Duck characters on money

Are you sick of all these dumb presidents and things littering our currency? I know I am. We could immediately improve the economy if only we were willing to implement the following foolproof plan:
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"The Golden River"

One unexpected benefit of writing on this blog is that--since any duck story I read nowadays (and I read or reread at least one a day) I'm reading with half an eye towards possibly writing an entry about it--I've become more analytical about them. This may cause me to be MORE critical of not-so-great stories, but it also deepens my appreciation for the good ones, because I'm better able to articulate WHY they're good.
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"The Flying Horse"

"The Flying Horse" is a justifiably-forgotten story from 1953, drawn by Jack Bradbury and written by some anonymous jerk whom I hate. If it's famous for anything, it's the cover, which was drawn by Carl Barks hisself. It was considered of sufficient interest that Gemstone chose to reprint it as the cover to WDC&S 658. The fact that the attendant story is not included makes it seem slightly baffling, especially if you've never read it before, but trust me--you're not missing much. However, it DOES provide a succinct little object lesson in the value of good coloring. Here's the modern version, as colored by the divine Susan Daigle-Leach:
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And now, hilarious pornographic Disney fanfiction.

Courtesy of Disney Weirdness: this. You know, there was a Donald & Daisy title in the seventies. I'm...guessing it didn't look much like this.

"Krankenstein Gyro"

When you're a little kid, "inventor" more or less equates to "magician" in your mind. These people basically conjure things up out of nothing: Isosceles invented the triangle, Johannes Gutenburg invented movable type, Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, Cyrus McCormick invented the mccormick reaper (whatever the hell THAT is), George Washington Carver invented peanut butter, Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb, Scott Stillinger invented the koosh ball. They just INVENTED them: first there was no movable type, then there WAS moveable type. Magic! You--as a kid--don't have enough context to realize that these inventions came out of specific historical periods and developed out of previous scientific advances. Let's say you want to invent a remote control helicopter (I badly wanted such a thing when I was small): You don't look at the work that's been done in radio waves and aerodynamics and all this relevant stuff--you just sort of put some gears and things together, and bam--you're good to go. It's like when Calvin wanted to build a robot to make his bed for him. You think you can do these things because your perspective is skewed. Mind you, you can't just blame the kids: this goes right along with the American myth of Rugged Individualism: the world doesn't work this way (with vanishingly rare exceptions), but thanks to Ayn Rand and her ilk, a lot of otherwise (presumably) not-that-dumb people imagine that it does. Still, the point remains: MOST of us grow out of this conception of the world sooner rather than later.
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"The Beagle Boys vs. the Money Bin"

As long as I'm talking about the Beagle Boys, I should give a mention to this excellent Don Rosa story, which was written to commemorate the introductions of both the Beagle Boys ("Terror of the Beagle Boys," November 1951) and the Money Bin ("The Big Bin on Killmotor Hill," December 1951). The result is a highly unusual story in Rosa's canon--the ducks barely appear; aside from a brief, wordless Donald cameo towards the beginning, the seventeen-page story (or fifteen, depending on how you count--more on this later) is Beagles-only until Scrooge makes his entry on page sixteen, and he doesn't actually DO much of anything. An interesting and welcome change of pace from Rosa's usual Scrooge-centric stories.
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