A list of "Barksian facts" dismissed by Don Rosa?

[juicymcduck]

Hello everyone! I was wondering whether someone has compiled a master list of “Barksian facts” that Don Rosa chose to dismiss/ignore when he created his Life and Times. If not, maybe we could start listing them here?

Off the top of my head, I can only remember those:

— Scrooge’s magic hourglass (from The Magic Hourglass);

— Scrooge’s time at Webfoot Tech (from September Scrimmage);

— Miss Penny Wise owning an old note that could force Scrooge to foreclose on his entire fortune (from Flour Follies);

— Scrooge’s earliest ancestors hailming from the Middle East (from King Scrooge the First).

Does anything else comes to anyone’s mind?

[deb]

You really can’t expect everything Barks ever wrote about Scrooge to fit neatly together. Between early ideas like the Magic Hourglass, which was reworked into the first dime mythos, and things Scrooge told his nephews to impress them that were probably just windy stories (such as buying animals for his zoo at Noah’s “End of the Flood” sale), it just can’t all be taken as “fact”.

[juicymcduck]

Mar 21, 2023 20:46:47 GMT deb said:

You really can’t expect everything Barks ever wrote about Scrooge to fit neatly together. Between early ideas like the Magic Hourglass, which was reworked into the first dime mythos, and things Scrooge told his nephews to impress them that were probably just windy stories (such as buying animals for his zoo at Noah’s “End of the Flood” sale), it just can’t all be taken as “fact”.

I, er... don't remember saying I "expected" anyone to do anything? It's not an attempt at blaming Don Rosa for anything (why would I do that?), all I want is to make a fun list, that's all. And besides, the term "Barksian fact" isn't even mine, it's Rosa's.

[deb]

Mar 21, 2023 21:59:44 GMT juicymcduck said:

Mar 21, 2023 20:46:47 GMT deb said:

You really can’t expect everything Barks ever wrote about Scrooge to fit neatly together. Between early ideas like the Magic Hourglass, which was reworked into the first dime mythos, and things Scrooge told his nephews to impress them that were probably just windy stories (such as buying animals for his zoo at Noah’s “End of the Flood” sale), it just can’t all be taken as “fact”.

I, er... don't remember saying I "expected" anyone to do anything? It's not an attempt at blaming Don Rosa for anything (why would I do that?), all I want is to make a fun list, that's all. And besides, the term "Barksian fact" isn't even mine, it's Rosa's.

Guess I overreacted. Apologies.

[juicymcduck]

Mar 22, 2023 3:02:33 GMT deb said:

Mar 21, 2023 21:59:44 GMT juicymcduck said:

I, er... don't remember saying I "expected" anyone to do anything? It's not an attempt at blaming Don Rosa for anything (why would I do that?), all I want is to make a fun list, that's all. And besides, the term "Barksian fact" isn't even mine, it's Rosa's.

Guess I overreacted. Apologies.

Apology accepted, of course! On my end, maybe I could've been clearer in my initial post...

[That Duckfan]

"Barksian facts" are kinda subjective. There's no method by which these facts can be gathered, only Rosa's interpretation of Barks' work. Barks himself never felt the need to be internally consistent to this degree.

That said, Scrooge recalling he sold road maps to Marco Polo in City of the Golden Roofs is one anecdote Rosa explicitly ignored.

[juicymcduck]

Mar 22, 2023 8:05:53 GMT That Duckfan said:

That said, Scrooge recalling he sold road maps to Marco Polo in City of the Golden Roofs is one anecdote Rosa explicitly ignored.

That was wise on DR's part! Because there are three solutions I can see, and none are ideal : (a) Scrooge is losing his mind, (b) Scrooge was born in the XIIIth century, (c) he met some guy named "Marco Polo" after the famous explorer.

In the very same story, he also says that he sold concertinas to the soldiers of the Czar and that he sold recordings of "The Bagage Coach Ahead" at the 1904 world fair. Unlike the Marco Polo case, both these statements are plausible.

[LP]

Not sure if these count or if they are simply continuity errors. Undoubtedly, there are more of these. These three are just the ones I remembered off the top of my head.

- Blackheart Beagle and Grandpa Beagle.
    In The Fantastic River Race, Blackheart already has three adult sons. This story is supposedly set around 1880, which would make Blackheart around 40 years old. In 1950 (the present), he would be around 110. However, when Grandpa Beagle shows up in The Money Well, he doesn't even know who Scrooge is, even though Rosa makes it seem like they are life long arch-enemies. It doesn't make sense that these two are the same individual, yet Rosa merged them anyways.
Worth noting is that the idea that Blackheart and Grandpa are the same character did not originate in Lo$, but in Rosa's earlier Cash Flow.

- Scrooge's first dollar.
    In Only a Poor Old Man we see that Scrooge has a framed dollar bill with the description reading "MY FIRST DOLLAR" (page 2, panel 3). Yet, in Lo$ chapter 2, we see Scrooge earn his first dollar from his uncle Pothole. Only this time, the dollar is a coin rather than a bill.

- Scrooge burned a village.
    In Voodoo Hoodoo, Scrooge proudly remembers having hired a mob of thugs to chase a tribe from their village 70 years ago. In Lo$ chapter 11, Rosa changed 70 to 40 in order for his timeline to make sense. But he also changed the events so that Scrooge is no longer proud of his actions; instead this is portrayed as his most monstrous act ever.

Oh yeah, and there's that Katie Mallard character, who was supposed to have been close to Scrooge back in the day, yet she only has a brief cameo in chapter 11... or something... I haven't read Barks' Katie Mallard story, so I'm not sure what that's all about!

[djnyr]

It's not an omitted "fact," but I do find it a little disappointing that Katie Mallard gets only a one-panel appearance in Chapter 11; in Barks' "Mystery of the Ghost Town Railroad," where she originally appears, she's a likable character with a good deal of screen time, a good-natured, tough and capable old frontier woman, a little like Grandma Duck but more rough-hewn. She and Scrooge, in "Railroad", talk a bit about the "old days" in the boom town of Goldolpolis, and come across as very good friends, which doesn't mesh well with her calling him "Mister" in her cameo in the Life and Times; there's also no implication in L&T that Scrooge got to know her better later, since the way the Goldopolis sequence is structured, it appears he exited the town shortly thereafter. I can't help but regard this as a missed opportunity to explore one of the handful of characters from Scrooge's past actually created by Barks. I suppose, though, it's more or less an inevitable result of the way Rosa chose to structure the L&T; there would have been more chance to showcase Katie if she'd appeared in one of the earlier Western chapters, but in Rosa's conception, Scrooge, at that point in his career, wasn't wealthy enough to have stock shares to hide from bandits (the hidden stock shares are the central MacGuffin in "Railroad"), so according to his own timeline, he couldn't bring in Katie until after Scrooge had hit it rich--and by then, Rosa had too many years' worth of events to chronicle to spend more than a few panels in Goldopolis. Also, I suppose having Scrooge strike up a friendship at that point in the timeline would have worked against Rosa's portrayal of his increasing moral and emotional isolation in Chapter Eleven.

[LP]

I read through all of Rosa's The making of "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck" that were published along with each chapter in the Uncle Scrooge magazine. These are the ignored facts he mentions:

Rosa ignored the existence of the magic hourglass from The Magic Hourglass as the basis for the McDuck fortune.

Apparently it is mentioned in The Hall of the Mermaid Queen that Scrooge made a silver dollar in a riverboat race in 1880. Rosa turned this silver dollar into the first dollar Scrooge ever made. However, I stand by what I said in my earlier post, as Rosa didn't have to make this Scrooge's first dollar.

Rosa's Lo$ chapter 6 has a young Scrooge meeting a young Flintheart Glomgold. However, in Barks's original The Second Richest Duck there is no indication that they have met before. In fact, the story seems to hint at the opposite: When Scrooge identifies himself, Flintheart says "I've read about you in papers I've found in the park!", rather than something along the lines of "I remember when we met 60 years ago!"

According to North of the Yukon, Scrooge loaned money from Soapy Slick in Goldboom, Alaska in 1898. In Lo$ chapters 8 and 9 Rosa changes this to Skagway, Alaska, 1896.

According to The Big Bin on Killmotor Hill, the Bin is "new". In The Trouble With Dimes, Scrooge's money barrels have been in the bottom of his bin for 70 years. This number is also given in Migrating Millions. Yet, Lo$ chapter 10 shows that it only has been 50 years.

In Voodoo Hoodoo, Scrooge claims that he made his second billion 70 years ago, which would be circa 1879. Rosa pushes the first billion to the late 1890s.

According to Mystery of the Ghost Town Railroad, Scrooge was a traveling tycoon in 1898. However, Rosa has him still struggling in Yukon at this point.

Finally, in Lo$ chapter 12, Scrooge's design is different from what we saw in Christmas on Bear Mountain. While he leaves his cabin on Bear Mountain in a good mood, he is back to being grumpy in Lo$ chapter 12.

And apparently John the chauffeur's design is also different.

[sim]

Mar 22, 2023 11:35:42 GMT LP said:

And apparently John the chauffeur's design is also different.

Wasn't he James?

[LP]

Mar 22, 2023 13:14:47 GMT sim said:

Mar 22, 2023 11:35:42 GMT LP said:

And apparently John the chauffeur's design is also different.

Wasn't he James?

Yes, you're right. Odd that Don Rosa calls him John in his behind the scenes-text. You'd think he or the editor would double check. On a similar note, I found another spelling error in another issue's Don Rosa behind the scenes. Rosa talks about how the Dalton boys will be bad guys in another story but it's misspelled as "bad gays".

Anyways, as I went to double-check if it was James I realized that the only real change in his design is that Barks gave him longer floppy dog ears, whereas Rosa drew him with round human-ish ears. Not a super-big deal.

[Mesterius]

Mar 22, 2023 8:32:37 GMT juicymcduck said:

Mar 22, 2023 8:05:53 GMT That Duckfan said:

That said, Scrooge recalling he sold road maps to Marco Polo in City of the Golden Roofs is one anecdote Rosa explicitly ignored.

That was wise on DR's part! Because there are three solutions I can see, and none are ideal : (a) Scrooge is losing his mind, (b) Scrooge was born in the XIIIth century, (c) he met some guy named "Marco Polo" after the famous explorer.

Or... Scrooge is simply saying it as a joke, using exaggeration to make his point (that he's been around the block a few times).

[Matilda]

Mar 22, 2023 9:35:04 GMT LP said:

- Blackheart Beagle and Grandpa Beagle.
    In The Fantastic River Race, Blackheart already has three adult sons. This story is supposedly set around 1880, which would make Blackheart around 40 years old. In 1950 (the present), he would be around 110. However, when Grandpa Beagle shows up in The Money Well, he doesn't even know who Scrooge is, even though Rosa makes it seem like they are life long arch-enemies. It doesn't make sense that these two are the same individual, yet Rosa merged them anyways.
Worth noting is that the idea that Blackheart and Grandpa are the same character did not originate in Lo$, but in Rosa's earlier Cash Flow.

- Scrooge's first dollar.
    In Only a Poor Old Man we see that Scrooge has a framed dollar bill with the description reading "MY FIRST DOLLAR" (page 2, panel 3). Yet, in Lo$ chapter 2, we see Scrooge earn his first dollar from his uncle Pothole. Only this time, the dollar is a coin rather than a bill.

- Scrooge burned a village.
    In Voodoo Hoodoo, Scrooge proudly remembers having hired a mob of thugs to chase a tribe from their village 70 years ago. In Lo$ chapter 11, Rosa changed 70 to 40 in order for his timeline to make sense. But he also changed the events so that Scrooge is no longer proud of his actions; instead this is portrayed as his most monstrous act ever.

In my personal headcanon, I have decided contra Rosa that Blackheart is Grandpa Beagle's father. I even have two trading cards in my collection, the French one for Blackheart and the German one for Grandpa (Opa) Beagle, and I personally hold that these cards are for different characters. Happily the two cards don't use the same illustration, so I can see them as different persons with a strong family resemblance .

I don't have any problem interpreting Scrooge's framed dollar as his first dollar bill ! Costs more to frame a coin, anyway ! And back in the mid-20th century, it was dollar bills which could often be seen framed in a shop as the "first dollar" earned.

The change Rosa made with regard to Scrooge's burning of the village and his subsequent feelings about that was of course fully intentional, and I personally approve of it. With a contemporary* understanding of the evils of colonization and racism, I feel it was necessary to come to terms with those elements in Scrooge's Barksian prehistory as an international capitalist, and one of the things I like best about Rosa's L&T project is the way he turned Bombie into a curse that Scrooge earned by his evil deed, part of Scrooge's slide away from family and other human connection and into misanthropy and the pursuit of riches apart from enjoyment and shared adventure.

* "contemporary" in the rich countries/peoples; the colonized have always understood the evils of colonization!

[Matilda]

Mar 22, 2023 15:21:32 GMT Mesterius said:

Mar 22, 2023 8:32:37 GMT juicymcduck said:

That was wise on DR's part! Because there are three solutions I can see, and none are ideal : (a) Scrooge is losing his mind, (b) Scrooge was born in the XIIIth century, (c) he met some guy named "Marco Polo" after the famous explorer.

Or... Scrooge is simply saying it as a joke, using exaggeration to make his point (that he's been around the block a few times).

Yes, as Deb said about the "End of Flood" sale: another windy story or over-the-top exaggeration. I like imagining Scrooge's tone of voice when he says things like that! Why, you young whippersnappers....