Mark Worden's Duck Family Tree

[Scrooge MacDuck]

I've decided to create a color version of Mark Worden's peculiar-but-seminal Duck Family Tree; here it is. I used the color schemes I'm most fond of, hence blond Hortense, for example, lest anyone be confused.



As I did it, I realized that while we all know that the two ? Gooses plus Luke Goose are from Jet Witch, Goosetail Gander is Ollie Eiderduck, Matilda McDuck is one of Magica's disguises in The Midas Touch, and good old ? Duck is based on an extra in a Barks-scripted story about surfing. Quackmore Duck is also basically Gladstone with a mustache, so no mystery there. As for Old "Scotty" McDuck, he's more or less Jake McDuck. 

But what about Hortense, Daphne and "Thelma"? I can't place them anywhere.

[Pan Maciej]

Gladstone appears to be taken from "Christmas for Shacktown".

Thelma's face those ring a bell...

[muggyruglugg]

Matilda also kinda looks like Swansdown-Swoonsudden.

[Baar Baar Jinx]

Aug 14, 2018 15:55:16 GMT muggyruglugg said:

Matilda also kinda looks like Swansdown-Swoonsudden.

Actually, it's Magica disguised as on Gina Luluduckita from "The Midas Touch".

The Quackmore and Hortense designs are the ones DuckTales '17 chose to base its versions of these characters off of, rather than the Rosa designs (at least in the pilot; they may change that if the characters ever appear in a future episode, as they did with Fergus and Downy). Legends of the Three Caballeros went with the Rosa designs for Donald's parents (props to them). 

Where did "Gladstone Goose" come from?

EDIT: Hmm ... about Quackmore here looking so much like Gladstone, and his being married to Gladstone's mother's sister in this tree ... I wonder if Donald and Gladstone have a sort of Scrooge-Rumpus thing going on that neither of them knows about? 

EDIT 2: Okay, never mind, I figured it out : Gladstone "Goose" is young Gladstone Gander, son of Daphne Duck and Luke Goose, who was adopted by Matilda (as per the original Barks tree). So Quackmore is biologically related to Gladstone after all, explaining their physical resemblance, and my earlier joke about Donald-Gladstone being like Scrooge-Rumpus stands annulled.

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Aug 14, 2018 16:14:46 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

Where did "Gladstone Goose" come from?

It looks to me to just be Worden's original attempt at what a young/teenage Gladstone would look like. Not too shabby, at that, actually, but too unlike any ducklings we've seen in official comics to be traced from anything else, I think. 

As to the DT17 switching Quackmore and Hortense back… they'd have hell to pay if they did, as there has already been quite a lot of fan art of the new versions. Some of us comic fans may gripe (though I don't; I really like Mustache Quackmore; better than a Donald clone with a toupee), but the purebred DuckTales 2017 fandom obviously likes them, and they'd feel the change was comign out of nowhere. 

[Scroogerello]

@ Baar Baar Jinx: "Gladstone (né Goose)" is Gladstone before he was adopted by Matilda and Goosetave, I believe.

Thelma's portrait was based on one of the female ducks from the cover to "Beach Boy" (1963).


EDIT: Come to think of it, Daphne's portrait kinda reminds me of Donald's disguise in Barks' "Kite Weather". Most likely just a coincidence, though.

[Baar Baar Jinx]

Aug 14, 2018 17:05:16 GMT Scroogerello said:

@ Baar Baar Jinx: "Gladstone (né Goose)" is Gladstone before he was adopted by Matilda and Goosetave, I believe.

It's a little confusing to have both versions of Gladstone on the tree simultaneously, as if they were separate individuals; would have been better to have an "adopted" branch grow out from Matilda and Goosetail to intersect with Gladstone. If I wasn't already familiar with Barks' original tree, I probably wouldn't have been able to figure it out on my own.

Daphne Duck here looks a little like Rosa's later Lulubelle Loon ... minus the Fethry-type expression and errant strands of hair, of course.  I doubt Rosa was basing Lulubelle on Worden's Daphne, but has Rosa ever said he was familiar with this tree when designing the new characters for his?

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Aug 14, 2018 17:12:21 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

Daphne Duck here looks a little like Rosa's later Lulubelle Loon ... minus the Fethry-type expression and errant strands of hair, of course.  I doubt Rosa was basing Lulubelle on Worden's Daphne, but has Rosa ever said he was familiar with this tree when designing the new characters for his?

He has, yes. He has said that the tree had made an impression of him as the only preexisting depiction of all these missing relatives, and that while he didn't have it around for reference when he drew his version, it was "floating about in his mind" — which explains the off-kilter similarities of Daphne and Lulubelle, for one thing, and the similar structure with the "ancestor"-figures in three separate trunks. Plus, of course, the fact that his Goosetave Gander and Luke Goose are basically lifted from Worden's. (Della with long blond hair and Quackmore with a dandy-esque haircut, I'm pegging down as solid maybes.)

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Aug 14, 2018 17:05:16 GMT Scroogerello said:

Thelma's portrait was based on oje of the female ducks from the cover to "Beach Boy" (1963).

Erm. Not… not exactly an inspired decision on Worden's part there then, because this means that retroactively, we have a picture of Donald's sister lusting after him. Ew.

[RobbK1]

Aug 14, 2018 17:05:16 GMT Scroogerello said:

@ Baar Baar Jinx: "Gladstone (né Goose)" is Gladstone before he was adopted by Matilda and Goosetave, I believe.

Thelma's portrait was based on one of the female ducks from the cover to "Beach Boy" (1963).


EDIT: Come to think of it, Daphne's portrait kinda reminds me of Donald's disguise in Barks' "Kite Weather". Most likely just a coincidence, though.

The bold script word above is not the correct spelling. There is no English word spelled that way.  I assume that the English word you intended to write is spelled as follows: "née" (and, of course, neither the same word as the Dutch nor Frisian word of that same spelling).

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Aug 14, 2018 23:12:21 GMT RobbK1 said:

The bold script word above is not the correct spelling. There is no English word spelled that way.  I assume that the English word you intended to write is spelled as follows: "née" (and, of course, not the same word as the Dutch word of that same spelling).

You are incorrect. Né/née is a word borrowed from French; much like fiancé/fiancée, the E is added or dropped depending on the subject's gender. 

[RobbK1]

Aug 14, 2018 23:16:28 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

Aug 14, 2018 23:12:21 GMT RobbK1 said:

The bold script word above is not the correct spelling. There is no English word spelled that way.  I assume that the English word you intended to write is spelled as follows: "née" (and, of course, not the same word as the Dutch word of that same spelling).

You are incorrect. Né/née is a word borrowed from French; much like fiancé/fiancée, the E is added or dropped depending on the subject's gender. 

It is true that née in French is a French word.  But, after being accepted into its new language, it is a word belonging to its new language and the rules of the original language don't apply.  There are no longer gender differences in spellings of words in English.  The English word "née", spelled correctly, complete with two of the letter "E".  There are thousands of English words borrowed from French.  None of them change spellings in English based on French rules dealing with inflection, or adjective agreement due to gender,  "Bon apetit" is correct in French.  But, the correct spelling in English is the incorrect "Bon Apetite", because that is the way it was eventually accepted by the masses in its new language. I have seen "née" hundreds of thousands of times in reading English text.  I have NEVER seen it spelt "né".  It is spelled "née" in any English language dictionary, not "née OR né".  You can insert a foreign phrase into English. And the rules of that language will apply there.  But, in using a word in the borrowing language, as the adopted word, in a sentence in the new language, it IS a word belonging to the adopter language, and follows the rules of THAT language, NOT the language of its origin.

One might find "née OR né" as "acceptable" in The Oxford English dictionary.  BUT, it must be noted that use of "né" currently, is archaic, and not used in modern English spelling (certainly not in North America). Perhaps a few people over 90 years old in Britain still use it. 

We still see BOTH spellings of Fiancee used in English, but, based on what I have seen, "fiancee" with 2 letter "E" is by FAR the more common, at least in North America, and the single is usage is declining rapidly, with most native English speakers, who understand no French, not even aware of the gender difference in the two spellings.

Unfortunately, in many cases, language evolves in a way that makes communication more difficult, making distinctions in meaning become lost.  In some cases, even logic can be taken away, making understanding become more difficult, limiting communication.  An example of that is the phrase, "I couldn't care less!", meaning: "I care so little that the amount less that I could care is so infinitesimal that it isn't worth measuring", has changed to "I COULD care less!", but still retaining the same meaning, defying logic. "I could care less" logically, should mean, "I care enough about something, that I could care some substantial amount less, if the situation were different".

Language is a living thing.  It evolves based on the numbers of people as a percentage of the people using it accept new words and phrases, and drop others (long or short in existence) out of use.

The word "nee" in English has a very narrow usage.  It no longer refers to the wide aspects of the verb "to be born".  But now only used for people whose family names have been changed, mainly women who when married, took the family name of their husbands, but also for people who became more known by their "stage names", pen names", or aliases (used to hide their real identities).  The frequencies of use for those various reasons may explain why the "ee" form, rather than the single "e" ending has become, by far, the more common.    

I see that most English dictionaries still keep both forms, for the different genders as correct.  So, you are correct, and my statement was incorrect.  Thank you for pointing that out.  I, whose speech and writing in English is already quite old-fashioned and outmoded, had thought that the male form, "né", was already termed "archaic", and not even listed as an accepted spelling, anymore.

But, it is a sad fact that most North Americans, except those that have a working knowledge of French (who didn't just take a few years of it in school and then forget most of it for the rest of their lives), have no concept of the male form of nee existing in English.  More North Americans know about the two spellings of "fiancée/fiancé", but many of them don't know why there are two different spellings, and they just use one of them, that they saw most when learning to write.

[sim]

Aug 14, 2018 14:05:44 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

I've decided to create a color version of Mark Worden's peculiar-but-seminal Duck Family Tree; here it is. I used the color schemes I'm most fond of, hence blond Hortense, for example, lest anyone be confused.



As I did it, I realized that while we all know that the two ? Gooses plus Luke Goose are from Jet Witch, Goosetail Gander is Ollie Eiderduck, Matilda McDuck is one of Magica's disguises in The Midas Touch, and good old ? Duck is based on an extra in a Barks-scripted story about surfing. Quackmore Duck is also basically Gladstone with a mustache, so no mystery there. As for Old "Scotty" McDuck, he's more or less Jake McDuck. 

But what about Hortense, Daphne and "Thelma"? I can't place them anywhere.

Sorry for the super-delay, but I don't think that Ollie Eiderduck (as Maurice suggested) was the main source for Goosetail. I rather think that this lady from the first panel of The Status Seeker bears way more of a resemblance to him.

[RobbK1]

It seems to me that Worden's tree is a simple one, like those that appeared in Tony Strobe-Drawn stories, sometimes with branches containing people who are NOT descendants or parents of the person who is attached to them by the branch. Scotty McDuck, being the trunk of a tree, implies to me that that tree is about him, and the branches spreading out from him should be his descendants. But Carl Barks never gave a name to Scrooge's father. And, I'm sure "Scotty McDuck" was not the character Don Rosa chose to be Scrooge'sfather. Neither was Uncle Jake. Fergus McDuck was. And why isn't Grandpa Duck (used by Barks, and also in a few different Tony Strobl stories) shown next to Grandma, with a branch going to their children (Daphne?)

So, Gladstone has been made a cousin of The Ducks by blood, and must now be assumed to be not only related by blood, but from another connection, be loosely "related" by marriage (as Barks had him brag that Uncle Scrooge was his own mother's brother's brother-in-law). No wonder they can't get rid of him, no matter how hard they try!