Donald Duck Makes Iron

from "Steel and America: A New Look" (©1974)

This 4:20 minute clip from the American Iron and Steel Institute's documentary film features Donald Duck demonstrating how medieval iron was made, and that the colonists used virtually the same methods.

In 1974, in preparation for the American Bicentennial, the American Iron and Steel Institute made a half hour film in cooperation with Walt Disney to promote an understanding of an industrial society. The film told the story of American steel making from its primitive beginnings to recent practices and future needs and interspersed with scenes of colonial iron (like the then recently reconstructed Saugus Iron Works, in Saugus, Massachusetts), modern steel plants, and steel products were scenes of Donald Duck do what he did best: being a good worker, getting run over by wheelbarrows and getting frustrated.

This scene, about 10 minutes into the film explains how iron is mined and smelted in the middle ages - and it ends with Donald's literal transformation into a Colonial ironmaster.

You can download the film in a series of sizes (note the file sizes are quite large for high-resolution video)

This video was produced by Walt Disney Educational Media in cooperation with the American Iron & Steel Institute and appears here with both their permissions.

• Donald and Steel

• note: some of these files are just clips; the full 4:20 video is a very large file no matter what you do.

***We are working on replacing this version with a cleaner copy as well as looking into streaming technology.

Resources

To play WMV files on a Mac, please install Flip4Mac.

Quicktime resources for all platforms are available here.