"The Lentils from Babylon"

Okay, I've been reading a lot of Romano Scarpa stories lately.  I know I've been very critical of the man in the past (and I maintain that "Anti-Dollarosis" is a really poorly-conceived/realized piece of work), but there's no question that the man could turn out a quality mouse story.  So, I decided to go back and check out some of his duckwork that I had previously dismissed, to see whether my sensibilities had changed.  I propose, here, to look at a number of his stories, starting with this 1960 effort, currently ranked twenty-four (!) on inducks, his second-highest-rated thing after "The Blot's Double Mystery," which was written by my old nemesis Guido Martina, and therefore is not really a fair measuring stick for how good the man is or isn't.

Well, let's not bury the lede too much here: yes, I've been finding more to like in Scarpa's work than I did previously.  If I didn't have anything to say beyond what I did about "Anti-Dollarosis," there probably wouldn't be much use in saying anything.  But that doesn't mean that I don't still find this story in particular problematic, and indeed emblematic of what's wrong with a lot of his work: there's good stuff here.  But the question looms large: just how much bullshit are you willing to tolerate to get to the good stuff?  Because let me tell you, there is a lot of bullshit in "The Lentils from Babylon," and it's not 'til towards the end that the good begins to predominate over the bad.

Let me briefly pause to recap the story's overly convoluted plot, because let's face it, it's so all over the place that even if you've read the story, you probably don't have a clear recollection of what it's about, and you're maybe not so keen on the idea of rereading.  The idea is that Scrooge is now a huge fan of lentils (having become bored of quail, apparently), and he comes across some imported Babylonian lentils that have that certain je ne sais quoi, even though everyone but him hates them.  So he determines to purchase the company that distributes them.  But what's this?  The company is owned by the Beagle Boys, who accidentally stumbled upon these ancient lentils whilst searching in the Middle East for more substantive treasure.  Scrooge buys as much stock in the company as he can, but for some MYSTERIOUS REASON, the Beagles don't want the lentils to become popular, and they refuse to sell him their own stock, thus preventing him from doing what he wants with the company.  So, he does the only rational thing, which is to trade the entire contents of his Money Bin for complete ownership.  But oh no, it turns out there aren't enough lentils left to fulfill demand.  So it's off to Asia to see what's what, which turns out to be that the Beagles have a Cunning Plan: there's this country called "Paylesh" that's buying the lentils, paying for them with the country's dirt, which, unbeknownst to the natives, is full of gold dust.  Then, the Beagles buy back the lentils for far less than the dirt is worth, trade 'em back for more dirt, and the cycle continues.  Also, your brain hurts.  Anyway, the truth comes out, and now Scrooge is kinda boned, except that the Beagles offer to return to him his money if he's actually able to make one of these lentils grow, which, as the story ends, he's about to do.  THE END.

Yeah…it certainly doesn't have simplicity in its favor.

This in media res opening actually works pretty well.  Scarpa likes this way of opening stories, but too often there's this OMG HOW DID OUR HEROES GET INTO THIS INSANE SITUATION?!? vibe that kinda makes me roll my eyes.  This is okay, though.  It's interesting in the way it establishes that Scrooge being poor is an ongoing thing that he's more or less just accepting.  That's not something you see often, if ever.

But one of the substantial problems with this story is that there's not just a lotta bullshit mixed in; it's that the entire premise here is based on bullshit.  As in: okay, after reading the story, we know what the Beagles are really doing with these lentils, and why they don't want them to become popular in the States.  So… are they even selling them there?  They could've saved themselves an awful lot of trouble by keeping the whole operation sub rosa.  You can't tell me they're smart enough to pull something like this off but too dumb to realize something this obvious.  Well, okay, you can, but it's not good characterization.

No!  Shut up!  That's nonsense and you know it!  You're just drawing attention to the problem by trying to explain it!  With the possible exception of Neil from The Young Ones, nobody in the world cares about lentils to the extent that they would comb whatever ultra-obscure, (presumably) Iraqi trade journals that might mention a business operating out of the country, and think, whoa--a new lentil distributor?  I gotta get me some of that!  And even in the bizarre event that they did, well?  As long as they're not Scrooge, presumably they'd hate them in any case.  So why bother?  Dammit.

And the most irksome thing is, this problem could easily have been solved by just having Scrooge stumble across the lentils while inspecting some business or other in the Middle East.  You might say, hey, why get so het up about this?  Sure, it doesn't make much sense, but it gets the story off the ground, which is what it's meant to do.  Calm yourself.  But the thing is, yes, okay, a certain amount of bullshit is tolerable in a story, but unless you're being intentionally absurdist (which Scarpa isn't here), you should do your best to err on the side of including as little bullshit as you can reasonably manage.

But, well, what happens happens, and we get this rather leaden and tediously predictable bit about stock manipulation.  As a lesson in economics, it's far from the level of Barks' "Financial Fable" or indeed Michael T Gilbert and William Van Horn's "That Ol' Soft Soap."  And one has to wonder: the Beagles decided that their company, to which they want to draw as little attention as possible, should be publicly-traded, because…?  To be fair, they do maintain enough stock on their own that they're not going to lose control, but it still seems really inadvisable.  One is tempted to be uncharitable and suggest that Scarpa didn't even know there was any other choice.  In any case, though, it's just another bothersome little detail.

And then--BIG FAT HUGE SIGH--we get the most unspeakably dumb and boring part of the whole story, as the Beagles attempt to squelch Scrooge's publicity efforts.

I mean okay okay, I'm well aware that "dumb and boring" is a subjective value judgment, but gosh…I'll admit that "Avoid Babylon lentils! They're cursed!" is sort of funny, but it's funny in such a dopey way, like something I would've come up with when I was ten, that my entire being just rejects the whole thing as misbegotten.

(Also: live commercials?)

And then, we get to the other absurdity: the idea that this lentil concern is going to triple his fortune--which, let us remember, consists of surely hundreds at least of mines, factories, and everything else.  But talk about lentils and ho ho boy!  Then we're really in clover!  Also note how the Beagles to all appearances (there's no indication that this is meant to be any sort of subterfuge) accept the idea that Scrooge's fortune would indeed be tripled, even though we know that the insufficiency of lentils is going to be a big problem, which leads to the question of why the hell they'd be willing to sell at all.

But they do!  For all the cash in his bin!  I suppose commenting on the total absurdity of this plot point would be superfluous?  I mean okay I can understand, kind of, being willing to just accept this kind of loosey-goosey approach to realism, but I just can't.  It's one thing to have plot details make no sense, but when you find yourself deforming well-established characters, you've gone too far for me.

…and it surely says something about the story that I--who am as opposed to corporate malfeasance as you can get--somehow can't help finding Donald and HDL's reaction to Scrooge's idea of finding other lentils elsewhere to just be insufferably self-righteous.  Get the hell over yourselves!  No one's gonna know, and it's not gonna have any negative effect on anyone!  Blargh!

Also, you know, maybe I'm just really slow on the uptake, but it took me quite some time and puzzling through things to figure out how this scam actually worked.  I can't help thinking there's just something fundamentally misconceived about centering a story around so incredibly convoluted a scheme.  I wonder how many small children reading this were able to really understand it.

Also, hard to say how the natives were unaware of the gold, given how obvious it is to even a layman like Donald.

I've been pretty negative here I know, but now we get to the part of the story that I unequivocally like, where the Beagles foolishly bet him his money back that we won't be able to make his ancient lentils grow.  His childish "but I WANT them to!" is funny in a character-appropriate way.

I also quite like the montage sequence of the ducks going all over the world trying to plant lentils in every conceivable environment.  It's really cool and epic.

Did I say "unequivocally like?"  Well, I have to take that back, alas.

It's okay to just say "he's lost his Money bin!  Now he's poor!"  If you just do that, we'll accept it, and everything will be fine.  But when you draw attention to the fact that the actual money in the bin is only a small percentage of his total fortune, the whole thing just breaks down.  What exactly does Scarpa imagine those "factories and buildings" are for, anyway?  If we're going to acknowledge that he has all these additional assets, we have to also acknowledge that he would still be extremely well-off even without the bin.  And to think: this would've been the easiest thing in the world to fix: just say that he had traded his entire empire with the Beagles, not just the stuff in the bin (which still would leave us with the wildly implausible plot point of him being willing to do this, but c'mon--I'm just trying to contain the worst of the damage.  You cannot ask the world of me).

I DO, however, like this pluckiness, even if it doesn't really go much of anywhere.  This might also be a good place to mention another cool thing about the story; namely, the way Gladstone commissioned not zero, not one, but two Don Rosa covers to go with it:

Not too bad, considering that the story isn't hugely visually dynamic.  That second one makes me wish that we actually got to see the Beagles living it up like that in the story itself.  That seems to be a rather odd omission on Scarpa's part.

And I'll readily admit that the ending is very well-executed, even if I can't help but think: wouldn't it be better if Scrooge regained his fortune due to, I dunno, some sort of actual effort on his part?  Still, credit where due for ending on such an unusual note.

So…there we have it.  The first time I read this story, I found it tremendously dull and not much else.  On rereading, my impression is certainly more nuanced: it's a hopelessly chaotic mish-mash of a thing, and yet, against all odds, it somehow manages to sorta-kinda work in the larger analysis.  Is it the twenty-fourth best Disney story ever?  Now that is a notion more bizarre than anything Scarpa ever came up with.