USSC's Associate Professor David Smith tells The Sydney Morning Herald how the celebrity power of Donald Duck played an important role in convincing Americans to pay income tax to fund the Second World War. “The thing about cinema at that time is that everyone would go out and watch it together,” Smith said noting that tens of millions of Americans went to the movies each week at the time. “So everyone’s probably looking at each other, going ‘Oh ok, yes we should be paying our taxes, and there’s this sort of sense of accountability and responsibility."