Thursday, May 12, 2016

"Want to Buy an Island?"

When I wrote about the story entitled "Why All the Crabby Ducks?" I completely forgot that we already had a much better-known story with a question for a title. From 1960, it's "Want to Buy an Island?!" A less-funny one, granted, but still! Do you want to buy an island? Do you want to build a snowman? Do you want to be a spaceman? These are all valid questions.


This opening seems perfectly unobjectionable, but it's actually quite fraught to a certain kind of continuity-obsessed person, since it claims that HDL are in kindergarten. Now granted, there's certainly evidence in support of this, like the occasional bits in old Barks stories where they throw tantrums:


...still, it has to be admitted that those do look kind of weird, at least to my sensibilities. You've gotta figure the Junior-Woodchucks-type HDL are more like precocious ten-year-olds. BUT NO! THEY'RE IN KINDERGARTEN! IT SEZ SO RIGHT THE HECK HERE! Actually, though--this is quite interesting--look what someone did when the story was reprinted:


Huh. Doubly interesting is the fact that that ain't Gladstone; it's Whitman. It is...kind of difficult to believe that anyone at Western--in its late, decadent days, especially--would have any concerns about continuity or general consistency--and yet, there you are. Still, the shaky attempt to imitate the original font certainly demonstrates a Whitmanian sort of incompetence.

I must ask, also: how come no girls in HDL's class?


Yeah, it is NEVER too early to indoctrinate kids into a capitalist Weltanschauung. Presumably, if no one had volunteered, the teacher would've ORDERED some hapless kid to sell some other hapless kid something, and so the cycle would continue. Whee!


Damn, Teach--sick burn. But how do you know he's never seen it? He seems pretty familiar with it, knowing exactly what it's called and where it is, and given that the seller is a duke--the highest rank short of king!--presumably he's not some suspicious complete unknown. LOUIE DID NOT EARN THE HALLOWED NAME OF FATWALLET BY MAKING BAD BUSINESS DECISIONS, DAMMIT!

(I feel the need to say this somewhere, so I'm saying it here: Ooooh, you gonna buy an isle tonight?/Ooooh, down beside that red firelight?/Ooooh, you gonna let it all hang out, fatwallet lords you make the rockin world go round)


YOU WILL BECOME BUSINESSMEN! DO NOT DENY YOUR DESTINY! GIVE IN TO THE DARK SIDE!

Gosh I'm cynical tonight! Seems like "caveat emptor" is an odd lesson to be drilling into five-year-olds' heads, but what do I know? I was not chosen as an educator by the Central Committee.


As you likely know, this story is actual a remake of Barks' 1947 story that we usually call "Donald Mines His Own Business" (according to inducks we also sometimes call it "Treasure Map Sap," but that's less charming and much dumber-sounding). In that story, the kids make a fake treasure map on a lark, and Donald finds it when they get sick of it; it takes the Ducks to the American Southwest instead of some far-flung island. Both stories are good. If I like the later one better, that may be at least in part because of nostalgia, having read it when small. But AT ANY RATE, the biggest difference between them--which really shows how Barks' concerns and his conception of the character had grown in the interim--is the depiction of Donald: in the earlier story, he was just going along, doing his thing, then OH BOY OH BOY A MAP TREASURE! There's none of the existential malaise that we see here. Not that the story develops this to any great extent--a tall order for ten pages--but I think it really does deepen and enrich the context for all this zaniness.


It's a rather poignant image, I think. A desire for transcendence that we can all relate to, maybe. Even if his plan is not terribly well-thought-out, the impulse behind it seems kinda noble.


Call me Lord Fathead if you will, but I kind of agree with Donald here. I would pay ten dollars for an island, sight unseen. I would even pay ten dollars adjusted for inflation ($80.45, according to the helpful US Inflation Calculator). The issue here is that the arguments here don't really match up with the original "don't buy an island without seeing it" principle. I'd pay ten dollars for an island--but only if I was sure that the island existed, and that the seller actually owned it. I would not buy it from some random sketchy dude who, contrary to all appearances, is allegedly some kind of nobility. So HDL are also right, sort of, but they're only right because the whole transaction was suspicious, not because of the principle they learned in school. Everyone is both right and wrong here.


OH WELL THEN IF YOU LEARNED IT IN KINDERGARTEN, LET US ALL BOW TO THE INFALLIBLE GREATNESS OF YOUR ERUDITION. LET'S ELECT A FIVE-YEAR-OLD PRESIDENT.

...I really am feeling punchy right now, it seems. For the curious, the Whitman reprint predictably changes "Kindergarten" to, simply, "school."


The stuff on the actual island is predictably less interesting, though it's kind of amusing to see Donald's imagination run wild. I must admit, his justification for leaving HDL in the dark--he's annoyed that they pooh-pooh'd his purchase--is much less colorful than it is in "Mines His Own Business:"


TEN THOUSAND!  That's...quite a pathology you've got there.


"He's a duck." Somehow that always makes me laugh.  Can you imagine the equivalent in a non-duck world?  "Did you see our uncle?  He's a human!"  Hard to imagine a less helpful description, though in the equivalent panel in the earlier story, they instead say "he's a little guy," which is probably equally useless, given that all adult ducks in the duckiverse are exactly the same size.


I don't know; this whole thing is vaguely ominous. This was, after all, the height of the Cold War; you can't see something like that and not suspect some kind of nuclear test.


...even if it does turn out to be more benign.


Say what you will, that's a pretty impressive SPLOOK. Some good artistic ambition, even in just some random, late-period ten-pager.


...but once again, this doesn't really work: there was no indication in the original lesson that the reason you shouldn't buy land from strangers sight unseen was that they might be frauds who didn't even own the land. "Be wary of island-owning tramps" seems like the real lesson--more to-the-point but much less widely-applicable. In "Mines His Own Business," Donald actually does find gold; of course, that doesn't have the whole "business tips" aspect that this does, but it definitely seems to be saying "following random treasure maps on wild goose chases is a great idea!" Kinda the opposite message from the one we get here.

Mind you, apart from mildly reflecting his generally skeptical nature, I don't think this story presents any deeply-held Barksian principle. It's just common practice to structure a story around a "lesson," and the content of said lesson is less important than its load-bearing capacity. In that sense, this one actually does work okay.

Labels:

64 Comments:

Blogger Pan Miluś said...

I would asume that in world of Ducks, Pigs and Dod-nose humans, being a Duck is more like ethnicity... which would be still wird to hear from three asian children "Have you seen our uncle? He's asian".

And let's not forget that Duck is also his last name. "Have you seen our Uncle? He's a Johnson".


Confusing in deed...

May 12, 2016 at 6:17 AM  
Blogger Pan Miluś said...

Dog-nose*

May 12, 2016 at 6:18 AM  
Anonymous Elaine said...

Note to colorist: shouldn't that be a *white* flag that Donald waves in surrender?

We won't ask where Donald gets the flag to wave. Perhaps, given his overall experience in mastering jobs and life in general, he's just gotten into the habit of carrying a white flag around? Though in truth, it's probably a handkerchief, which is still an argument for white over red.

May 12, 2016 at 9:41 AM  
Blogger Achille Talon said...

Or it's just toon physics: a toon who surrenders just has a white flag materializing in his defeated hand as he raises it. Though it would be pretty un-Barks-like.

About the Kindergarten… I have a theory that solves both the age problem, and the weird economical teaching. This would not be just about any kindergarten. It would be the "Billionaires' Club's Kindergarten", where billionaires like Scrooge can put their kids, and of course they'd teach economics there. Scrooge probably dragged Huey Dewey and Louie there even though they are much too old in an effort to teach them economics in a similar vein to how he tries to get Donald to become a businessman at the beginning of "Poor Old Man" and "Second-Richest Duck".

May 12, 2016 at 1:36 PM  
Blogger GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

While that WOULD explain the subject matter being taught, I can't quite buy it. Why does do these billionaires ONLY have a kindergarten? Why not a complete school system? And even if they do, are HDL *really* going to be okay with being dragged back--with having their education sabotaged like that? Is Donald? I think this is one case where he would definitely stick up against his uncle.

May 12, 2016 at 6:06 PM  
Anonymous Gyro's Helper said...

Note the calculus equations on the blackboard in the first panel. Clearly Duckburg kindergarten is not ordinary kindergarten.

May 12, 2016 at 9:52 PM  
Blogger GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

Yeah, right next to pictures helpfully labelled "a bird" and "a cat." It certainly seems there's SOMETHING suspicious about this class...

May 12, 2016 at 10:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Why have you said: "Weltanschaunung"? I mean, Kindergarten is a german and english word. Weltanschauung is world view on english!

May 13, 2016 at 7:53 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Two other interesting things in the opening panel: the order of the nephews (usually it is Huey, Dewey and Louie, but sometimes Barks changed it) and the fact that we are reminded their surname is Duck, something that happened before in previous stories but which I don't think is that common. Does anyone know which is the earliest source to give the boys the surname Duck? The earliest I know is Barks' 10-pager from WDC&S #49 (October 1944), the same 10-pager that introduced the name Duckburg.

I was surprised to read kindergarten, since I read that story in an Italian translation and it said school; I guess that translation was based on the Whitman edition. Myabe it's because people at Whitman decided it would be weird to have that integral calculus in kindergarten (not that it would be normal to have it in primary school, but it would be slightly less absurd). I wanted to be the first to make jokes on that calculus, but my &#*% pc stopped working for more than a day and half when I was writing an answer (that I lost) while there were still no comments to this article. :( Well, no big deal.

My two cents on HDL's age: to me it seems it increased with time by a few years before stopping. In the earliest Barks stories, like in the Taliaferro strips, they were drawn younger, while in later stories they look a bit older: this is coherent to the occasional references to their age, such as them partecipating to a contest for children under 6 in WDC&S #42 and then being in second grade in WDC&S #100. "Want to Buy an Island?" is the only exception I know of to this "rule" now that I know the original says kindergarten and not school; it doesn't bother me because I don't see Barks' stories as necessarily taking place in chronological order. Achille's idea is clever, but it sounds far-fetched to me. By the way, are there other stories beside WDC&S #100 that say which grade of school do they attend?

Joe, what do you mean with "Doubly interesting is the fact that that ain't Gladstone; it's Whitman"? Did Gladstone use to change Barks' stories when reprinting them?

Oh, and maybe Elaine will be happy to know that the in Italian version the colorist made Donald's flag a white flag, which makes sense. And as faithful as the Italian transaltion is, the "He's a duck" was left out for good, and the nephews only say "Hey! Did you see our uncle?"

May 13, 2016 at 2:18 PM  
Blogger Achille Talon said...

Anonymous -> Yes, Gladstone used to make edits on old Barks stories, often "just because", sometimes because of continuity issues.

As a counter-answer to defend my theory, I have an easy answer for the "Why does do these billionaires ONLY have a kindergarten?" part. Billionaires aren't going to get their hands dirty watching after toddlers, but they don't put their children in schools, they hire tutors. Obviously. (Also, my theory explains the calculus part: knowing numbers is elementary knowledge for businessmen)

May 13, 2016 at 3:05 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

@Achille
"Yes, Gladstone used to make edits on old Barks stories": thanks for the info. It would be intersting to have a list of those changes. I rarely read duck comics in English, so the only change I know of is in this scan of "The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone"

http://goo.gl/JYLTy3

from Uncle Scrooge #253 (April 1991), in which the year 1110 is referred as "881 years ago" instead of "845 years ago", as if the Gladstone editor wanted to retcon the story as happening in 1991. Not cool.

May 13, 2016 at 5:30 PM  
Blogger Debbie Anne said...

I think that the thinking at the time was that for a modern reprint in a mass-market newsstand publication versus a collector's album, it made sense to update years in the stories so that kids reading would assume it was a current story.

May 13, 2016 at 6:07 PM  
Blogger GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

No doubt, but to people familiar with the stories, it caused a certain amount of WTF?-type cognitive dissonance until you realized what was going on.

May 13, 2016 at 6:38 PM  
Blogger GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

Incidentally, my new policy is to not respond to people who refuse to choose a fake name. I can't tell you all apart! It's too confusing!

May 14, 2016 at 12:27 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

@Debbie
I know that is probably the reason, but in my opinion it is not a good idea to rewrite an old story to make it seem it is a new story, not to mention the big WTF effect GeoX mentioned. IDW has been guilty of that in the beginnining, but as far as I know they don't do that anymore.

Not that I want to turn this discussion into a debate of "duck universe chronology": I mentioned the change in "The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone" because it was the only exmple I knew of a change made by Gladstone.

@GeoX
Too bad there is this new policy, but hey, your blog your rules. Anyway, I guess you can call m Drakeborough, the name I chosed for the Wikia not long ago. I wrote all the anonyomous messages in this page except the one about Weltanschaunung.

May 14, 2016 at 5:34 PM  
Blogger Achille Talon said...

Drakeborough: "On Wikia"… What wikia? Because as far as I know, for some reason, there are no less than three Duck Comics wikis (and that's not even talking about the DuckTales wikis and the wikis in other languages), which are Duckburg Wiki (http://duckburg.wikia.com/wiki/Duckburg_Wiki), Scrooge McDuck Wiki (http://scrooge-mcduck.wikia.com/wiki/Scrooge_McDuck_Wikia), and Calisota Wikia (http://calisota.wikia.com/wiki/Calisota_Wiki). All about strictly the same thing. What the heck.

So which one are you from?

May 14, 2016 at 7:29 PM  
Anonymous Baar Baar Jinx said...

"And let's not forget that Duck is also his last name. "Have you seen our Uncle? He's a Johnson"."

So, in effect, it would be like the kids saying, "Hey, have you seen our uncle, Donald Asian? He's Asian!" Sounds very politically incorrect, especially coming from kindergartners ...

"from Uncle Scrooge #253 (April 1991), in which the year 1110 is referred as "881 years ago" instead of "845 years ago", as if the Gladstone editor wanted to retcon the story as happening in 1991. Not cool."

Not to nitpick, but that was Disney Comics, Inc., not Gladstone. But yeah, Gladstone did it too. I remember a backup Barks reprint where one of the nephews says, "We're lucky, lucky Ducks to be living in 1989."

May 14, 2016 at 7:40 PM  
Anonymous Elaine said...

On Whitman changing "kindergarten" to "school": I don't imagine their concern was continuity, so much as it was rudimentary customer relations. Readers identify with HDL. Readers are 8 to 12 years old. Readers do NOT want to be associated with kindergarten. Hence, HDL are not in kindergarten. QED.

Yes, Barks definitely aged the boys from the cartoon-derived tantrum-throwing brats to the smart upstanding JWs we know and love, who are clearly older kids. And he did that consciously aware that the kid readers would want to identify with kids who would outsmart the grownups. But I agree that there's no need to think that Barks wrote them as 5 years old in 1950 and 10 years old in 1960, or whatever. He may well have stuck them back in (calculus-teaching!) kindergarten in this story just because he thought it was funnier to have them roleplay moguls as kindergartners. And funnier to have them say to Donald, "That's not the way we heard it in kindergarten!"

May 14, 2016 at 11:25 PM  
Anonymous Baar Baar Jinx said...

The calculus on the blackboard is actually hilarious in context. Reminds me of an old PowerPuff Girls episode where the teacher of a kindergarten class is showing kids pictures of objects to name. "Apple! Pear! Cat! Dog! Internal Combustion Engine!" That made me laugh out loud.

Re: The boys' last name being Duck. I remember that being mentioned on an episode of DuckTales, and it somehow struck me as strange, even though it was perfectly appropriate. Not that I expected them to change it to McDuck or anything, but still. I mean, they're Donald's nephews, and I guess if "Duck" is a proper name and all that (that old debate again), then yes, their name could be Duck, but you would have to then assume that they're Donald's brother's kids then, rather than his sister's, in which case they would have taken their father's name, unless their father's name is also Duck, in which case we have a third family (after Donald's and Daisy's) named Duck (unless you subscribe to Rosa's theory that Daisy is HD&L's father's sister, in which case we're down to two), unless you subscribe to the decidedly unRosa-like theory, discussed at some length on the now-defunct Disney Comics Forum that Della was a single teenage mom (in which case we're back to two again)... it gets really complicated. Mickey's nephews have the last name "Fieldmouse", making it much easier. I guess DuckTales could have given HD&L a completely new last name and it wouldn't have been a huge issue; I'm glad they didn't since their last name "Duck" at least gels with Barks.

Also, did it ever strike anyone that one of the nephews has the exact same first and last name as Baby Huey?

May 15, 2016 at 6:58 AM  
Blogger GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

Well...I suppose it's at least conceivable that Della didn't take her husband's name and that they decided to give the children hers instead of his because they liked hers better and they didn't want to mess around with hyphenated names. Yeah, especially in the 1930s, it seems unlikely, but let's face it, there's no scenario here that DOESN'T seems unlikely.

May 15, 2016 at 10:24 AM  
Blogger Achille Talon said...

…or, like the German fans assume, Daisy is herself a distant cousin to Donald, so there's really just a single Duck family.

May 15, 2016 at 10:39 AM  
Blogger GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

Ooh! Or how 'bout this? What if their father's some kind of secret agent and it was felt that giving his children his own name would potentially compromise his security in the field?

May 15, 2016 at 10:45 AM  
Anonymous Review Or Die said...

http://www.cbarks.dk/thefamilytreesdonald.htm

So this was interesting to me, the two versions of the family tree created Barks that I see here don't actually show who HDL's dad is. It's my default site for when I need to look at Barks material, since it's almost always wonderfully comprehensive.

But I was googling to see if perhaps I could find a little more information on the subject and came across something just a little odd.

http://goofy313g.free.fr/calisota_online/trees/ducktrees/worden.html

This was published in The Carl Barks Library, at least it appears to be. An extrapolation of Barks' family tree (both it and this were later used on Rosa's family tree), it shows the pseudo-human "? Duck" as HDL's father, with a glyph to show that it was unclear how the two were related - whether it was marriage or something else.

But it's seems clear that Barks didn't have, not even for his own reference, information on the boys' dad. The first tree from the 1950s and the later 1990s version made for Rosa (presumably compiled for the use in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck) are conspicuous by ? Duck's absence. If he read the family tree published in the Library, he didn't use it as reference for the later attempt for Rosa's request.

I'm certainly not up on my Barksian lore, that's very much outside my purview (though I am getting the new Donald Duck volume next week!). But I thought it was curious that the more commonly accepted relationship, and even appearance, was added to what Barks originally used for his own reference material rather than taken from it. It's remarkable how often that happens in fandom.

Personally, as siblings who are freakishly identical even for triplets, I advocate that they were born via mitosis... or that Daffy Duck really is the father. Both work for me by virtue of being equally silly.

May 15, 2016 at 10:59 AM  
Anonymous Baar Baar Jinx said...

Well, as I may have tangentially alluded to earlier, there was a multi-page thread on the dearly-departed, much-lamented Disney Comics Forum that was kicked off by someone pointing out that Barks himself had, in some obscure interview somewhere, suggested that Della had the triplets when she "was very young"(teenage pregnancy implied) and gave them to Donald because she was "not a very good mother" (or something to that effect). The quote was on a scans-daily page. The DCF thread and the link therein, of course, is now lost forever (Again, I implore those with the power to make it happen, if the DCF discussions are truly not lost, please bring back the forum in an archived, searchable but non-modifiable format! There are too many good discussions there to simply allow to go quietly into the night!). Anyway, I can't be sure if Barks was being serious or had been asked about HD&L's dad one times too many, but the upshot of the resulting discussion was that, given all the character's ages, a teenage illegitimate pregnancy answered a lot of questions satisfactorily, from a logistical point of view. I still say it makes the most sense, realistically, but needless to say, not a Don Rosa-approved idea.

Funny how so many discussions dovetail into the question of HD&L's father. Should I even ask it being Daffy Duck explains the identicalness of the triplets?

May 15, 2016 at 11:16 AM  
Anonymous Review Or Die said...

I answer your question with this question: Do you really think Daffy Duck could ever have kids that didn't turn out to be some kind of punchline?

May 15, 2016 at 11:28 AM  
Blogger Pan Miluś said...

I always like theory that Daisy is HD&L father's sister. I would asume that their one more sibling (Aprils, May and Junes father/mothe/creator) is their triplet! It would make the triplet thing genetic and this way when Donald and Daisy finally get married (the only way you can have babies as far I know) they will have triplets as well! :)


May 15, 2016 at 12:32 PM  
Anonymous Drakeborough said...

@Achille
I subscribed to the Italian "PaperPedia Wiki" on March 26, though I was active long before that as an anonymous. I discovered that the same account can be used in other Wikias, and I also contributed to the French "Picsou Wiki". By the way, are you the user Scrooge MacDuck from Picsou Wiki?

@Baar Baar Jinx
Oops, you are right, Uncle Scrooge #253 was published by Disney Comics, not by Gladstone. Thanks for correcting my mistake.

"I remember a backup Barks reprint where one of the nephews says, "We're lucky, lucky Ducks to be living in 1989."": really? I didn't know about that, I only knew (from Alberto Bbecattini's article in the Italian version of the Carl Barks library and the two pictures) that in the first American reprint (Donald Duck #192, February 1978), the original line "We're lucky, lucky Ducks to be living in 1959!" was changed to "We're lucky, lucky Ducks to be living in this age!" The article doesn't mention further changes in later editions, but these article don't always say everything.

@Elaine
I think both your points are reasonable.

@Baar Baar Jinx (second message):
I don't have a problem with Della's husband having the same surname as her, it happens in real life too (I have an uncle who married a woman with the same surname, and my surname is not even as common as Duck is in the duckverse). Still, my point was not the question of why their surname is Duck; I was interested in the earliest mention of their surname. Until I am proven otherwise, I will mantain that the earliest mention is in WDC&S #49 (October 1944).

"Also, did it ever strike anyone that one of the nephews has the exact same first and last name as Baby Huey?": well, Huey's name comes from politician Huey Long (1893–1935). The first names of Donald's nephews first appeared in the Taliaferro Sunday page that introduced them, but it wasn't Taliaferro who came up with their names, it was Dana Coty, a gagman from the Disney animation department.

@Achille (second message)
"…or, like the German fans assume, Daisy is herself a distant cousin to Donald, so there's really just a single Duck family": I prefer not, it is disturbing for me to think of a boyfriend and girlfriend who are related to each other, and it is a needless complication.

@Review Or Die
Interesting enough, Don Rosa re-used this design of HDL father in an alternate version of his family tree. There is no bird covering his face, and no greenery to cover his name, which however is blank (linke the surnames HDL). In Don Rosa's conventions, fans can take an autographed family tree and have their full name added as the name of HDL's father, and HDL's surname becomes the same as the fan's surname:
https://coa.inducks.org/story.php?c=XNC+DRSV+4E
It's a shame that the DCF discussions are lost (too many interesting stuff was there), but the only think I remember Barks saying about her is that Diney obviously won't allow a story which makes her a pimp's wife who got pregnant working in brothels. He probably never talked about teen pregnancy, and I prefer to think she had HDL when she was about 20 as per Rosa's chronology.

Anyway, does anyone know about Della's only (unofficial) animated appearance, voiced by Mila Kunis?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySVOnm84Cto

@GeoX
"Well...I suppose it's at least conceivable that Della didn't take her husband's name": I prefer to think Della's husband has the surname Duck, since it's the only thing we learn about him (no face, no first name) in the family tree.

@Pan
The mother of April, May and June is Daisy's sister, this is canon from Barks' flipism story that introduces Daisy's nieces. On the other hand, I don't know if their surname has ever been revealed.

May 15, 2016 at 3:26 PM  
Anonymous Elaine said...

@Pan--if we want to maintain some veneer of scientific accuracy, though, I am constrained to point out that (human) identical multiple births do not run in families. Fraternal twins/triplets do run in families; it's the likelihood of multiple *conceptions* occurring at once which is genetically based. Identical twins/triplets are just one of those glorious random things.

This also means, incidentally, that while fertility treatments have made fraternal twins markedly more common, identical twins are as rare as ever.

You could, of course, come up with some alternative biology that governs humans who look like ducks, where identical multiple births *do* run in families. Which reminds me: I've often wondered how those who think that Donald comes from an egg (I'm talking to you, Marco!) explain the existence of Huey, Dewey and Louie. Aren't identical twins/triplets a phenomenon of live births?

May 15, 2016 at 7:32 PM  
Anonymous Elaine said...

@Review Or Die: “freakishly identical”? From familial experience, I’m here to say that it’s quite common for identical (monozygotic) twin children to be indistinguishable to all but those who (1) know them very well and (2) take the time to look carefully before just calling out a name at random. Once they reach adulthood, they usually develop more distinct appearances and characteristics, unless they intentionally cultivate sameness.

What’s perhaps “freakishly” uncommon is identical (monozygotic) triplets. They do occur, but they’re very rare indeed. Which is why I personally would prefer AMJ to be fraternal triplets---I like to think of the Dutch individuated AMJ as such. The existence of two sets of identical triplets in one town (especially given that the genetic explanation Pan proposes will not fly) is pretty over-the-top. When Barks introduced AMJ as a one-time joke, their identicalness was fine, but once they became recurrent characters, I think they just take away from the unique status of HDL.

By the way, has any writer ever portrayed any character other than Donald and the boys themselves as able to tell them apart? A playmate, like Garvey Gull or one of the Duckies cast? Daisy? Scrooge? I assume if Barks had ever shown Scrooge as able to tell the triplets apart, Rosa would have taken note of that and not ascribed the ability solely to Donald.

May 15, 2016 at 8:05 PM  
Blogger GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

@Drakeborough Dunno why your comment didn't appear. It's here in my email, though, so I'll post it for you. Just a sec...

May 15, 2016 at 11:50 PM  
Blogger GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

RIGHT, okay, your comment was marked as spam for some reason, and then my effort to repost it was ALSO marked as spam. Sheesh. Your original comment is now in the right place, just after Pan Miluś'.

May 16, 2016 at 12:15 AM  
Anonymous Drakeborough said...

@GeoX
Thanks for publishing my comment, I was sure I saw a note in this page before closing it saying my comment had been published and I would have thought I was becoming crazy if this hasn't been confirmed. I don't know why it was marketed as spam, maybe it is because it has a Youtube link?

I see, though, a couple of things I should have proofread, like "these article" which should be "these articles", and an unclear "and the two pictures" which I would have continued by clarifying I am talking about the two pictures in this article
https://coa.inducks.org/story.php?c=Qit%2FDPCS+18E
comparing the same panel in the first two American edition of the story.

@Elaine
I totally agree with your idea of Donald NOT hatching from an egg. And even though I am not much of an expert in twins/triplets, I think the following quote can be of interest for this discussion.

In 2010 someone in the Papersera forum asked Don Rosa "why did you make Della Donald's twin sister and not his elder sister?" and Don's answer was

"Or why not his younger sister?

I guess I wanted to make the two siblings as equal as possible since he would someday be raising her children as his own. And if it's true that multiple births run in a family, that was another reason.

Good question. But I recall that it seemed obvious to me that $crooge's sisters (also created by Barks) should definitely NOT be twins or triplets with him to make him more of the totally and supremely unique individual I see him to be. And it seemed likewise obvious that Donald and his sister should be twins to make him more of the Everyman character that he is, as well as those other reasons above."

On the other hand, I never read a Dutch story with AMJ being different, but I don't like this idea at all. I mean, there are plenty of stories both by Barks and by other authors when I saw them being identical in appearance and personality (indeed, their point is that they mirror HDL) so it just feels wrong to me to differentiate them, just like it felt wrong that DuckTales differentiated the Beagle Boys, something I hope the new series won't repeat. Plus, if AMJ are fraternal triplets, then there must be a big age difference between the oldest and the youngest.

May 16, 2016 at 3:34 AM  
Blogger Pan Miluś said...

@Elaine "Once they reach adulthood, they usually develop more distinct appearances and characteristics."

Yhe! We all seen "Quack Pack"! ;)


There was series of stories (Dutch I think) where AMJ where given diffrent apperances (one had ponytail etc. It actually made me think of "Popwerpuff girls") and from what I recall characteristics as well (like I think one was more into sports etc.) I kind of like that, since for me these character never develope over the "they are girls who like cute girly things" so at least these was way to do something fresh with them.


On one hand making them related to Duck family would explain a lot (like why they are often seen with the family during Christmas or spend time on Grandmas Duck farm etc.) but on other hand we get all these stories where they are romanticly involve with HD&L...
THAN AGIAN - Dickie Duck was always refrence as HD&L cousin (at least in stories that where printed in Poland) YET few days ago I read a recent story where as a joke HD&L where shown to have a crush on Dickie...

Note that In some stories Gyro is being refered as "member of the family" despite the fact not being related to the rest of the Ducks in any shape of form so I guess after all the adventures they had together they made him "honorary member".

Family ties in Duck Family is a tricky form.

May 16, 2016 at 3:39 AM  
Blogger Achille Talon said...

@Drakeborough: Yes, I'm also Picsou Wiki, Wiki Universduck, Scrooge McDuck Wikia and Haunted Mansion Wiki's Scrooge MacDuck.

@Pan Milus: The series in question is called "Duckies"…

And for the "related yet romantically involved" problem, I remind you that marriage between cousins is allowed in most countries and was even a very normal thing in the 19th century. It has no reason to make people uncomfortable.

As for Gyro, I'm almost sure Don Rosa made a nod to his connection to the Ducks when he created Gretchen Grebe on his Duck Family Tree. I mean, remove the eyelashes and give her glasses, and she's Gyro. Numerous fans, including me, and Gilles Maurice in his Duck Family Tree (http://goofy313g.free.fr/calisota_online/trees/ducktrees/myducktree.pdf), have theorized that Gyro Gearloose is a distant relative of the Ducks through Gretchen.

May 16, 2016 at 5:04 AM  
Anonymous Drakeborough said...

@Pan
"Yhe! We all seen "Quack Pack"! ;)": oh, in my previous message I only mentioned the DuckTales Beagle Boys and I forgot to say how much I disliked HDL in Quack Pack... I wonder what the show's creatore were thinking... luckily in later animated products they were portrayed again as identical and younger.

Do the Dutch still show AMJ as being different, or was it only done in the past? Anyway, it's interesting to notice that even though Barks created them, he didn't name them, as they are not named in the flipism story. Their names were probably decided by an editor, since a few years later several writers first used their names in a group of stories produced in a relatively short amount of time. However, I still don't know of a story that reveals their surnames.

I think Dickie (a character I don't like, but that's beside my point) calling HDL "little cousins" is not meant to be taken literaly. By the way (hoping a Youtube link won't mark my comment as spam again), this is Dickie's only animated appearance, and we also see other characters from Disney comics who never appear in animation or that officially didn't make their debut until later:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSDD-mlxDFU

"Note that In some stories Gyro is being refered as "member of the family"": really? I don't know of such a story, can you give me a few titles? In all stories I read Gyro is clearly unrelated to Donald & co.

"Family ties in Duck Family is a tricky form": this may have been true some 25 years ago, but I think now they are more precise and less confusing.

May 16, 2016 at 5:16 AM  
Anonymous Review Or Die said...

@Elaine - I was really referring to their uncanny ability to finish one anothers' sentences split between the three of them as though they shared the same thoughts. That part's a little odd to me if I was to look at it from a non-comic perspective.

May 16, 2016 at 7:44 AM  
Blogger Achille Talon said...

About Gyro's being a member of the family, he is in the family reuninon in this story: https://coa.inducks.org/story.php?c=W+DG+++38-01. And it's just an example.

But won't someone answer to me about the point that I brought up about how cousins can lawfully marry?

May 16, 2016 at 7:45 AM  
Anonymous Drakeborough said...

@@Review Or Die
I like the old running gag where HDL either finish each other's sentence or speak the same line together, too bad in later sories it was't used very often, though I see why would the authors figure it was impractical for more comlex stories.

@Achille
Thanks for the link. It seems that looking at lesser known old stories you can find many weirdnesses.

I don't know how cousins can lawfully marry, in my country they can't (of course). One more reason to dislike this strange idea of Donald and Daisy as cousins.

May 16, 2016 at 8:21 AM  
Blogger Achille Talon said...

According to Wikipedia, marriage between cousins is legal in basically all of Europe; the U.K. are having a big debate about that these years; and the U.S. have no global law against it but almost all the states have banned it. Most countries banning it do it because of the risks of genetic problems; so my theory on the matter has always been that those genetic problems don't exist for anthropomorphic ducks, and that thus it is not restricted for them in the Disney universe.

May 16, 2016 at 8:51 AM  
Anonymous Drakeborough said...

"marriage between cousins is legal in basically all of Europe": this is news to me. I may do some research about it, or maybe not, as I really don't care about this issue. Though for what is worth, I haven't ever met a couple made of cousins.

Incidently, I had never even heard of this "Donald and Dasy as cousins" idea until recently, when in an Italian tv quiz show a guy was asked to name Donald's cousins: he aso listed Daisy, and he was corrected with a "Daisy is not Donald's cousin". Of course this is just trivia, and doesn't mean anything as these programs have often shown to be inaccurate in these things. But anyway, for my headcanon I will mantain that Donald nd Daisy are not related at all.

May 16, 2016 at 8:58 AM  
Anonymous Elaine said...

Yes, when I said "the Dutch individuated AMJ" I meant the AMJ from the Duckies series (mostly one-pagers). If you want to be twinning-technical, they could be monozygotic triplets who just choose to individuate in some ways, wearing their hair differently and picking different interests...though that would be relatively rare for monozygotic multiples in childhood. Or they could be fraternal (more than one zygote) triplets. Drakeborough, I don't know what you mean by talking about an age difference; triplets of whatever sort would be born within a day or so. But I'm not surprised that you dislike the idea of AMJ being individuated, since you defend original versions and set tradition, a perfectly honorable approach, which I share to a lesser degree.

Yes, as identical triplets they mirror HDL. Personally, I'd prefer that they get the chance to be something other than pastel reflections of more dynamic boys--distinguished, as Pan points out, mostly by being "girly." But I do enjoy greatly a couple of stories which feature the identical AMJ, where they are shown as smart, active and adventurous. Though I must say, I find it hard to stomach the German coloring, where all three of them are identically in pink!

Thank you for quoting that post from Rosa on Papersera, very interesting! As you'd expect, I think his (tentative) comment about multiple births running in families is ill-informed, since identical multiple births do not indicate any familial pattern. But the other reasons he gives for making Donald and Della twins are quite interesting.

@Review Or Die--ah, I see what you meant. I'm just as glad that Barks dropped the practice of splitting a sentence among the three.

May 16, 2016 at 10:54 AM  
Anonymous Drakeborough said...

@Elaine
"Yes, when I said "the Dutch individuated AMJ" I meant the AMJ from the Duckies series (mostly one-pagers)": so it is not a recurring thing but just something that was limited to that series? Seems good to me.

"Drakeborough, I don't know what you mean by talking about an age difference; triplets of whatever sort would be born within a day or so": I meant that if AMJ are not portrayed as triplets then there is a relatively big difference between the oldest and the youngest sibiling. But of course if they are portrayed as triplet who just are not identical, then you can pretend I didn't say anything.

"But I'm not surprised that you dislike the idea of AMJ being individuated, since you defend original versions and set tradition, a perfectly honorable approach": thanks for undestanding how I feel about this issue. :) AMJ appear in more Dutch stories than in stories from all other counties combined, but if only a minority of Dutch stories differentiate them then the idea of them being different is a fringe view among authors. In my mind I will stick with them being identical, as per Barks, Rosa and plenty of other authors I read, who all showed them to be identical. Well, each readr can choose what to like best.

Does this cheapen HDL? Not for me, at east not more than Flinhteart's existance cheapens Scrooge.

"But the other reasons he gives for making Donald and Della twins are quite interesting": I agree, from a narrative point of view it feels a good idea to make them twins. And since people often talk about the 2014 Dutch story with Della, I think I should link this:

http://www.forumchaves.com.br/viewtopic.php?p=781643#p781643

The story is not complete, but is probably more complete than any other scan of the story on the web; the scans are followed by a comment of mine.

"I'm just as glad that Barks dropped the practice of splitting a sentence among the three": so I guess I am the only one who liked that. :( Tough I think that gimmick predates Barks and was already present in the newspaper comics.

May 16, 2016 at 11:50 AM  
Blogger Achille Talon said...

Brhm. People, I hate to break your fun and all, but we're way off-topic. That's not a bad thing in itself, but if we're going to talk of generalities, could we do it on the "Feathery Society" forum ? Poor thing isn't going to develop much if we keep using up all the subjects of discussion here

Oh, but you are not alone Drakeborough. I like that gimmick, and I keep using when I write a Duck fanfic.

May 16, 2016 at 12:21 PM  
Anonymous Drakeborough said...

@Achille
"Brhm. People, I hate to break your fun and all, but we're way off-topic": well, last time we had a discussion with many off-topic we beated the record (for this blog) of most comments in a single discussion. Not that I want to take all merit for that, but still... Anyway, I will wait and see what GeoX thinks.

"That's not a bad thing in itself, but if we're going to talk of generalities, could we do it on the "Feathery Society" forum": I tried to subscribe last January, but somehow it didn't work due to some technical problem. Maybe I will try again.

"Oh, but you are not alone Drakeborough. I like that gimmick, and I keep using when I write a Duck fanfic": I am pleased to read that.

May 16, 2016 at 12:46 PM  
Blogger Pan Miluś said...

Boy, I haven't seen this many comments here since the Great "A little somethig special" Discusion of 2016! Those where some crazy Times I tell you what...


As for Gyro being part of the Duck Family... I can't find the stories at the second since I would have to did my entire collection but yes, In fact there where few stories where Gyro is mention by somebody as a family member... which in most cases felt more like lazyness of the writer. In one for example Donald talk how he is the only family member without any specal talent - "VonDrake is smart, Gladstone Lucky, Grandpa is a great cook" etc. and Gyro is mentioned. It could be fixed just by addig "Even people from out-side my family have special gifts" but nope, he was thrown in like Gyro is his cousin or something...

May 16, 2016 at 2:35 PM  
Anonymous Drakeborough said...

"Boy, I haven't seen this many comments here since the Great "A little somethig special" Discusion of 2016! Those where some crazy Times I tell you what...": maybe we could beat the record of 103 comments we wrote in that discussion?

"there where few stories where Gyro is mention by somebody as a family member... which in most cases felt more like lazyness of the writer": I totally agree with that.

"In one for example Donald talk how he is the only family member without any specal talent - "VonDrake is smart, Gladstone Lucky, Grandpa is a great cook" etc": Grandpa? Is it a typo for Grandma, or does that story actually mention Grandpa Duck?

May 16, 2016 at 2:57 PM  
Blogger Pan Miluś said...

Typo, typo... ;) By bad.

May 16, 2016 at 3:32 PM  
Blogger GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

@Achille Talon

Brhm. People, I hate to break your fun and all, but we're way off-topic. That's not a bad thing in itself, but if we're going to talk of generalities, could we do it on the "Feathery Society" forum ? Poor thing isn't going to develop much if we keep using up all the subjects of discussion here…

I do see your point, but I can't help but be kinda delighted when conversations here take wild twists and turns.

May 16, 2016 at 4:44 PM  
Anonymous Baar Baar Jinx said...

Honestly, to my mind, HD&L are, and have always been meant to be, one character. Their finishing each other's sentences is a hilarious illustration of that fact. That's why it always cracks me up when people say things, without a trace of irony, like "Huey is my favorite". I mean, is anyone ever going to say, "176-671 is my favorite Beagle Boy?"

@Drakeborough " I only knew (from Alberto Bbecattini's article in the Italian version of the Carl Barks library and the two pictures) that in the first American reprint (Donald Duck #192, February 1978), the original line "We're lucky, lucky Ducks to be living in 1959!" was changed to "We're lucky, lucky Ducks to be living in this age!""

Try the reprint of the story, "The Floating Island" in Uncle Scrooge #239. I don't have the issue available for immediate verification, but I'm pretty sure that's where the change to 1989 was made.

Re: Donald and Della, while I personally am not wedded to the idea of their being twins, there was a thread on the DCF that pointed out that Hortense and Quackmore had their children fairly late in life (mid-to-late forties?) despite talking about kids before they were even married. The suggestion was that there was perhaps a need for fertility treatments, and that was presented a possible justification for Donald and Della being twins.

May 16, 2016 at 6:35 PM  
Anonymous Drakeborough said...

@"Baar Baar Jinx"
"Honestly, to my mind, HD&L are, and have always been meant to be, one character. Their finishing each other's sentences is a hilarious illustration of that fact. That's why it always cracks me up when people say things, without a trace of irony, like "Huey is my favorite". I mean, is anyone ever going to say, "176-671 is my favorite Beagle Boy?"": I can't say how much I agree with all this. That's why, among other things, I like the jokes in stories like "Return to Plain Awful" and "An Eye for Detail" where HDL are surprised (and annoyed) when they are told they are identical. I also like the scene in "The Incredible Shrinking Tightwad" where the Beagle Boys make fun of HDL being identical, without realizing they are identical themselves. Though in the case of the Beagle Boys there is one exception, and that is 176-167 liking prunes very much, as mentioned in two Barks stories (a rare case of Barks using continuity) and in plenty of Rosa stories.

"Try the reprint of the story, "The Floating Island" in Uncle Scrooge #239. I don't have the issue available for immediate verification, but I'm pretty sure that's where the change to 1989 was made": I also don't have that issue, but I see no reason to doubt your word.

"Donald and Della, while I personally am not wedded to the idea of their being twins, there was a thread on the DCF that pointed out that Hortense and Quackmore had their children fairly late in life (mid-to-late forties?) despite talking about kids before they were even married": if we use Don Rosa's timeline, Quackmore was born in 1875, Hortense was born in 1876 and Donald and Della were born circa 1920, when their parents were about 45 and 44.

"The suggestion was that there was perhaps a need for fertility treatments, and that was presented a possible justification for Donald and Della being twins": I don't think we ever got an official explanation for why Q&H had children so late in their life, though in some "deleted scenes" of Life of Scrooge part 11 we see that Q&H wanted to wait until Scrooge's return before getting married, though they gave up 1920 and got married even though Scrooge hadn't returned yet. Here is the 20th and last (publicly known) deleted scene of chapter 11:

http://www.duckhunt.de/Scripts/LoS_11_20.gif

I guess Don Rosa was imlying Q&H didn't want to have children before getting married.

May 17, 2016 at 10:13 AM  
Blogger TheKKM said...

@GeoX: "Ooh! Or how 'bout this? What if their father's some kind of secret agent and it was felt that giving his children his own name would potentially compromise his security in the field?"

I approve of this radical new theory that 60's S-Coded story star 0.0. Duck is, in fact, HDL's father but has left his family behind for a lifetime of adventure together with Mata Harrier.

May 17, 2016 at 12:04 PM  
Blogger Achille Talon said...

"Though in the case of the Beagle Boys there is one exception, and that is 176-167 liking prunes very much, as mentioned in two Barks stories": Make it three. (Well, if you count "Horsing around with History", but I think you can).

"I guess Don Rosa was imlying Q&H didn't want to have children before getting married." You bet. Extramarital sex would never have flied past Disney censors.

@TheKKM: Errrrrrr… your addition to GeoX's "theory" is kind of inconsistent, because if 00 Duck really was the father, then he would have given his own family name to Huey Dewey and Louie. Which basically leaves us where we started.

May 17, 2016 at 12:12 PM  
Blogger TheKKM said...

0.0.Duck isn't likely to be his own name, though, so for all we know he was named Roger Moore

May 17, 2016 at 12:19 PM  
Anonymous Drakeborough said...

@Achille
"Make it three. (Well, if you count "Horsing around with History", but I think you can)": oh, I forgot about that. Though if I remember correctly, in that story a nephew say the Beagle Boys loves prunes instead of saying one of the Beagle Boys loves prunes. So, Barks obviously meant this to be a continuity reference (the mention of prunes can't be a coincidence) but I guess he misremembered the original gag and it ended up being a reference which slightly changes the original idea (not a big deal, though). Still, this story had to be mentioned for completeness' sake, so thanks for reminding me of it.

"You bet. Extramarital sex would never have flied past Disney censors": actually, it depends of whether it is explicit or not. If it is explicit, it won't fly past the censors. If it is not explicit, then it can fly past the censors. For example, if (for some reason) Don Rosa wanted Quackmore and Hortense to have children before getting married, he could have done that by simply avoid mentioning when they got married. There is Cornelius Coot who according to interviews probably had Clinton with an Indian squaw with whom he wasn't married (she's not even in the family tree), and there was no problem at all since the idea doesn't appear on paper. There is Blackheart Beagle who probably was under 18 when he had his sons. And then, there is "The Prisoner of White Agony Creek"...

All of this boring writing is just to clarify that my point in saying "I guess Don Rosa was imlying Q&H didn't want to have children before getting married" was not the one you probably got (unless I'm mistaken), it was quite the opposite. My point is that Don Rosa thought he needed an in-universe reason to explain the age difference between Donald and his parents, so he used Scrooge's world travels to say that Q&H they didn't want to get married before Scrooge returned (and imply they didn't want to have kids before getting married) and since Scrooge make them wait for many years this explains the age difference between Donald and his parents. This is at least the explanation that Don wanted to use, though it never made past the first storyboard.

May 17, 2016 at 1:37 PM  
Blogger Pan Miluś said...

"Though in the case of the Beagle Boys there is one exception, and that is 176-167 liking prunes very much, as mentioned in two Barks stories"

This reminds me... GeoX, can you be a cool-swinging cat and review "Mysterious Stone Ray"? Huh? HUH? :D

May 17, 2016 at 3:04 PM  
Anonymous Drakeborough said...

About the prsonality of Huey, Dewey and Louie: the current version of the Wikipedia article "List of DuckTales characters" claims the following

"Huey Duck serves as the general leader of the trio and is very skilled at playing marbles.
Dewey Duck is arguably the most clever of the three and sometimes fills in the role of leader over Huey.
Louie Duck is probably the most creative thinker of the bunch and more laid-back than his brothers."

It's been ages since I watched DuckTales, so I have a question for those who are familiar with the show: does DuckTales really portray HDL as having different personalities? Or does it portray them as having the same personality (like in the comics) and the supposed differences are a case of some fan trying to see what is not there?

May 18, 2016 at 10:12 AM  
Blogger GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

I think it's the second one. Those alleged distinctions between the three of them are basically nonsense. Maybe you can find an instance or two where one or the other of them seems accurate, but that's just random statistical noise. You can't use it to generalize about them.

May 18, 2016 at 12:28 PM  
Anonymous Drakeborough said...

That's what I suspected. Thanks for the answer.

May 18, 2016 at 12:37 PM  
Blogger Pan Miluś said...

Honestly the only two exmaples in "Duck Tales" I recall of one of the boys showing any unique trades :

- One episode had one (I think it was Louie, the green one) be the master in playing marbles.

- One episode center on Louie be upset that people confuse him with his brother and he try to act and dress more oryginal and be unique...


...and that's it. The description you quoted appears to be madeup by a fan who was desperete to give them characterics. Honestly you can give any of these desription to any of the boys and it would work.

May 18, 2016 at 2:31 PM  
Anonymous Review Or Die said...

I could have sworn in the unappreciated masterpiece, something that truly understood the characters as they were originally intended, Quack Pack, that the triplets were more individualized.

Quack Pack is truly the Empire Strikes Back of Disney Ducks as a whole. A masterclass, if you think about it, in all aspects of writing and animation. Truly, it is impossible to find flaws in it. Any such flaw is in reality a deliberate design choice to make a greater virtue, one that we mortals are not meant to know and understand.

It is the closest man has ever truly come to painting the face of God.

May 18, 2016 at 3:28 PM  
Blogger GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

That's a really good point.

May 18, 2016 at 9:34 PM  
Blogger Monkey_Feyerabend said...

Thanks for this review. I have just read it. It is quite insightful (probably more than GeoX intended it to be!).

I am very disappointed with the French translation that I read: they turned the very funny line "Have you seen our uncle? He's a duck" with an unfunny "Have you seen our uncle? He's a little fellow". Bah...

Thanks to the guy that posted that Della "bitch" Duck video from youtube. I assume that explanation of the disappearing of Della from now on. It is the more simple and reasonable. Pure Occam's razor!

On the story in itself, let me copy&paste my comment from the inducks. Not because it adds something to what GeoX's review and the other comments already said. Just because I feel it will be read more here than there...and damn, it took me some time to write it! Here it goes:

[Remake of "Donald Mines His Own Business" (Barks '47, code W WDC 81-02). It is interesting to compare the two stories and realize how the Barks's characters and humor have been changing. This version of the plot is less funny in my opinion, because the final bombing has less comic thrill and a more relaxed rhythm. But this version is bit better from the psychological and human perspective. Take Donald, for instance: in "Donald Mines His Own Business" he is pushed to believe in the fake map by his genuinely propositive attitude toward life. In " Want To Buy An Island?" he looks depressed, bored with life, and that feeling pushes him towards the (comic) tragedy. And he attacks the military guy because he keeps being lost in his fantasy, whereas in the '47 version he did it just for blind avidity. Another new feature of this '60 version is the clear duality between the nephews - who start with a childish behavior in the first page but then clearly show to know how to manage with reality - and the adult Donald - who starts displaying a typical adult sadness and then get stuck in his fantasy.]

July 18, 2016 at 5:43 AM  
Blogger GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. said...

Oh ho! So that was YOU! I read that comment before I wrote this. Inducks really ought to have attributions, like with amazon reviews. Insightful stuff.

July 18, 2016 at 10:26 AM  
Blogger Monkey_Feyerabend said...

Pleased to help!

July 18, 2016 at 11:55 AM  

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home