Best Foot Forward
A TaleSpin story outline by Dave Bryant
This work is not in the public domain
The episode opens on Kit and Baloo fishing off the dock area directly in front of Higher for Hire’s ramshackle main building. They look up as a truck rounds the building and stops, letting out a passenger hidden to them by the vehicle’s bulk. When the newcomer tells the driver to wait for him, Baloo looks thoughtful—he thinks he recognizes the voice.
His guess is confirmed when a tall, thin black cat with an obvious limp appears, walking stick in one hand and clipboard in the other, looking about a bit vaguely. Baloo gets up and greets him as “Kitten” Tom Clowder; he responds in kind, though a bit reservedly. Kit, tagging behind, is introduced to him as Baloo’s navigator. When Tom claps a hand on Kit’s shoulder instead of patting him on the head as too many adults do, Kit warms to him. Baloo tells Kit that “Kitten” Tom used to be really hot pilot for Khan Industries—he used to make the famous Desert Run out of Gafia. Tom looks very ill at ease and throws cold water on Baloo’s description of him by commenting, “That was a long time ago.” He goes on to tell Baloo that he’d thought the address on the invoice had seemed familiar, but what happened to “Baloo’s Air Service”? Baloo looks downcast, and sheepishly replies that he went broke and got bought out.
Tom obviously makes a mental connection, and says that explained the “R. Cunningham” he was supposed to see. Baloo readily agrees with a chuckle and tells him that “the boss” ought to be in the office now—“Just go right on in.” Tom thanks him and with a perfunctory parting pleasantry heads for Becky’s office. Kit asks Baloo if he’s going to tell Tom that Miz Cunningham is a girl; Baloo laughs and says, “Let’im find out for himself.”
Tom knocks on the office door, then enters upon Becky’s “Come in.” He limps over to her desk and announces that he’s “here to see Mr. Cunningham.” When Becky informs him icily that she is “Miz Cunningham,” he blinks, apologizes in obvious embarrassment, and introduces himself. He then starts into business, a bit thrown off by the inauspicious beginning.
Baloo and Kit return to fishing. Kit observes that Tom’s a nice guy, but kind of sad. Baloo looks a little sad himself, and agrees—Tom wasn’t at all like that until the accident. Kit asks, “What accident?” Baloo begins to explain as there is a segue to a flashback.
At a tiny airstrip in the desert somewhere outside Gafia, a slightly younger Tom is frantically prepping his Seaduck-size high-performance desert runner for the next leg of the Desert Run. He is congratulated on this plum assignment by the pilot of the other aircraft currently at the field: a standard Khan Industries trimotor in desert livery. The other pilot, a typical Khan panther, but older than most, shows his true feelings about being passed over for the Run by a young upstart hotshot—who’s not even a big cat—as he enters the airstrip’s small shack of an office. (It’s not even big enough to have a tower.) He asks the field’s meteorologist for the local weather forecast; as he’s told of a major sandstorm to the west, a wicked thought starts to bubble in his mind. He thanks the meteorologist and wanders back out.
Tom—and the clipboard that always seems to be in his hand—is going through his preflight checklist. The other pilot wishes him good luck, then tells him that the weather is all clear. Tom wants to confirm this with the meteorologist, but the other pilot says he just checked for him—consider it a favor. Tom thinks about it, then decides that the other pilot’s right. Firing up his engines, he takes off toward the west as the other pilot cackles gleefully.
The flashback ends with Kit asking, “Gosh. . . . So then what happened?” Baloo finishes up with a shaggy-dog-story ending: Tom crashed in the sandstorm; his plane and cargo were totaled, and Tom himself was badly hurt. The other pilot claimed he’d told Tom about the storm, but Tom had gone ahead and flown that course anyway. Tom was fired—Khan can’t stand incompetents—and went broke paying his hospital bills. Since then, he’s made a precarious living as a freelance cargo broker.
The two bears’ conversation is interrupted by Tom leaving the office, Becky having seen him to the door. As the truck leaves, she trots out to tell Baloo and Kit that Tom’s gotten them a nice, fat, juicy contract. Her enthusiasm makes both Baloo and Kit uneasy, and they glance at each other with an “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” expression.
Somewhere else in Cape Suzette, Tom enters his run-down motel room and flops down at the room’s rickety table. The tabletop is strewn with FLAP licensing documents; at the sight of them, Tom looks even more tired. A quick flashback shows Ralph “Love to Flunk ’Em” Throgmorton, the same FLAP examiner that gave Baloo his last flight test, telling Tom huffily with one of his trademark alphabetical checklists that he can’t allow Tom to fly, that Tom can’t work the rudder pedals properly with a crippled leg.
The next morning, Baloo and Kit are jolted out of bed by Tom’s truck horn. Becky, already up and impatient, makes a snide comment about sleepyheads as the two stumble out to load the cargo—a huge crate with louvered airholes. As they wrestle it into the Seaduck, Kit pokes his head out of the cargo hatch, from which Baloo-and-crate noises emanate, and asks Tom just what is in the crate. Tom looks up from where Becky is signing the papers on his clipboard and informs them that it’s a “wumpus”, a rare herbivore that’s active only during the daytime; it’s big and can be dangerous, but the darkness inside the crate should keep it asleep for the flight. As Baloo wrestles with the crate’s tiedowns in back, Tom gives Kit a navigation briefing to Hyenasport, and is impressed when Kit already has the route mapped out and ready. Eventually, the four of them—Baloo, Kit, Tom, and Becky—board the aircraft and take off, passing out through the notch in the cliffs.
Cut to Don Karnage, lazing in the command chair of the Iron Vulture, writing in his diary. One of his crew (probably Mad Dog) bursts in with information—one of their informants in Cape Suzette just radioed in about a “rare, valuable cargo” being flown out to Hyenasport. Don Karnage, figuring that if it’s “rare and valuable” it’s worth stealing, orders an intercept; the Vulture lifts off and heads out.
Back to the Seaduck, flying peacefully over the ocean. Baloo and Kit are up to the usual in the cockpit, Baloo irritated that they’re passing so close to Louie’s without being allowed to stop. In the passenger seats, Tom is clearly somewhat smit by Becky, who is now allowing him to call her Rebecca instead of Ms. Cunningham. Up front, Baloo is just about to fake an inflight emergency so he can stop at Louie’s when a real emergency preempts him—the Air Pirates’ fighters, diving in to attack.
Baloo’s “Oh-oh!” comes through to the passenger section; Becky gets up to investigate just as Baloo jerks the plane into a wild evasive maneuver. She is thrown her off her feet and into the cockpit just in time to hear Don Karnage on the radio, ordering them to land or else. Tom stays in his seat, knowing better than to distract the pilot.
The Seaduck is raked several times as Karnage’s fighters try to force him down, while Baloo flings the plane around the sky in his usual style. Things go relatively well until Tom hears an ominous creaking and cracking behind him; he looks back just in time to see the panicked wumpus smash its way out of its bullet-holed crate into the gyrating Seaduck’s well-lit interior. At its first sight of Tom, it charges.
Tom scrabbles out of his seatbelt and makes for the cockpit door; with his bad ankle, the wumpus catches him before he can make it. Turning around at the last second, he swings his heavy, knobbed walking stick for all he’s worth, breaking it over the animal’s head and knocking it flat on the pitching deck. He goes for the cockpit door again as the wumpus recovers, shaking its head and trying to get its footing. As Tom grabs the door handle, he hears a bellow from behind and looks back. From his point of view, the charging wumpus fills the screen.
Tom is punted through the open hatchway, bouncing off the windshield and ending up sprawled upside down behind Kit’s seat, stunned. Everyone else takes a beat to gawk at the wumpus, its head jammed through the cockpit door, bulging the cockpit bulkhead with its efforts to get to them. With a shake of its head, the wumpus pulls back to stampede around the cargo hold. Its shifting weight throws the Seaduck out of balance and all over the sky, stretching Baloo’s piloting skills to their limit and starting to make Becky airsick.
In his command fighter, Don Karnage wonders out loud with his trademark turns of phrase just what has gotten into that Baloo—mistaking the wild maneuvering for deliberate evasive action—as the Seaduck thrashes all over the sky.
Aboard the Seaduck, Baloo, seeing that something has to be done, grabs a half-dazed Tom by the scruff of the neck and throws him into the pilot’s seat, stripping off the cat’s long aviator scarf. He yells at Tom to take care of the Seaduck; he’ll take care of the wumpus; he’s the only one aboard big and strong enough to have any chance of manhandling the thing. As Kit and Becky holler incoherently at Baloo, Tom helplessly yells that he can’t fly, his bad leg can’t work the pedal—they’ll only be able to turn to the right.
Baloo is already trying to wrestle the wumpus, being taken on a wumpus-back tour of the cargo hold, and doesn’t hear Tom; Kit and Becky do. They both shout, “What?” Becky, queasiness forgotten, proceeds to scream at Tom much as she has done to Baloo in similar situations.
But Tom, his normally tolerant temperament frayed by the havoc, has reached his limit. He unties the bandanna he wears under the aviator’s scarf and stuffs it into Becky’s mouth with two fingers. She stumbles around the heaving cockpit as Kit yells, “Miz Cunningham!” The young bear grabs her and pulls out the bandanna. As Becky grabs for a handhold, Kit looks at the cloth in his hand, then at the broken remnant of Tom’s walking stick rolling past.
Back in the now-battered hold, a worse-for-wear Baloo is still wrestling the wumpus down. Outside the Seaduck, Karnage has noticed that “He is only making right turns, yes-no?” and orders his fighters to herd his victim towards the distant Iron Vulture, to which he radios orders to “Set the table for guests.”
In the Seaduck’s cockpit, a flash of inspiration hits Kit. He grabs the broken stick, then leaps over to the pilot’s seat and pulls Tom’s kepi—a soft hat resembling the French Foreign Legion cap with its long flaps in back—off the cat’s head. Tom shouts, “Hey—!” but Kit, ignoring him, vaults onto his lap and splints the walking stick to the pilot’s leg with the bandanna and kepi, making sure the tip of the stick protrudes beyond the sole of Tom’s boot. He jumps back off, telling Tom to “Try the pedal now!” Tom does, and is amazed and delighted when the makeshift contraption works. Becky, pulling herself to her feet, catches sight of the Iron Vulture coming into sight.
Outside, the Vulture’s beak yawns open for the Seaduck; Karnage gives the orders for the final herding maneuver when Tom, seeing an opening, slams the Seaduck into a long, steep slip to the left, dropping out of the trap and disrupting Karnage’s herding maneuver to the point that a couple of the pirate fighters fly into the Vulture instead; the pirate craft shudders and belches smoke as the fighters collide within.
Tom rolls the Seaduck away from the pirate craft and into a nearby cloud, where he firewalls the throttles and loses the surviving fighters. All three in the cockpit take a moment to breathe a sigh of relief and stop hyperventilating. Kit and Becky suddenly remember Baloo’s struggle with the wumpus and go for the cockpit door to check on him when Baloo himself reappears, dusting his hands and chuckling. Becky asks him how it went; he responds by hooking a thumb aft and telling her to see for herself. She looks in to see the wumpus asleep amid the debris, blindfolded by the aviator’s scarf. The Seaduck flies on into the sunset, resounding with relieved laughter.
Back at Higher for Hire, Becky, Kit, and Baloo are talking in Becky’s office when a knock comes at the door. Baloo answers it to find Tom, who enters with a Cheshire-cat grin on his face. Kit runs over and asks him how it went. Tom flashes his new pilot’s license and answers, “Like a charm. Wildcat really did the trick!” As he finishes, he bends down to lift the left leg of his bomber-pilot pants, revealing a gleaming new steel leg-brace. Ω
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