right there in the theater or Times Square or the development of the H-bomb. That commitment to germination is how we got Boomers. That’s also how Boomers got their understanding of what qualifies as socially responsible behavior. Every American political trend of my lifetime, minus the ACA and (temporarily?) same-sex marriage, displays the same lack of morality and decency as “I bought a movie ticket, therefore this former dime store with a screen and chairs in it is now my personal spermodrome.” Sorry. I know this is a lot of blue material. I know this is a lot of reproduction talk. I gotta go there. It will feel “on theme” as we explore Casey Bats Again – a short whose title you’ll soon understand as a threat.

The short’s first minute-ish is a recap of “Casey At The Bat”. Disney had good reasons for doing this: stalling for time, recycling animation cels from the first short, giving theatergoers a grace period to finish up that one licking move before paying attention to new story beats. The first minute is fine. We see baseball men do cartoon hijinks and modest body horror. It’s also boring. It makes me wish I was watching Baseball Bugs (1946). The few fun bits involve a pitcher sweating way too much, in fear. One time everybody’s hats fly off. They also finish with the “small raincloud over sad person” bit, which is hack now, but was still kind of fresh in 1954. It’s whatever. It’s fine. It’s cartoons!

Oh no. That’s exactly how Rave Macbeth started. You never want to hear a narrator explicitly handwave the famous writing that brought the audience in the door. That means this story is about to be other stuff. Other random stuff, From The Twisted Mind Of nobody good at new stories. We’ve got several minutes to go, and the only guardrail on this story is “start with a strike-out.” Anything could happen next. What’s the answer to the pointless question of “what did Casey do after losing a baseball game?” The one-sentence answer: the timeless tale of fathers inflicting their trauma on their spouses and children, plus the fresh horror of Ladyballers (2023). It begins with Casey’s wife leaping out of the stands and charging the plate.

In the moment of Casey’s deepest, darkest professional failure, his wife bursts in with the news he’ll be a father. This would make her an asshole. You don’t release a firehose of “JOYFUL LIFE MILESTONE INCOMING” while somebody’s a few seconds into processing defeat. That choice would tinge the happy milestone with sadness. The news you will be a father becomes defeat-flavored. For no reason! Mrs. Casey doesn’t sin again in the short. But her behavior only grows more baffling. As you might guess, Mrs. Casey never gets a name. As you might not have guessed, Casey’s response to this news is to feel immense joy about the imminent birth of his son. Emphasis on “son”. Casey decided his first child will be a son. No one explains why. Nobody points out that’s not a sure thing. Somehow Casey unlocks a whole new level of patriarchy. Somehow Casey invents a grim new meaning of the phrase “boys will be boys.”

It gets worse. Casey decides his TBD Child is a son because that’s how the universe must work. Then Casey decides his son will exist to make up for Casey’s one-time failure in one at-bat.

Casey is an innovator. All previous (selfish, horrible) fathers forced their child to live their dreams, for reasons that sound positive. It’s cloaked in generic separate good values. That father hollers about wanting his son to be The Best, because being The Best sounds nice. Then that father weeps into his attic’s cache of old jerseys/canvases/trombones in private. Ideally he does this in a fugue state, keeping his true motives secret even from himself. Casey is built different. Casey is conscious of exploiting his firstborn. He’s breeding his offspring for his own retroactive professional success and he’s doing that in public. What a monster! What a monster, surrounded by fellow Irish drunks with exactly the same understanding of human reproduction! All the other men in the short guzzle cigar smoke about the stone cold lock that Casey’s kid will b’penis’d.

Then, one goofier-looking man joins the story. He is goofier-looking because he is a NERD. Specifically, he’s a doctor, who might be an optometrist. While Casey hollers on a telephone, this sunglasses peddler breaks into Casey’s home, to deliver Casey’s baby.

Then the doctor departs. Casey’s immediate next action: showering his child with normative masculinity. What is the child’s sex? What is the child’s name? What’s happening to The Wife Casey Possesses in the other room? Those are questions for lesser maniacs. Casey is grooming a slugger.

The cartoon has some actual fun with this before pulling a horrendous Bathroom Bill maneuver. After Casey shouts “he’s here”, the baby does excellent athletic stuff from inside their pram.

It’s fun. I need you to know that I love and respect cartoons. I like it when funny characters do fun animated things. I do not like it when Disney depicts a father cringing in horror at the belated revelation that his child is a girl, via genital inspection.

Casey is heartbroken. We can tell because when he learns his talented healthy child is a talented healthy girl, one raincloud dwarfs the household.

The tale accelerates from here. I assume the legal department required it to move at that speed. They knew audiences needed to not think about the only ways this plot could shake out. This plot is doomed from its second step. The writers took a starting point of “Casey’s life after one strikeout”, and chose a next story beat of “Casey is the (pre-Title IX) Machiavellian Travel Sports Anger version of England’s King Henry VIII.” Like whoever was Henry’s Pope, Americans would not accept a Casey who divorces his way into new breeding opportunities. They also probably wouldn’t be down for dropping Mrs. Casey down an open manhole or off the edge of a southwestern mesa. We’ve rejected cartoon violence against women since the end of the Punch And Judy era. We celebrate that value every time Bugs Bunny achieves his most invincible state, i.e. presenting as female. So after the writers made Casey demand sons, and after the lawyers saved Mrs. Casey’s marriage and life, Disney had one remaining option. They made Casey a monogamous, remorseless insemination machine.

Years whirl by. Casey refuses to parent his delightful daughter or speak to his beautiful wife. Instead he [baseball metaphor for ejaculating into your wife as often as possible, to raise the statistical odds of an immediate next pregnancy]. Is this strategy a “home run”? No! It is…a “triple”? That’s not how Casey would describe it, because triples are good. But Casey has triplets. The triplets are women. Cue three rainclouds over the house.

According to the narrator, Casey does not relent. And in the narrator’s misogynist framing, “Casey’s batting average didn’t show a single hit.” That’s the narrator’s description of Casey and his wife enjoying six successful pregnancies, resulting in nine healthy children. “Oh For Nine”, intones a man who had a mother. Of course, the narrator thinks he’s setting the tone for a delightful twist. The twist immediately turns horrific, if you think about how baseball works even a little bit. My dearest Hotdogger: will you allow a brief diversion into how the sport of baseball works? I promise it’s worth it. Here is the diversion: the writers give Casey nine children because everybody knows nine people constitute a batting order. However, they also made a point of these nine kids coming from six pregnancies. There was no need for this. It could’ve been nine pregnancies. It also could’ve been six pregnancies, without listing that in the format I am about to show you.

Oh no. Oh god. The cartoon listed Casey’s children as if they are runs in a baseball game. However, they made a point of throwing some zeroes in, because a baseball game has nine innings, but the writers boxed themselves into some of the pregnancies generating multiple. Are they trying to say pregnancies happen within innings and/or calendar years? I think that’s what this means? And therefore, maybe the Caseys had three miscarriages? We have to think about that now?

On with the horror show. Casey stumbles into the astounding concept of fielding a baseball team whose players are women. Disney presents this as an astounding idea before A League Of Their Own came out, but long after the women' s baseball teams the movie is based on existed, so I’m unimpressed all around. I’m also disgusted by two ways they present it: Casey’s uniform, and Casey’s children's faces. In baseball, managers dress the same way the players do, because past teams often had a player do the managing. Casey refuses to look like a girl, i.e. any of his children. So he wears a “MANAGER COACH FATHER” getup one of his familial female quasi-slaves stitched for him.

Even grosser, Casey’s daughters are forced to subsist on one meager face design. One tragically good part of this short is the character design of the men. They all have funny 1890s faces. Each mug is unique. Also when one of Casey’s fellow functional alcoholics thinks up the idea of “girls playing baseball??!!??!”, he has a fun lightbulb-over-head containing a dollar sign filament.

These vibrant dumpy cartoon men live in a world of just one kind of woman. Mrs. Casey and all her daughters and the few other women outside the family only have one face. It’s normative. It’s “pretty”, in the sense that Lego figurines are too smoothed out and uniform to be “ugly.” And we begin to learn this canon about Casey’s world after the doctor delivers a ninth healthy child. The kids are hauntingly match-y. Also Casey’s response to Healthy Child Number Nine is to attempt to murder the doctor. The doctor’s crime? Propagating a lesser gender.

Only greed can calm Casey’s apparent case of rabies. After Casey’s buddy suggests exploiting the nine girls for profit, Casey relents, in the form of paying the doctor for his services. The narrator is explicit about this being the first time Casey’s ever paid this man. Casey withheld payment either for gorilla-esque rage reasons, or in the strategic hope it would starve the doctor into delivering a boy the next time. The doctor is so stunned to begin to receive money he faints.

The narrator goes on to say Casey’s mood turned so positive, Casey was even “speaking to his wife.” That is a direct quote. That is also a baffling description of the “speaking” the cartoon proceeds to show us.

Casey is happy because now that his wife produced nine daughters – for biological reasons driven entirely by Casey’s genes – Casey can now field an all-daughter baseball team. Does Casey see this as a chance for his daughters to play sports in the kind of meaningful context he enjoyed? No. Casey plots to profit from this team using the exact marketing playbook of freak shows. The cartoon also fills a bunch of time by making Casey too drunk or stupid (i.e. Irish) to acquire one ticket to the inaugural freak show. While Mrs. Casey (and randomly/deservedly the doctor) sit in a special box, Casey struggles to sneak or climb or tunnel into the stadium. We watch him do this forever. Casey also fails to acquire a third-party ticket to view the show through a peep hole. This short’s respect for women is sub-Porky’s.

Casey achieves access to his own baseball event with one at-bat to go. His daughters trail by one run. His daughters feel enormous Casey-esque confidence about winning. This confidence is justified, because Casey’s first and mightiest daughter is the last batter. She will hit the ball and win. Also, if she fails, Casey made that not matter. Casey made this (sexist) game a non-competitive stunt. It’s like if The Savannah Bananas played in Gilead. Every one of the thousands of people at this event knows it is “Whose Line” rules. The only person monstrous enough to feel differently is Casey. When his daughter is about to bat, Casey cheats. Does he do any of the ordinary forms of baseball cheating? Worse: Casey does an illegal NFL “horse collar” tackle to his own daughter. Then, with her out of the way, Casey steps to the plate in drag.

Let’s keep the Gilead concept going. Imagine a world where Margaret Atwood’s version of Americans fielded a sports team. They’d probably play in America’s capital city, under a team name referencing a powerful official social class in Gilead’s society. So let’s call this made-up thought experiment team “The Washington Commanders.” If that patriarchal team existed, The Commanders would be less cruel to Casey’s daughter than Casey is. They would Horseshoe Theory their way into (sexist) gentle treatment of that lady. They also wouldn’t perform a bitter mawkish parody of “a woman trying to bat.” Casey’s ugly pantomime of a female athlete, who is still trying to play baseball as well as possible, cannot hit the baseball. He misses the first pitch because his wig covers his eyes. He misses the second pitch because his daughter tries to tug him off the field by the waistband of his ladies’ athletic shorts. The shorts fall down, revealing Casey’s entire pair of men’s trousers. How dare they dishonor cartoon tradition by making Casey embarrassed without revealing funny-print boxers.

Casey then misses the third pitch, because that is one Casey trait in the Casey poem. Fine. Sure. And if that meant Casey lost, it would open the door to saving the whole cartoon. His daughters could go on to barnstorm the country, winning games without him. Casey would be stuck at home, his lesson learned, his “GENES MACHINE” t-shirt donated to Goodwill. Sadly, strangely, illegally, his daughter was standing a few paces behind him when he swung and missed. Casey’s eldest hits the backwash of the pitch for a home run.

Casey’s drunk/stupid/Irish-Catholic mind misunderstands this event. To a 1954 audience this probably made sense for ethnic/religious/skull-shape reasons. As Casey misses the ball completely, but sees it leave the park for a home run, he thinks he hit a home run without any sensory feedback to confirm. Casey trots the bases victoriously with his daughter shadowing him the whole way. Our old friend Horseshoe Theory returns here. Behold the implications of Casey’s world-historic misandry. In his bitter disdain for all women, Casey achieves an unprecedented satire of men. Guys will gaslight themselves into retroactive sports heroism before they’ll go to therapy.

End of cartoon. Endless questions. And blessedly, no further Disney Casey shorts. I say that knowing I’m about to be wrong. Artificial intelligence runs amok. Soon the WaltBot shall devour this Casey corpus, evaporate the Caspian Sea, and produce Caseyette Demon Capturer Train Your Dragon Would You Like Me To Make This Title More Trademark Safe. That’s on the way. So watch for my thoughts on it, tomorrow? And in the meantime: play ball!*

*if you have “balls” or if you are one of a madman’s nine cis daughters

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: ObsoL33T, and just his luck to sponsor an article about a cartoon baseball player rawdogging his wife on Friday the 13th.

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM