Post by Daniel Maline on Mar 6, 2023 23:40:33 GMT
"I know for a fact that all Europeans have grown up with the firm belief that $crooge's Bin is filled with GOLD coins, coins made of the metal GOLD, as incorrect as that idea is from the intention of the original stories."
WRONG. Look, I love Don, but he can be soo annoying sometimes, especially when he confidently spews incorrect information. Also, he constantly talks about his deep dislike for misinformation spread online but he himself has done it on several occastions. No, Don, NOT all Europeans have grown up with the firm belief that $crooge's Bin is filled with GOLD coins, In fact, I am dead certain MOST of them have not.
In Finland, we have currently two traditions regarding which coins are in question in those Duck cartoons. If the story is Italian, then they are gold coins, but in the stories created by Carl Barks, Don Rosa and Daan Jippes, they are mostly copper pennies. This is because Don Rosa sometime in the early 2000s corrected the wrong idea that the bin is full of gold, which is evident especially in the pre-Rosa translations (would Don Rosa's primary understanding of the European understanding of Scrooge's coins have come from here in the Nordics, i.e. the Egmont sphere?).
I remember reading an interview with Don Rosa in the local comic magazine Aku Ankka, where he said that Barks' joke was that the coins are the most worthless coins that can be found in the United States (aka one-cent coin) and that Barks would have painted them specifically as copper pennies in his oil paintings. The reason why Don wanted to correct the matter was that he had been shown Dutch, German and Nordic Duck comic magazines, and the translations of which said that the coins were gold. This was because when the comic sheets arrived in Europe for editing and printing, the pages were colorless and the black and white pictures don't tell what kind of coins they might be so the editors made an educated guess for translations and coloring.
But it is not impossible that there are various kinds of different coins in the bin along with copper pennies and platinum coins. For example, in one of the stories drawn by Don Rosa, Donald dug a money pit in the bin when he wanted to chase valuable Spanish gold Doublons at the bottom. And then there's also the Atlantis story created by Carl Barks, where Scrooge collects all the 1916 quarters (copper and nickel alloy) to keep one for himself and then dumps the rest quarters in the sea.