"A Bucket of Scones"

 Look, I know you wanted something for Halloween, but all I have is this half-started entry I'd had sitting around for a while.  Gasp at its spookiness:

Is this blog going to consist exclusively from now on of obscure stories I remember with unearned fondness from my childhood?  Maybe.  Or maybe I just need to decompress as I and everyone else wait for the end of the world.  Blah.

Anyway, I think we see the hilarious misunderstanding we've got going on here.  As far as Donald's psychologizing there goes, that might apply to other rich people, but they know their uncle personally, yeah?  So this "he needs a break from his mansions and yachts" thing is...silly, yeah?  I know this isn't the first time I've noted that Western writers often had very vague and inconsistent ideas of who Scrooge was supposed to be.  Note also: "billionaire."  

In defense of this nonsense, reading this story WAS, in fact, my first encounter with the word "scone."  But I was six-ish at the time, is the thing.  Were they really a strange, exotic thing in the fifties, or is our writer just being silly?  I strongly suspect the latter.

Okay, so let me drop some knowledge on you: if you damage someone else's property, that person is not allowed to just holler a random amount of money at you and then, I guess, murder you if you don't pay it.  All of this would be adjudicated by courts and insurance agencies.  The fact that Scrooge is going along with this nonsense as opposed to calling the cops on this clearly unhinged individual threatening to inflict grievous bodily harm on his nephew does not speak highly of him.

That aside, there are a lot of these stories with the "I don't want to do a thing but oh no now suddenly I badly need the money you were offering so I guess I have no choice" thing going on.  But it always bugs me that they can't ever even be a tiny bit subtle about it: oh, what a coincidence, it just happens to be exactly the amount of money offered.  It's going to look contrived in any case, but would it kill you to at least vary the number a bit--he demands eighteen hundred dollars instead of two thousand, say--to at least create a veneer of...what, gravitas?  What am I asking for here?

Anyway, we lurch from that to this.  Face the wrath of Bo and Some Other Guy!  Can you impale boats with a periscope like that?  I am skeptical.  But anyway, typical Most Generic Villains Ever.

This is the cunning plan, and by Disney Comics rules, it's actually kind of reasonable.  Of course, when you think about it even a bit, the most cursory amount of investigation would reveal that Donald being involved wouldn't be plausible.  It's like those Ace Attorney cases where oh no, an innocent person is being blamed, and for some reason it's not incumbent on the prosecutors to supply any sort of motive, the way you have to for the real killer.  Grr!  So unfair!  Blah.

Also, because it's funny, I want us to be aware of the interior decoration in this sub, which appears to consist solely of a lumpy mattress, gold bullion (that's either left in an open vault or just stacked in piles, depending where you're looking) and at least one unsecured missile just kind of rolling around.  All this is fairly insane.

Ah yes, the kind of pluck we know and love.  I'd like to know who these "friends" are that Donald is wailing about.  Best be more concerned with your imminent demise than your posthumous reputation.

Also, dammit, who even ARE these ships you're attacking?  Actual naval vessels, or just random freelance gold shippers?  No good thinking about THIS nonsense.

I actually feel like there's something potentially interesting in the "how could he!  Wait, he couldn't've.  But he must've!" dynamic.  Here it doesn't go beyond Scrooge just assuming, well, the impossible thing must be true," but there's still potential.  It really is an interesting and unanswerable question: what would Disney comics (and Warner Bros, Walter Lantz, etc) have been like with quality control?

And then...yeah.  There's this.  Donald knows fluent morse code because OF COURSE he does.  Learned it in the Little Booneheads, probably.  That is some kind of exactitude.  How does he get those exact coordinates?  Best not to ask.  Actually, we'll come back to this part soon.

Also, not-Bo is Mo.  Make a note of it.  Side question: would it have killed these writers to come up with somewhat distinctive villains?  I can't blame anyone too much; even Barks relied a lot on generic pig-faces, but come on.  I am SO not vibing on Bo and Mo.

My feeling is that this Would Not Work, but who can say?  I'm not sure if it was ever tested on Mythbusters.

I do appreciate how extremely chill the cops (military?) are in this world.  You want to just take this sub, which presumably still contains missiles and probably relevant evidence against these two, who still have to go to trial you know!, like that.  Sure, just take it.  Return it any ol' time; you know where.  "The Harbor Authorities."  That is some real professional malfeasance on the part of the cop (army guy?).

"Hootmon Inn" is very slightly amusing.  That is all, and DANG is it conveniently located for the passing submarine trade.  I feel like we're probably supposed to take her assertion that her scones are the best at face value, but come on.  Every little shop like this, especially when catering to foreigners, is going to play the authenticity and greatness of their food all the way up.

Anyway, they end up doing the classic "doing dishes to pay when short of funds" thing, and...

Right.  Okay.  This is really the only reason to say anything about this story.  I know I and others have remarked in the past about the somewhat disorienting tendency some old writers had to suddenly ascribe a wildly idiosyncratic trait to a character.  Well, if "Donald has an eidetic memory" isn't at the top of that heap, it's certainly making a good run for it.  Although at least this does explain some things about the morse code episode: it presumably would have been easy for him to memorize the morse alphabet (though he still would've needed practice to be able to use it fluently), and if, I don't know, the bandits had had the coordinates of the attack on a blackboard (I wanted to say white board, but this is the fifties), fair enough, I guess.  Do I think our writer was making any conscious effort to associate the morse thing and the memory thing?  I do not.  Still, there you go.  Have fun.

Well what can you do.  This was a good use of everyone's time.  I do quite enjoy the nephew wailing there in the bottom right, a veritable Greek chorus to this tragedy.

I know sometimes it seems like low-hanging fruit, but we MUST unpack this.  Scrooge can't go to Scotland because, apparently, all his "business interests" are stateside, so what can you do?  Probably just another misjudgment of the kind of character Scrooge is, but, well...also, I feel like an idiot even suggesting this, but if Donald is capable of perfectly replicating the elite Scottish scones, doesn't it seem conceivable that Scrooge could've just found a recipe?  

"Well, no, Scrooge couldn't go himself and he couldn't trust anyone but his nephews," you may well say.  Right, I know that's often the rationale for bringing them along, but if this all has to be that sub rosa, I don't know if he would've been standing on a random bridge hollering about his woes.

Something seems off about the logic here, but never mind.  I do like that we come to some degree of accord, with Donald more or less on top.  I guess.  Well, look, ultimately, this story is of no account and is not spooky in the slightest, but HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!