Keskustelujen arkisto

Oops! Eric CHUN! No 'g' at the end! Sorry!!! You have permission to call
me Dong Rosa. (You probably already did!)

If you stretch the logic a little bit, you can find ways to combine the
facts that current Duck stories should involve modern world in order to
appeal to the modern kids and that in the Barksian cannon Scrooge lived
already in the 19th century and would be... erm, quite OLD in the 1990s.
(Since he took part in the Gold rush, and also that he first appeared in
the 40s I think the term "Golden Ager" would be more than appropriate).

I quote here Finnish artist Tarmo Koivisto (and maybe I've done that
before) who said that the Barks stories he loved in the 50s predicted the
Finland in the 1990s, meaning that we haven't really started to see e.g.
those monstrous highway crossings, sometimes shown in the stories, in the
real life until recently. So, continuing this thought a bit - take a look
at some Barks stories of the 60s, that Gold Rush in the moon -story, for
example. While I knew that some of you regard this stuff to be out of the
"Barksian cannon" proper, you can at least play with the thought for a
while: It seems obvious that by the time Barks retired, Duckburg had
enjoyed a marvellously fast technological evolution. Space flights are
common and Duckburg has its own space stations, etc. etc. So, if all this
took place already before the time that you have counted as Scrooge's
100th anniversary, you could suppose that already before that point of
time Duckburg had passed a phase in their development very familiar to us.

You may say that this isn't too strong a thought-structure, but following
this it would be very possible to have, say, stories involving computers
(internet?) and stuff and still follow the Barksian time line. I mean,
surely they had personal computers before home computers ships!

The other possibility is ofcourse to forget the dates and enjoy a good
stories as they come, but I guess that wouldn't just be enough for you
guys.

--- Jyrki Vainio ---

Daniel.C.Kenny wrote:

> As for Gottfredson's death date, wasn't "Mickey Mouse in Color" dedicated to
> Gottfredson? The book was published in 1988, I think. I think an exact date
> is mentioned in the book too, but don't quote me on that! My book's at home
> and I'm away at college now, so I can't check. Does anybody else have access?

In the "About This Edition" foreword, dated October 3, 1988, it says that
"Gottfredson passed away in 1986". The book is "Dedicated with love to Floyd
Gottfredson the man who gave us the greatest Mickey".
--
Kriton (e-mail: (Email removed))
(WWW: http://dias.cti.gr/~kyrimis
-----
"You know, I think it's just a matter of putting two and two together to make
three..."
-----

THORE:

> To make it easier for you to find the answers to your questions, I
> suggest you get a DOS program called List and the old postings from this
> list. That way you can use the search function and search for keywords.
> It's a bit much to read through all the postings, since most of them
> are of no interest.

I have the opposite experience with the same result: most of the old postings
are very interesting, which means I can't help reading them when I look for
something. The result is, looking for things in the archive takes more time!

--Harry.

On Nov 12, 7:08pm, Harry Fluks wrote:

> "I'm mindin' d' pencil business fer a poor blind friend of mine
> while he's in seein' a movie!" (Butch in 1931)
>
I get the joke, but... I knew a girl in high school who had
been blind since birth. Yet she would say that she had "seen"
a movie with no hesitation. It's what people did with movies;
that was the verb she'd always heard used with that medium.
It would have been more self-conscious for her to come up with
some odd formulation like "I listened to that movie." And, when
we say we saw a movie, we mean more than that we just sat there
stupidly and watched a meaningless light show. We mean we became
involved with it, and were actively engaged with the flow of
information. As best she could, the blind girl I knew did that,
too. Things had to be explained to her as a movie unspooled,
but she could pick up a surprising amount on her own just by
listening. She became involved with the characters, laughed at
the jokes, cried over sad turns of events. It may stretch the
meaning of the verb "to see" a bit to cover what she was doing,
but it seemed to fit at the time.

Now that I've very solemnly pontificated on something that was
just meant as a joke, we now return you to our regularly
scheduled ML...

--Dwight Decker

>> BTW-Anyone know when (or if) any convention like this is headed the New York
way? <<

Well, there is a large convention planned in New York City for the
Thanksgiving Day Weekend, I believe. I don't know if any Disney people
(professionals or anyone from the mailing list here) will be there, though.
Wish I could go, but it's impossible for me, and I only live 30 minutes
from the city. If Don and Erik Larsen were there, though, I'd find a way.
;-)

Come to think of it, though, Don: I read your convention reports all the
time about your trips overseas and to California. Do you ever come to the
NorthEast? Ohio doesn't count.

Oh, wait, weren't you in Niagara Fall a couple months back? Forget it.

-Augie, go to Philly!
-Augie
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Augie De Blieck Jr. * (Email removed) * (Email removed)
(Email removed)
http://www.nic.com/~augie/two/two.htm

RICH, HARRY, DWIGHT, others:
I'm a bit puzzled by statements where one person thinks the comics are good
since the Disney characters can change, or that it's Disney's old animated
cartoons that would have them change, showing them old and gray, or married,
or whatever.
I don't know when the comics ever allowed any of the Duck characters to
actually change, whether it was Donald or one of the Barks non-Disney Ducks.
Barks added to the Donald Duck "universe" which was nonexistant before he
started in on it to make something of it. But afterwards, it all stays the
same, right? I mean, maybe some people think I've been allowed to change
things in the Duck world, and I'll let them debate that, but it's not how I
see what I've done. I've only tried to represent the Ducks as I've always
seen them in my own head. I don't feel as though I've changed a thing. In
fact, from the beginning, in my own mind my mission was to reaffirm the
Barks Ducks I grew up with, and not do stories with the meandering
personalities or histories as I saw non-Barks Duck stories as having. But
anyway, as to whether the characters change in Disney's cartoons, this is an
invalid subject, so to speak. Or is it a moot point? The thing is that
Disney never viewed Donald or Mickey as characters, only actors in a role.
If Donald grew old and gray in that Bootle Beetle cartoon, it was simply
make-up. If he was married to Daisy in another cartoon, it was obviously
just a script they were acting out. It's only in the comic books that Barks
developed a true character from that configuration of lines with a name that
Western Publishing was licensing from Disney. As I've said before, I've
never even considered Disney's Donald and Dell's Donald to be the same.
As for whether the Wicked Witch or Lucifer the Cat came back to life between
their films (as actors) and the comics, and this should allow me or someone
to bring back a dead comics character... I'm stymied by that logic. These
"actors" didn't come "back to life"... they were simply used by Dell in a
story, often (as with Lucifer) at Disney's direction for promotional
reasons. That's why Pinocchio comics appearances always show him as a wooden
puppet rather than a boy. But since the comic book characters are not mere
actors, once they are offed, they stay that way. It's that the comics are
about characters while the cartoons feature "actors" that I've always
infinitely preferred the comics' depiction of the Duck and even that Mouse.

Similarly, my view of the Duck Universe greatly simplifies, actually
eliminates, the possibility of me worrying about what animals can be used in
a Duck comic. Barks wasn't a funny-animal cartoonist at heart, so he was
striving to put Donald in adventures with real people. Eventually, his
editors told him to use animals as the supporting Duckburg characters, so he
simply started putting black noses on most of 'em, pig-snouts or beaks on
less than 1% of the rest, and about a total of 3 others over 25 years being
drawn with rat ears -- these variations from the black-nosed "humans" simply
to make them stand apart as the story's villains. As someone just said,
Barks stated that his stories were of people drawn as animals.
"Funny-animal" comics are about animals drawn as people. I can tell there's
a resistance in some to see that the Duck comics are not mainstream
funny-animal comics, and therefore getting all messed up with the logic of
what animals can be depicted and which can't. My view of it eliminates all
that problem, the same way my view of when these stories take place
eliminates all problems dealing with $crooge's impossible lifespan. It's
really all a lot simpler than you're making it out to be. Still, as I always
say, how I see these comics is my personal view, but it has come from
reading or otherwise absorbing these stories not since I was 15 or 10 or 7,
but literally from birth due to my growing up in a home filled with the
1949-1960 comic book collection of my much-older sister. And I'm sure
thankful I've regarded Barks' Duck stories as NOT being funny-animal
stories, otherwise I would never have stuck with 'em and read them, since I
always preferred comics about people rather than the "funny animals" that
editors seemed to think kids wanted to read about (or that their parents
thought it was cute to see them reading). Besides Barks' Ducks, I loved
Little Lulu, or Asterix or the Spirit or EC comics or anything but
funny-animals. And thankfully I was still willing to give all the Dell
comics a chance, otherwise I never would have even tried understanding the
Duck comics.

HARRY:
"Why did you do it?" "What did you do it for?" You Europeans crack me up,
dissecting and making word-plays with English! How I admire your versatilty!
I mean, any one of my neighbors here would just say "Whachadoonatfer?" and
think it was all one word if they ever had a reason to think about it at
all. If I had reason to mention to them that I knew someone in the
Netherlands or Denmark who could analyze English better than they could,
they wouldn't be impressed since they don't know where those places are.

RICH:
> But Disney *has* shown older characters in animation! Huey, Dewey and
>Louie were teenagers both in classic cartoons ("Lucky Number") and a more
>recent series ("Quack Pack," if memory serves). And I seem to recall that one
>or two of the Bootle Beetle cartoons showed an elderly Bootle sharing
>reminiscences with a Donald who looked almost $crooge's age...

The title of that cartoon is "Sea Salts." It begins in a seaport town where
Bootle, who looks like he normally does, lives with the aged Donald that you
describe, who wears a captain's hat, walks with a cane, and has Scrooge's
sideburns. Bootle narrates their past adventures when they were shipwrecked
sailors on an island. In the flashbacks, Donald looks like "our" Donald and
Bootle has no sideburns, cane, or glasses, and wears a white round sailor
hat. I don't know the date of the cartoon.

>Talking about Bob Gregory: A long time ago, Arthur wondered if Roberta Gregory
>was related to him. She is: she's his daughter. In a recent interview (in
Haarlem),
>she said "My father worked for Disney. He has worked out a lot of story for
>Carl Barks." (sic!)

Ass-like question: what is Roberta Greogory famous for?

DWIGHT:
Touching story about the blind movie fan. Interestingly, the exact same
scenario happened in an early episode of the comic strip "Foxtrot"
<http://www.uexpress.com/ups/comics/> which features a blind supporting
character.

ERIC CHUN(G):
>Aren't the people just drawn as animals (to make them more appealing to
>kids and the young at heart)? Whereas, the animals remain animals.
>
>Carl Barks said that he thought of the ducks as people, as evidenced by
>the title to U$ #1, "Only a Poor Old -Man-". He didn't think of them
>as duck-persons.

That's how I see them too! The reason? More about this further down.

>Monkeys and people aren't related. If species evolved into other spec-
>ies, there would be millions of in-between species existing today, or
>there'd be in-between species fossils. The in-between species fossils
>for monkeys and people, the "missing link", has never been found.

Uh-oh! Are we getting into a creation-versus-evolution debate here?

>Species don't seem to be able to intermix, either, due to DNA (genetic) cod-
>ing, which rejects it. The only known case is the mule, which is a
>cross between a male donkey and a mare. But mules aren't capable of re-
>producing.

Other species can too intermix! Any member of the horse genus Equus can mate
with another. Examples are the hinny, which is the offspring of a male horse
and a female donkey (the flip side of a mule!), and the zeedonk (male
zebra+female donkey). (Funny how we're talking about donkeys [aka asses] on
this ML ;-) Most of these are sterile, but there ARE rare exceptions, or so
I've heard. Similarly, outside the horse family, male lions (Panthera leo)
and female tigers (Panthera tigris) can beget ligers, and the reciprocal of
that equation has produced tigons. There has even been a "litigon" born in a
zoo in India a few years ago, the daughter of a lion and a tigon. OTOH, I
think ligers CANNOT breed with tigons.

However, the further apart the animals are related, cross-breeding IS
impossible. But where? I think the line is drawn at different genus or
different family. At least American buffalo (Bison bison) and domestic
cattle (Bos taurus) have been able to do a cross-genus mating. Of course,
the scientific distinction of which animals really are are from different
genera (the plural of genus) than others is not foolproof. I suspect there
has been more than one sci-fi story, done sometime and somewhere, about
humans breeding with apes, but this is almost certainly impossible, as
humans are from the family Hominidae and apes Pongidae. An even more
transparent myth is the idea of a "cabbit" which was mentioned in "Dear
Abby" a few years ago--the idea of a cat breeding with a rabbit, which are
from different ORDERS--Carnivora and Lagomorpha respectively.

In fact, that logic topples Dwight and Rich's theory completely.
(Anal-compulsives relax--we're getting back too the actual topic of this
ML!) For example, even the plainest Barksian facts--just counting the comic
books, not the family-tree notes--indicate that one of Gladstone Gander's
parents must be a mallard duck (Anas platyrynchos) and the other a goose,
which if I remember right is from the same family but a different genus.
(BTW, I once heard that Donald Duck IS a mallard, even though he doesn't
look like one--where is this proven?) Going beyond Barksian facts, and into
Rosaian facts, the Duck Family Tree proves that DD, HDL, and Gladstone are
also descended from a Coot, which is from a different family than ducks!
(Hmm...if Grandma Duck's father and grandfather were Clinton Coot and
Cornelius Coot, then she isn't a duck at all!) Then, Gus Goose is the
offspring of a goose and a half-coot-half-grebe, whereas a grebe is from yet
ANOTHER family...

Oh, sorry to have bended your ears and wasted your disk space with all this
scientific gobbly-gook. I promise it won't happen again. (Or at least it
SHOULDN'T.)

--Jonathan(g) Markoff