Donald Duck Fun Annual 1981

Okay!  Something slightly different today, but hopefully as interesting to you as it was to me.  So there's this British book:

I ordered it some years ago from amazon or ebay or something, without having any idea what it was, and then just put it aside when it seemed to be a kind of boring children's book of minimal interest.  But on picking it up lately, I realized that, while it certainly has its boring aspects, it's of more interest than I had thought.

It's indexed on inducks, but only partially.  It contains a handful of short Western stories (with new, more hideous coloring), but that is only sixteen pages worth, and it's listed as being forty-eight pages--which is only true if you include the covers and all the front and back matter, but even so: there's obviously a lot missing from that entry.  And what's missing is all the stuff that makes it worth looking at.  We have a few pages of children's-placemat-style "games," but mainly what we have is text stories--and unlike the comics, these are very obviously locally produced; they're filled with Britishisms, and they're written in that condescendingly twee tone you associate with a lot of British children's literature.  And...look, I'm not trying to keep this secret!  I scanned the whole dern thing, and you can download it here!  But I think it will be edifying to go through some of this material, for reasons that will hopefully become apparent.

...but actually, before we do that, let's look at that cover again:

It seems like a normal kind of thing, but the more you look at it, the more it looks like one of those "find nine things wrong with this picture" jobs.  Roughly from left to right: Clarabelle seems to have only one leg; Pluto's back half appears to be missing; one of the planks in the plane hasn't been colored in; there is no way that Scrooge could fit in there at that angle; Daisy's right leg is at a really fucked-up angle; and Donald appears to be groping her.  Yeesh.  I am not here, mostly, to make fun of the art in this book, but this is not a great job.

What's most interesting about this book on a macro level is how completely out-of-time it feels.  It features Scrooge and Gladstone, so you know it's in some sense post-Barksian, but it does NOT feel that way.  In the early days of this blog, I wrote about an old British Mickey Mouse annual from 1940, and this does not feel substantially different than that.  There is little to no grasp of any of the characters, for one.  We know of course that Disney comics have never really taken hold in the UK, but I am just SO curious about the circumstances here, because notwithstanding the presence of these two (2) characters, it certainly feels as though the writers of these stories are totally unaware of the last forty-odd years of Disney comics.  Like someone told them hey, there's this Gladstone guy, you should include him.  He's super-lucky; that's his trait.  Work with that.  So they gave it their best effort, but, because they didn't know what this "luck" thing was meant to look like in practice, we get this slightly off version.  This just isn't the sort of thing it generally does, and the idea that Donald would be willing to feed Gladstone a feast just because he happened to show up...well, to enter into the spirit of the thing: pull the other one; it's got bells on.

"A scrumptious meal of roast beef."  You know, sometimes the tone here really makes my brain itch, but things like this are just so completely naff that I can't help but find them dopily adorable.  But what's with this idea that Gladstone would go on a diet?  Whoever introduced the writers to Gladstone neglected to inform them that with his luck comes total hedonism.  It seems like an important point.

Don't have much to say about this, but it really is tempting fate to ask the reader to spend time thinking about artistic quality.  Just look how off-model he is there!  Note that the child who owned this book before me started to colour that jolly picture of Goofy and then just gave up in despair, which seems reasonable.

It's interesting to see Scrooge measuring his fortune in pounds--there was no sense of concrete history or context in this conception of Scrooge, though that should've gone without saying--and also that the writers don't understand how his money is supposed to work.  Quick rule of thumb: if you're saying it's any amount of money that a person could conceivably actually have, you're doing it wrong.  It has to be so much money that thinking about economic inequality becomes meaningless.

And this idea that Scrooge would be obsessed with four-leaf clovers...well, actually, even though it seems absurd, I can sort of imagine a latter-day Western story doing something like that.  Not that that makes it any better. 

See!  I was talking about how old-fashioned this all feels: I think "Charlie the Crocodile, old Elmer the Elephant, King Lion and Oscar the Ostrich" make my case.  This thing of just making up other animal characters meant to be living in the same world as the ducks/mice feels VERY nineteen-thirties.

Did you want to know what they looked like?  This!  This is what they look like!  That lion looks naggingly familiar--any thoughts?  

I will say: obviously, our writers here weren't thinking about these characterizations (if you want to call them that) in terms of any kind of Disney history--and yet, I kind of like that ending.  Through the whole story, you think, okay, Donald's being a blowhard, as per usual.  But then, it turns out, no, he's just trying to amuse the kids.  And that's kind of cute, and a fun, atypical thing for him to do.  I must maintain that the story is less "thrilling" than the authors assert, however.

This is probably the most boring story here (with an extremely feeble denouement), and I don't have much to say about it.  But I did want to note this: "Mickey's a real fanatic for his tea!"  There are definitely parts of this book where it feels like it was written by an American thinking, hmm, how can I make this thing as cartoonishly over-the-top British-sounding as possible?

I suppose this is adjacent to a normal depiction of Scrooge, who is indeed known to cadge food from his nephews.  AND YET, this idea--of him visiting Donald's house under false pretenses to bake cakes and then snarling at anyone who tries to take one--makes me laugh immoderately.  Such total nonsense!

This story is, in outline, extremely boring, with a punchline so weak it doesn't deserve the name.  But then we get THIS: "He had lots of films of himself counting his millions and he never tried of watching them."  HE WOT?  Is this like when couples...you know what I'm getting at, yeah?  See the Blur song "Stereotypes" for more details.  I mean...gosh.  I suppose that's not necessarily an unfair parallel--maybe Scrooge's interest in money is, if not exactly sexual, then sort of along that same path--but, knowing the British reputations for reserve and repression, I'm sure the hapless person who wrote this would turn beet-red from top to bottom at the very suggestion.  It's obviously completely unintentional, but you've gotta watch yourself, man!  Otherwise, this is what's gonna happen!  Still, even if you totally reject this implication, you have to admit, the idea of Scrooge watching video of himself counting money is incredibly bizarre.

Also, stop calling your pictures "jolly."  I'll be the judge of that.

Okay, this one's pretty boring, but--that seems to be a pattern, doesn't it?  I find few if any of these stories interesting as a whole, but they've all got the weird little details.  Like, why is Donald so fixated on the idea that they may ONLY SWIM FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES?  Is he generally that sort of control freak?  Weird.

"He didn't really like rushing about with dogs."  Noted.  I'm wondering about Donald's "friend" here.  If this were a comic, you'd have to depict the friend, even if it turns out just to be a generic dude, but this is so hazy.  Is that image from some cartoon?  It looks very familiar.

But here's the REAL interesting thing about this one: is his "friend's" dog, Rover, actually...Bolivar?  Of course, we must allow that it could be a total coincidence that the artists decided to draw the dog as a Saint Bernard, but man, I dunno.  Is it possible that they caught a brief glimpse of a Western comic and so made the association?  It's just weird, from the perspective of a person more familiar with this material than these folks clearly were.  Huh.

Hmph.  We save the worst for last.  Well, maybe "worst" sounds overly judgmental, but this thing goes for three pages, and it does NOT earn that space.  I guess it's slightly interesting to make this a crossover featuring Pinocchio and the Pigs, but nothing is accomplished: we just get this really repetitive "oh boy let's enter the race" stuff from all of them, and for WHAT?  Not much!

...they were going the wrong way.  There's yer punchline.  I order you to bellow with hilarity.

I do like how the vintage cars are drawn.  Not so much that egregiously off-model Donald, who looks like the sort of thing you'd see in a Tijuana Bible or some such.

Well, that's about it.  I hope this was as intriguingly odd to you as it was to me.