"The Winter of Their Dissed Kismet"

So, in honor of our friend Chris, here is this Kari Korhonen short from 2001, for which he provided the localization, and before anything else I should note—and I mean this in the most positive way possible—that that title is truly one of the most gruesome puns I have ever encountered.  MY GOSH.

And fair’s fair, this script DOES sell this decidedly goofy premise to the extent that it’s capable of being sold.  Which is a limited extent, though one has to concede that the story hinging on supersition DOES dovetail, kinda, with that one Barks Junior Woodchucks story (“Bad Day for Troop A,” is it?) where whichever nephew is obsessed with the idea that they’re going to have BAD LUCK.  Seems Un-Woodchuck-ish no matter who’s doing it, though.  At least the script makes things a little better by semi-acknowledging this (“All this tryptophan…,” “I’m so punchy…”).

Also, since I know Chris was familiar with old, obscure non-Barks stuff: is it at all conceivable that that bit on the bottom left about fish being brainfood is a specific reference to this story?  I choose to believe it is so!

Chris was certainly a bigger Ducktales fan than me, and possibly than anyone else in the world; as others have pointed out, of the many things to regret about his passing, one of them is that he didn’t get to see this reboot of the show that they’re coming out with (though of course, the quality is still very much up in the air).  If you haven’t yet, it’s well worth checking out his retrospective he did a few years ago, which is a lot more thorough and less jaundiced than my nonsense.

ALL OF WHICH IS JUST BY WAY OF SAYING: “Quackaroonies.”  When I first saw this in “The Great Paint Robbery,” I was not aware that it was a Ducktales thing.  It adds a distinctive feel to the story, but—and I would have LOVED to have the chance to argue the point with him—I think it’s kind of jarring to see in a regular duck story like this; for better or worse, Ducktales had its own distinctive aesthetic, which reg’lar duck stories just don’t share.  Then again, I must concede that part of it’s just that I don’t really like the word in ANY context.  Compromise: “wakaroonies.” 

Anyway, a Littlest Chicakdees reference makes me happy—though it’s certainly a linguistic oddity I’ve never quite understood that they’re not just the Little Chickadees.  I’m aware that they’re often just the plain ol’ Chickadees, but I like some kind of diminutive modifier, to match the Woodchucks.

…just to note that this is certainly as much an allusion to the Ducktales episode “Too Much of a Gold Thing” as it is to the common phrase.  That works for me in its unobtrusiveness.  Writing about this story is maybe perhaps also appropriate given the recent New England blizzard.

And of course “webs” is another Ducktales thing.  Like, webbed feet.  As I believe I’ve noted previously, it just makes me think of spiders, but Chris was VERY much down with it.

I haven’t said much about the story itself, because—to reiterate—it’s pretty darn goofy.  But—to reiterate further—Chris sells it to the extent that it’s sellable.

That “rare phone book collection” looks to me like a Van-Horn-style thing, which I appreciate.  I think that Chris’s Van Horn enthusiasm helped ME to appreciate the man more, so that’s another plus.

Thing is, I kind of wish the story had doubled down on its “wish bones change the weather” premise.  Sure, it’s crazy, but at least crazy is interesting.  Whereas this whole “pulling the bone just happened to dovetail with natural, albeit bizarre, weather patterns…well, okay, when I say it like that, I guess I have to concede it’s crazy either way.  STILL, I don’t think we need something that even has the APPEARANCE of being a naturalistic explanation.

REALLY, though, there’s no point in getting all het up about it.  It’s a pretty trivial six-page story, and in that context it’s fine; nobody would think twice about it if Chris’s script didn’t make it better than it reasonably oughta be.