I've read about that Rockerduck-Cornelius connection. If that's all there is, I would file that under "translation error". However, if you can find a story which explicitly mentions a relation between Cornelius and Rockerduck, I'll most likely add that connection to the tree. Grote's tree, while fascinating, has a bunch of weird stuff, which I don't take into account in mine.
The French tree you link also puts the Beagle Boys next to Cornelius, and Flintheart next to Rockerduck, not to mention that Daisy is far away from her nieces. It makes me think that the Rockerduck-Cornelius and Gretchen-Gyro placements are arbitrary.
I dunno — it'd seem like a weird coincidence for Gyro to be next to Gretchen specifically if that were so, given that it's such a commonly-held suspicion. Notably, Rockerduck and Gyro are actually on the tree (i.e. within the green), unlike Flintheart and the Beagles.
Regarding Grote, by the way, it is one thing that you do not retain its own creations (or the Erika Fuchs creations it inserts), but wouldn't you consider using some of its depictions of otherwise-unseen relatives? I am thinking, for example, Eider Coot.
Thanks for the confirmation re: FamilyEcho. As to why it's like that, the expectation is that it's used for real family trees, and so you'll only share the link with real relatives… I don't know of any better, free family-tree-building software (what did you use, yourself?).
By the way, just noticed you didn't have Whitewater and Fethry as siblings on this thing. I think that's a losing battle you're fighting here… but alright!
A few days ago I read a '60/70s Italian story in which Scrooge claims that both DD and GY are his heirs and keep calling them both "nephews", I don't know how much it could be accountable for that though.
Huh, interesting. D'you have that one's INDUCKs code? I know there are a few stories where Gyro is present at "Duck family gatherings" at Grandma's farm (that "cave duck" story drawn by Strobl, for example), but this is more explicit about Gyro being a relative of Donald's than anything I've seen before.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Apr 17, 2021 12:31:03 GMT
Anyway, you may or may not want to pay lip service to the idea that Rockerduck is somehow descended from Cornelius Coot. The idea appeared in Grote because in German his last name is (was?) "Erpel", the same name used for Cornelius; but it also cropped up again in a French redraw of Rosa's tree, which also stuck Gyro next to Gretchen Grebe, seemingly putting some support behind the idea of a relationship there (which I always thought Rosa must've had in the back of his mind). I don't know if it exists in any stories, though.
Also, um, it's a persistent problem with FamilyEcho, but did someone modify my tree? I hadn't seen it in a while, but it appeared when I checked it tday t have Klara, Corvus and Anna on it. I suppose it's possible I'd inserted them myself long ago and forgotten…? But I don't think so…
I guess an argument could be made that he's actually Daisy's grand-uncle, based on his apparent age. Then Daisy's mother's maiden name could be "van Duck" from J.P. van Duck, instead. What do you think about that?
Meh, I don't think he looks that old. He looks to be no older than Scrooge, certainly, so if Scrooge is just Donald's uncle, he should be Daisy's uncle. But there is no reason to think Bertrand is Daisy's blood relative (certainly Daisy doesn't appear to be a daughter of the British nobility herself), so couldn't we simply have him as an uncle-in-law — who married one of Daisy's Van Duck aunts?
I found the Rockerduck family tree in the Picsou Soir. Who is this Oscar character and who is he said to be related to in the story he's from? Where would he fit best in my tree?
Oscar Maraucanar is the French name of Marmaduke Mallard. I'm not sure where the design is from.
I'll have to look into the Jean-Claude situation a bit further before I'll make any changes.
Pokerface is one of the hardest characters to place. I'd love some more suggestions for alternate placements of him!
I agree that the DuckTales 2017-continuity is it's own thing (I'd even say the 80s version is in it's own universe!). However, I wanted to be thorough and include everything from every continuity. I have comics-only relatives, Silas McDuck from 80s-DuckTales, Mel Mallard from Quack Pack, Gertie Goose from that cartoon-movie, and so on. Ludwig's offspring from 2017-DuckTales are no exception. I should clarify that this massive all-encompassing tree does not represent my own personal head-canon. I've made another tree for that purpose in the past.
Erika Fuchs's made up relatives are on the fence for me. But in the end I elected to regard them as mistranslations, as harsh as that may sound.
I was vary of the $crooge McDuck Wiki, as it doesn't play by the same rules as me. It's often hard to make out what is a fan-made name for a character and what is official. Still, that Bogey McDivot article might be worth a read.
In some of my older tree I believe I'd just place Pokerface as a son of Quagmire, but I've flip-flopped a lot myself. Much as there's nothing in the story that demands he be a McDuck rather than a Duck, I also prefer to keep the “Mc”, both because the name sounds snappier that way, and because he was (IIRC) the first-ever non-Scrooge “McDuck” ever introduced!
There's really little to no clue about where Jean-Claude fits in the family tree in his debut — he's just a one-panel mention in a half-comic, half-feature thing looking back at the history of Duckburg. However, it is stated he tried and failed to take Fort Drakeborough back from the Native Americans who'd seized the Killmule Hill stronghold by that point, so it has to predate Cornelius Coot's arrival (as seen in His Majesty McDuck's flashback) by some margin.
I guess I see where you're coming from with DT17, but I still feel like there's a very big difference between all those “classic” Disney shows and DT17. With the former, while it would be too much to say that they are intended to “fit in the Barks canon” per se, they are just supposed to be new works featuring “the classic characters”; you're meant to go into the 1987 DuckTales, or Quack Pack, while holding your knowledge of the 1940s cartoons at least to be valid history for these characters. And, of course, the '87 DuckTales comics eventually did away with the idea that DT ‘replaced’ the Barks versions of events, with continuity references back to Barks and Rosa story. (I don't just mean Rightful Owners, either!) By contrast, DT17 is explicitly a parallel universe from everything else — some events and characters will echo or resemble pre-2017 stories, but no preexisting Duck story whatsoever is directly applicable to its universe, with the potential, still very shaky exception of Donald's cameo in A Goofy Movie (since Angones stated, after the Goofy DT17 episode aired, that Goof Troop was directly valid history for this Goofy, not "events substantially similar to Goof Troop").
W/ regards to the $crooge McDuck Wiki, you really ought to give it a shot; following the thread on here where there were complaints about this very problem, we've become very explicit about sourcing of such information. The opening sentence of a page whose name is speculative in some way will always read “[Name] is a logical English name for the character known in Italian as [Original Italian Name]”, and names that are directly from unlicensed sources will always be marked with the [UNOFF] citation.
Oh, and IIRC no date is given for Pilgrim Hat Guy; 17th-century is just a guess. But I misspoke when I spoke of Seafoam — I meant Matey McDuck, of course, who as per the Chapter 0 of the L&T ended up as governor of Fort Drakeborough after surviving the shipwreck Barks originally had him dying in.
The placements of the characters are based on information compiled from various sources, including Wikis, the Generation Duck blog, Asger Pedersen's Ande-Aner article, INDUCKS, Scroogerello's Gander tree, Gilles Maurice's original tree, and my own research.
Huh. Was my own familyecho tree from a few years ago one of those sources, or did we independently come up with these similar ideas of how to deal with Eider and McPaperduck?
Either way, this is a spectacular piece of work, I have to say. I don't agree with everything here, of course; including things I don't expect to change your mind about, such as how ‘Grandpa Duck’ from No Hunting is still Humperdink to me, etc.
Also, most strikingly, while it's true that some of these competing Scrooge ancestors can harmlessly be reckoned to have been something else than McDucks, it's very very weird to do that with Silas McDuck, who seems to have been nothing less than the Head of Clan McDuck at the time of the flashback depicted in the DuckTales episode where he appears. Personally, I'd be more comfortable with making him a g-…-great-uncle rather than direct ancestor, but keeping him as a McDuck, than the opposite solution that makes him a Mallard.
Also, what's this business of Zak McWak being HDL's father's brother? Wouldn't that suggest their names should be Huey, Dewey and Louie McWak? Unless you're going with HDL having been born out of wedlock, I supposed. Either way, I'm stickin' with him being Daisy's brother, sorry.
One thing you have overlooked, and which I have been giving a lot of thought to, is the possibility of an American line of McDucks descended from Seafoam at Fort Drakeborough after he left Scotland for the final time. That is where I would place Jean-Claude McDuck (and perhaps Pokerface McDuck). There's a Luciano Bottaro story with a nameless McDuck Ancestor who apparently resided around Calisota in the 17th century, who would fit right in with this lineage; I can't see if you put him anywhere on your tree…? He looks like Scrooge but wears a pilgrim hat.
Oh, and I really, really cannot condone putting Ludwig von Drake's DuckTales 2017 children on there. That's a wholly different universe, dammit! “Our” Ludwig never had any such children, only his counterpart in an alternate dimension did.
Still, very good stuff. The only other “missing characters” I can see are things I guess you made a principled decision of overlooking — characters original to Erika Fuchs's translations, for example, as depicted in Grote's tree, which I always took more seriously than most.
Glomgold and Quagmire's relatives leading up to Bogey McDivot were given names by the writer of the story in interviews, also; it's all on the $crooge McDuck Wiki. You might want to add them where relevant.
What was really silly was Della's prosthetic limb. It's never used as a burden to the character nor does it affect her in any real way besides the initial shock. They try to make it out to be a representation of real-life amputees but it's so laughably unrealistic and pointless to the character it might as well be a coat of paint. It might of worked if it was portrayed as a real disability that causes her to struggle
…Not to be that guy, but the idea that the only correct way to portray a character with a disability is to treat it as a burden or struggle is… er… problematic.
By the time Bradford has murdered his own brothers
Factual correction: the way the reveal is structured is confusing, but it seems pretty clear that The Last Adventure was intended to reveal that the two other buzzards were never Bradford's brothers — they were, in actuality, clones of himself. (This doesn't change much about your point; certainly I admit his trying to kill Donald in spite of the way the deal is written seems like an actual plot hole, and either way he does kill Heron. I'm just, as I said, highlighting the fact.)
That's still doesn't explain why Bradford believes it means direct descendent when he tried it with May and June and it didn't work. It's a plothole, it conficts with what was previously established.
Who knows if he didn't simply figure out the truth — that he needed someone whom Scrooge had a personal connection to?
I don't really know much more I can say. You're defending a clear plothole that throws a wrench in the plot.
But it's clear why he wanted Webby. The only thing that is not clearly spelled out is why he reverted to thinking he needed Webby even though May and June didn't work. But we do know what he wanted with Webby, just not how he came to the conclusion that she would help him get it. And especially given that he is correct, I think it's a real stretch to call “We're not shown on-screen how the evil mastermind figured out the true thing” a plot hole.
Again though… ‘Plot holes’ depending on the specifics of how magical papyruses interpret the word “heir” should not meaningfully impact one's enjoyment of a comedy adventure cartoon. This isn't James Joyce, for pity's sake. The plotting of DuckTales 2017 is already miles more intricate and self-consistent than that of the Classic Series. Take any given hour-long special of the original DuckTales, or even run-of-the-mill episodes, and you will find many, much more baffling elements which the writers clearly feel no need whatsoever to even begin to address. (Just off the top of my head, “why on Earth Mrs Beakley's tuning fork does what it does in Treasure of the Golden Suns” comes to mind.)
There are many things you can credibly say DT17 gets wrong that more conventional Disney cartoons did not… but "plot holes"?
And that's your problem "I don't think it especially matters." Of coarse it matters when the entire plot of the episode depends on it making sense. Think critically about something for once.
I think there are more important things about storytelling than spelling out every mechanical detail of the magical technobabble. On the level of character development and symbolism, the story works. And the reason Buzzard still went after Webby isn't even a logical plot hole at all — it's simply something that is left unsaid, but which it is easy for fans who care about that sort of thing to make up explanations for.
If he tried with May and June and it failed then why does Bradford still think it means direct descendent and go after Webby specifically?
Possibly he thought the problem was that May and June were “two steps removed” from Scrooge (clones of Webby rather than of Scrooge directly)? I don't think it especially matters.
And if you're saying Bradford misunderstood the papyrus and thought it was only a direct descendent that still doesn't explain why he didn't try to have May or June open it.
But he did try, that's the point! It's clearly stated that May and June were written off as “failures” by FOWL, hence their putting them back in their tubes and going with the backup plans of using them to get Webby herself back. Note also how the girls are impressed when Webby gets the Papyrus (“She did it!") and the form taken by their later anger at FOWL's reason for creating them ("FOWL made us to get a stupid piece of paper? And we weren't even good enought to do that!").
I think we're clearly meant to infer that shortly after cloning them, FOWL did try to get May and June to get the Papyrus, and they failed (hence their resorting to kidnapping Webby again). FOWL didn't realise why, but the reason was that although they were genetically 'descended' from Scrooge, he did not consider them family (heck, he did not even know they existed), and thus they weren't rightful heirs, unlike Webby, whom Scrooge already saw as a rightful heir even if he didn't know they were related by Blot. It's Bradford misunderstanding the Ducks' philosophy of families yet again.