"The Think Box Bollix"

Hi, we're going to look at a Barks story today! It's been a long time! But I was randomly rereading some Barks ten-pagers, and as often happens, I was struck by some things that I kind of wanted to say on the internet! So, here they are. This is 1952's retroactively-named "Think Box Bollix."

Behold, the second-ever appearance of Gyro Gearloose, looking a bit different from the Gyro we know'n'love. It's interesting that his first appearance a month before, in "Gladstone's Terrible Secret," was a completely incidental thing; he was just there so Gladstone's luck could pay off. More incidental than Scrooge in "Christmas on Bear Mountain," easily. From such humble beginnings sprout great legends! You will note, however, that his character here is rather different from the way he'd be portrayed later. The think boxes are a characteristically Gearloosian thing, but this whole thing with a car running on firecrackers is not: it's just an actual thing that you could kind of imagine actually working, albeit wildly impractically. It's not magic, like most of his later inventions.

Also interesting is Donald's reaction to this whole fooferaw. In later stories, characters would be more or less universally accepting of Gyro's wizardly ways, but in this instance, Donald is full of skepticism--as, all else being equal, you'd expect him to be. Still, the level of anger he's able to work up seems excessive.

I look at that top left panel, and I like to imagine that the topic of Gryo's inventor bona fides was dropped after the exchange in the woods, and that it's just now restarting with Donald just abruptly materializing in the room and shouting this stuff at HDL out of nowhere. This is amusing to me. His concern with bourgeois respectablity does seem a little contrived--I wouldn't call that a major thread of his character, though you can certainly cite the odd instance of it. If people would really tease HDL for the rest of their lives, it seems more an indictment of the unbelievably, stultifyingly boring Duckburg lifestyle than it does anything else. And anyway, it's not like they've issued a press release about the experiment or anything--how's the rest of Duckburg supposed to even find out about it?

That "harmless" there is kind of odd--if you think he's so harmless, why are you so het up about this? It's not clear to me about whether it "should" be there or not. On the one hand, it is interestingly psychologically telling; on the other, it just doesn't seem like someone worrying about what Donald's worrying about would include it. Was Barks actually thinking about these things? Not clear to me.

Donald's plan here doesn't bear much thinking about. So...the idea is that he'll pretend to be a wolf so HDL think the machine's worked; then he'll reveal that he's not and it hasn't. But, I mean, what does that have to do with anything? If it works, it works; if it doesn't, it doesn't. It's unclear to me why the presence of a guy in a wolf suit would increase the shame factor. Also, if the essential problem is that by participating in this experiment at all HDL will be coating themselves in eternal shame, then I don't see how this scheme is supposed to help even if it would. I guess it's just that they'll abandon Gyro and thereby not have to feel any additional shame? Also, why won't I shut up about this nonsense? These are important questions.

This is a funny bit that's easy to just pass over. Another artist might've just depicted this costume-buying thing as a totally standard, utilitarian thing, but with Barks it's specifically a pint-size duck pounding on the door of a costume shop at night and making insane demands of the half-asleep owner. Fun stuff.

And then we come to this, one of the most genuinely startling moments in Barks. I find myself a bit taken aback every time I read it. The fact that the guy is initially set up as a good guy, like the hunter in Little Red Riding Hood, makes it all the more discombobulating when he reveals himself. You suddenly can't trust anything. A wolf is a duck and a dog is a wolf.

Where did the wolf get the dog costume? Difficult to say. But speaking of, there's also a bit of confusion with this "I'm not a dog! I'm a wolf!" business. One's initial impulse is to think of the guy as, well, a human, dog nose notwithstanding, and you think he's making some kind of subtle semantic point; then you realize that, apparently, dogfaces just think of themselves as "dogs" in the duckiverse.

I always wonder about this rabbit--what happens to him? He and his wife(?) are clearly completely alienated from their fellow rabbits now, what with having learned to think, and unlike the wolf they're never reverted--so what's their life going to be like now?

(The nephews are lookin' a bit glassy-eyed there in the upper right, aren't they?)

Well, apparently, the answer is "not so great." A dime for a bunch of carrots? Rabbits don't need money for food! But now their heads are all scrambled up and they're reduced to begging for money because they think they have to participate in the human economy. It's like in Watership Down where the rabbits reach Cowslip's warren where everyone is content because they have good food provided by humans and they even understand the concept of representational art but the price of this is that a few of them are regularly killed, and if this sentence makes no sense to you, goddamn, you need to read Watership Down.

I know there are potential ethical pitfalls here, but it seems like the best thing to do would be to have Gyro reverse their situation. Seems like no one's very interested in the think boxes anymore, though. Admittedly, they don't really seem to have much use other than messing up animals' lives (could the newly-thinking animals provide information about their species that would be of interest to biologists, or have they entirely lost their original instincts? Not enough to go on here to say), but still, they're an impressive achievement.