Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Nov 17, 2017 18:10:34 GMT
So I was rereading the 1966 Italian story Donald Duck and the Vest from Outer Space (gotta love'em old bombastic Italian titles), and amongst the weirdness of its plot I found this arresting panel:
KID:"Duckburg! Heh, that's a funny name. Wonder what the people are like." SIGN:"DUCKBURG — 320.000 inhabitants + 1 billionaire"
Disregarding the sign's overlooking of John D. Rockerduck and all the other denizens of the Duckburg Billionaires' Club, it does beg the question of just how many inhabitants there are in Duckburg. This 1966 story says 320.00 (by comparison, around that time, San Francisco was home to around 740.00), and that seems to fit the Italian conception of Duckburg pretty well to this non-expert.
However, do any of you have any other hints of the Duckburg population given in stories (I'm thinking maybe some stories focusing on elections may have some interesting numbers?), or else your own ideas of how many people Duckburg should house?
Post by Monkey_Feyerabend on Nov 18, 2017 10:29:03 GMT
I suppose that most of the authors do not have a fixed idea about that. So, the way writers conceive Duckburg's population and artists portrait it* must rather develop more or less unconsciously. As a consequence, it also depends on the notion of "big city" in the country where the author comes from. For instance, for an Italian person a "big city" must have 3 millions inhabitants at least, like Naples, Milan or Rome. That's most probably how many Italian Disney authors think of Duckburg. Example: Rota portraits Duckburg as some kind of "New York with elements of Milan's architecture" (see the splash page opening Paperino Pendolare, which is almost a view of Milan Central Station). For a Novergian, Finnish or Dutch author the thing can be different, so that half a million population would be enough already.
Of course, there are some authors who - independently of their nationality - more consciously set the stories in the US. In that case a San Francisco-like population may be accurate. Even if, I will notice, some views of the city by Barks himself make me think of a much bigger city! Take for instance the splash page opening The magic hourglass. That looks bigger than San Francisco to me! Or at least more densely populated. (Before you ask: yes, I have been in San Francisco.)
[* here the work of the artist is even more relevant than the one of the writer, as the former is usually more in control of the backgrounds, and backgrounds gives you a representation of the surrounding population.]
Yes, the splash panel in "The Magic Hourglass" , which, no doubt, partly inspired Marco Rota's splash panel in his story "Donald Duck's Life (From Egg to Duck)", made Duckburg look like a city of more than one Million people. We story creators must assume that the range of city sizes, in which Duckburg is portrayed, represented a fantastic rate of growth of that city over a very short period, which must represent a "boom period", perhaps due to some flowering of a new industry, or favoured monopoly-type position given to that city. This must have occurred during the six to seven year span over which both the domestic and foreign adventure stories of "The Duck Family" (Donald, Scrooge and Huey, Dewey and Louie) take place.
Yes, the splash panel in "The Magic Hourglass" , which, no doubt, partly inspired Marco Rota's splash panel in his story "Donald Duck's Life (From Egg to Duck)", made Duckburg look like a city of more than one Million people. We story creators must assume that the range of city sizes, in which Duckburg is portrayed, represented a fantastic rate of growth of that city over a very short period, which must represent a "boom period", perhaps due to some flowering of a new industry, or favoured monopoly-type position given to that city. This must have occurred during the six to seven year span over which both the domestic and foreign adventure stories of "The Duck Family" (Donald, Scrooge and Huey, Dewey and Louie) take place.
Hm. For one such as me who takes into account the timeline going from 1940's to the present day, the answer is even easier — of course Duckburg could have gained more inhabitants between 1966 and From Egg to Ducks.
So I was rereading the 1966 Italian story Donald Duck and the Vest from Outer Space (gotta love'em old bombastic Italian titles), and amongst the weirdness of its plot I found this arresting panel:
Interestingly, in the Finnish translation from 1973 an additional "1" has been added to the number of inhabitants. This would make Duckburg larger than Helsinki or even the Capital region of Finland. Not sure if the story was translated from the original Italian text, though.
According to this map, Duckburg is a larger city in point of area. What population it has exactly can't be said for certain, because that depends on population density. Duckburg possesses highly urbanized regions (just remember the "The Magic Hourglass" splash panel! It's taken at the "Sanduhr-Brücke" aka Hourglass Bridge, right in the city core), but large parts of it seem to more resemble rural areas, so it's very likely kind of in the middle. Though, theoretically, maybe Duckburg could house a million people if it's very densely populated, my guess is that it has most likely a quarter million to half a million inhabitants.
That would mean there were about 60,000 adults in Duckburg. That implies that the total population would have been between 100,000 and, perhaps 150,000 people.