Keskustelujen arkisto

In Walt Disney's Comics & Stories #142 (July 1952), Donald and the nephews went on a "Houseboat Holiday" and were dismayed to find that Lake Erie was filled with mud. Lake Erie is the shallowest of the five Great Lakes that lie along the Canada-United States border. In the 1960s, Lake Erie was heavily polluted with algae, sewage, litter, chemical waste, industrial waste and other contaminants. Barks responded by writing a 1966 Junior Woodchucks story titled "Be Leery Of Lake Eerie." (Note the change in spelling.) Since this was a Disney comics, naturally the lake was resrtored to pristine condition by the efforts of Huey, Dewey, Louie and the other Woodchucks. The real Lake Erie was similarly cleaned up in the 1970s. Barks penned several environmentally-themed Junior Woodchucks stories. Most of them involved pollution, deforestation or trapped whales. Even though they helped to make us aware of the harm we're causing to our environment, those stories did not seem Disney-ish. Comic books should be fun to read. They shouldn't try to beat us over the head with environmental messages.

You can tell I haven't read that story for a long time! But it also brought to mind Walt Kelly's famous 1970 Pogo strip which depicted Pogo and Porkypine trying to slog through all the trash and garbage in the Okeefenokee Swamp, with Pogo lamenting, "We have met the enemy and he is us." The line was adapted from "We have met the enemy and they are ours," a statement made by American Navy Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry after defeating a British naval squadron on Lake Erie during the War of 1812. Yes, Lake Erie. See how everything fits?

There's a part of me that wants to say "if it's a Disney comic it's ipso facto one hundred percent "Disney-ish! This is meaningless!" But there's another part of me that wants to me to agree with Debbie about Darkwing Duck. I'd put those New Duck Avenger comics in the same category.
EDIT: post seven hundred!

I'd rather expand the definition of what is Disney-ish to include exactly those stories. To me it's much more interesting when it's engaging with other kinds of stories.
Otherwise I could get pretty cynical about this. There's quite a few characteristics I'd attribute to the adjective Disney-ish, including consumerism before sanity (Disney Princesses), royalty without a shred of character (Snow White, Cinderella), and shaping your most successful character into a boring role model (Mickey Mouse).

I mean, if you go with the cuddly, family-friendly, all-smiles-all-time vision of Disney, the majority of Barks' and Don Rosa's output wouldn't be Disney-ish.

Quote from user: Thomps2525Awww.....Mickey would like to remind you that in 1928 he was a wanted outlaw who smoked cigarettes and drank beer. Check out The Gallopin' Gaucho, the second Mickey Mouse cartoon produced and the third one to be released. The complete version is on YouTube, but various reissues have cut the scenes of Mickey smoking and the scenes of Mickey and Minnie dancing the tango. Apparently even Disney didn't think those scenes were Disney-ish!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnjSVSykNsA
All of the earliest Mickey Mouse material, whether it was in films or comics, was produced long before there would even be a concept of "Disney" or "Non-Disney", as Walt Disney was just a film producer, and not a brand name synonymous with "Family Entertainment". So of course much of the early material was left in the vault once Disney had an image to uphold. The early Mickey material is (in my opinion) the most interesting, as it was produced without the sense of "we shouldn't do this" or "this would be a bad influence on kids", and really can't be expected to hold up to today's Disney standards.

As for Darkwing Duck, he may be from a different source of inspiration than the "classic" Disney characters, but I wouldn't say he isn't a valid Disney character. If we have to have Disney superheroes, I'll take original characters like Darkwing Duck and Gizmoduck anyday over shoehorning "heroic" identities like Super Goof and Duck Avenger on classic characters. (Just my opinion...if others like them, enjoy).

Quote from user: Thomps2525Did you like Donald Duck's portrayal of secret agent "Double Duck" in the Italian stories that were published in the United States by Boom Kids in 2009-10? Remember in 1966 when Gold Key published several Mickey Mouse Super Secret Agent comics drawn by Tony Strobl? All the characters except for Mickey and Goofy were human---none of the usual "dogface" characters that populated other Disney comics. Mickey in the human world---what was Disney thinking?!?
I never read Double Duck. The idea didn't grab my interest, as much of BOOM's early comics didn't...they had Mickey as a Wizard, Donald as a Secret Agent, and the whole Duckburg group as Superheroes. I'd much rather see them as themselves.

Mickey Mouse, Super Secret Agent was not the greatest, but passable, mostly because by the time I read them in Gladstone's Digests, I knew there were only three issues. So I view it as a period piece. Paul Murry drew Mickey and Goofy in those stories, not Tony Strobl. Dan Spiegle provided the "realistic" humans (and everything else).