Post by farmspirit on May 21, 2021 11:11:30 GMT
After doing some thinking, I've concluded that an early mistake the show was both insisting that the show happened "in the present" and also insisted on addressing the questions the show made it have.
Scrooge's character is fluid in that parts of him like how rich he is and how old he is can change for context. You don't need to make him a prospector if that raises too many questions.
The show made Scrooge keep his ties to the Old West. And that could've been fine if they treated the whole backstory as just tall tales while not really confirming the show is in the 2010s. Except they needed to try to "explain." Now Scrooge is a practically immortal mega gajillionaire with only his parents and Goldie getting that perk. This pushes him even harder as some superhero ala Batman or Iron Man with characters like Glomgold and Beaks and Rockerduck not at all respectable rivals.
This is certainly a problem, that they could have solved in a couple of way:
- doing like the italian comics are doing: the stories are always set in a continous and undefined present, so a story made in 1960 could happen just two days before one from 2010. In this solution the ties between Scrooge and the Klondike are maintained, but kept vague with no need to place dates, and at best they are played for jokes as in implying Scrooge is extremely old.
This option has some problems: one is that this is starting to not work with the introduction of authors who put dates and purists who wants everything happening when it was written (the most notable example is the discussion about the last Fantomius story). Plus this option can work for a medium like the comics, where every story is indipendent or has little cohesion with the others, but in a medium like a tv-show, with a single creative time and a cohesive narrative, this vagueness could not resonate well with the audience, especially a mainly USA audience that demands a tight continuity.
- an alternative is doing like has been done for the MCU: for example here the origin story of Iron Man has been changed from the Vietnam War to the Afghanistan War. They could have done the same for Scrooge backstory, moving the gold rush in time. While there isn't a corrispective gold rush that could have worked in real life (I suppose, I'm not an expert in this so maybe there was a famous gold rush and I'm complitely oblivious of that), they could have made up one, since the 17DT has a different history.
Those are just some quick ideas about how they could have made prospector Scrooge work. But as you said, there are tons of stories where Scrooge isn't a miner, and that isn't any less Scrooge that the ones where he is.