Old Barks interview

[Baar Baar Jinx]

Youtube has this old interview with Barks, that claims it's from 1975 (although it looks like it's actually from 1994). Although with poor audio and video quality, it has a wealth of information. His delight at the ridiculous humor and absurdity of the characters and the stories he created contrasts with the seriousness with which the interviewers seem to want him to discuss them. This is actually a pattern I've noticed ... for example, Barks has reportedly said that he believes Donald is a "mental teenager" (which is clearly untrue in any story he wrote), and he calls Donald "stupid" in this very interview (Donald can be called arrogant, immature, hotheaded, impulsive, and a host of other things, but certainly not stupid).

Other interesting points:

At 34:50 he states that Mickey had "three nephews but lost one along the way", which I don't think was ever true.

At 41:15, he calls Gyro a chicken.

Interestingly, at Barks 45:00 suggests that it was someone at "the office", presumably an editor at Western ... who saw the potential in a then little-used Scrooge and suggested the character be given a full-length story. I always thought Barks was inspired to make Scrooge a headliner himself.

Also, I'm intrigued by Barks' unusual (to my ears) accent. He grew up in Oregon, is this a typical accent for the region?

[The KKM]

Jun 28, 2017 13:09:29 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

(although it looks like it's actually from 1994).

Have you seen what the interviewer is wearing? That's 1975 for sure

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

Cool, thanks! I only knew later interviews, this will be nice to watch. I love that man's voice, whatever he said.  
It is surely from 1975, Barks looks as a (healthy!) man in his seventies here.

Jun 28, 2017 13:09:29 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

 Barks has reportedly said that he believes Donald is a "mental teenager" (which is clearly untrue in any story he wrote), and he calls Donald "stupid" in this very interview (Donald can be called arrogant, immature, hotheaded, impulsive, and a host of other things, but certainly not stupid).

Well, let us not forget that Barks was a man born in 1901! He may have had a notion of "teenager mentality" and of "stupidity" different from the one that we have now. (In particular, he could have used the word "stupid" without meaning that much offense as we intend nowadays.)

[drakeborough]

Jun 28, 2017 13:09:29 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

Youtube has this old interview with Barks, that claims it's from 1975 (although it looks like it's actually from 1994).

As other people have said, Barks' age makes it 1975 a more probable date. Plus, the note at the beginning ("This rare interview was taped in 1975 when home video recording was in its infancy. Consequently the picture is in black and white with some variations in picture quality.") makes perfectly sense, while I would expect a better quality from a 1994 video recording.

Jun 28, 2017 13:09:29 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

Barks has reportedly said that he believes Donald is a "mental teenager"

Well, even though he is clearly an adult, in many stories Donald acts like a person in his late teens.

Jun 28, 2017 13:09:29 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

At 34:50 he states that Mickey had "three nephews but lost one along the way", which I don't think was ever true.

Maybe he was thinking of the fact that Mickey's nephews derive from the many "miniature Mickeys" orphans from the cartoons, which were more than two. Then again, there were more than three of them, so this doesn't fit well with the idea that the number was reduced from three to two.

Some British comics had multiple "miniature Mickeys", and in one of these stories (reprinted by IDW two years ago) there were four nephews (though IDW reduced them to two):

Obviously, there's no way Barks was aware of a 1937 British comic that was never published in the Usa until 2015. Plus, the fact that they don't call Mickey "uncle" (except for the edited IDW version) may imply that they are the orphans from the cartoons, instead of Mickey's nephews.

Then, there's the infamous "Ten Little Mickeys" (though once again we can safely say Barks wasn't talking about it):

Maybe Barks was vaguely aware of the fact that the number of Mickey's nephews in the newspaper comics had been reduced by one, but he also knew that in comic books there were two of them and thought the same was true in newspaper comics. So, he may have wrongly deduced that the newspaper comics reduced their number from three to two, while in reality the newspaper comics reduced their number from two to one.

Another strange thing is that Barks said the animation department created Donald's nephews, which is also something he said when he visited Italy in 1994 as part of his European tour. In the Italian interview he seemed convinced of the fact, even adding that Taliaferro took HDL from the animation storyboards and put them in newspaper comics, and that Taliaferro's comic predated the cartoon only because comics can be produced faster. Of course, we know this is not true, since "The Walt Disney Productions Story Dept. on February 5, 1937, sent Taliaferro a memo recognizing him as the source of the idea for the planned short, Donald's Nephews", and said memo predates HDL's appearance in both comics (by 8 months) and animation (by 14 months). Still, Barks wasn't completely wrong, since we know that the nephews were developed by the animation team, and that Taliaferro did took some ideas from the animation team for their debut in the comics (including their names, which were invented by Dana Coty of the animation department and not by Taliaferro).

Jun 28, 2017 13:09:29 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

At 41:15, he calls Gyro a chicken.

We previously discussed a written interview in which Barks called Gyro a chicken: well, that was the transcription of the interview from this video.

Jun 28, 2017 13:09:29 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

Interestingly, at Barks 45:00 suggests that it was someone at "the office", presumably an editor at Western ... who saw the potential in a then little-used Scrooge and suggested the character be given a full-length story. I always thought Barks was inspired to make Scrooge a headliner himself.

I don't find it surprising since Barks wasn't an editor and thus didn't have the power to create a new comic book title, or even have three one-shots numbers dedicated to his character (the actual Uncle Scrooge title started with number #4) unless the editors decided so.

[Baar Baar Jinx]

Jun 29, 2017 13:42:19 GMT drakeborough said:

I don't find it surprising since Barks wasn't an editor and thus didn't have the power to create a new comic book title, or even have three one-shots numbers dedicated to his character (the actual Uncle Scrooge title started with number #4) unless the editors decided so.

I guess I'm surprised that someone at Western had the prescience to see the potential in Scrooge as a character, even before Barks established him as an adventurer and explorer. I'd have thought Barks would have come up with the idea of a solo book for Scrooge himself and pitched it to Western (even if, as you say, he didn't have the authority to greenlight it), but in the interview, it sounds like the request for a Scrooge book caught him unawares. Still, a lot of unexpected characters got a trial in the old Four Color series, so maybe it isn't that surprising.

[RobbK1]

Jun 28, 2017 13:09:29 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

Youtube has this old interview with Barks, that claims it's from 1975 (although it looks like it's actually from 1994). Although with poor audio and video quality, it has a wealth of information. His delight at the ridiculous humor and absurdity of the characters and the stories he created contrasts with the seriousness with which the interviewers seem to want him to discuss them. This is actually a pattern I've noticed ... for example, Barks has reportedly said that he believes Donald is a "mental teenager" (which is clearly untrue in any story he wrote), and he calls Donald "stupid" in this very interview (Donald can be called arrogant, immature, hotheaded, impulsive, and a host of other things, but certainly not stupid).

Other interesting points:

At 34:50 he states that Mickey had "three nephews but lost one along the way", which I don't think was ever true.

At 41:15, he calls Gyro a chicken.

Interestingly, at Barks 45:00 suggests that it was someone at "the office", presumably an editor at Western ... who saw the potential in a then little-used Scrooge and suggested the character be given a full-length story. I always thought Barks was inspired to make Scrooge a headliner himself.

Also, I'm intrigued by Barks' unusual (to my ears) accent. He grew up in Oregon, is this a typical accent for the region?

As I've stated previously on this forum, Carl told me that he intended Gyro to be a character for only that first story.  But then, he realised that a zany inventor could be an interesting character, so he built the next Walt Disney's Comics & Stories story around that character, and then he decided Gyro was a tall, gawky red-headed chicken. 

Barks grew up in southeastern Oregon, and northeastern California (just across the border), and Santa Rosa California.  He grew up from 1901- about 1915 or so, the age of acquiring patterns of speech.  He has the accent of a general US Westerner from that period.  It's one of the least pronounced or recogniseable accents in USA (least difference from "TV English".  He sounds more "educated and sophisticated" than the typical "East Oregon farm boy).

Knowing Carl, and his policy of not making waves with his employer, and being very satisfied with drawing for a living, I would guess that he would NOT have been the one to suggest to his bosses that Uncle Scrooge should have his own book.  The story that someone in Western's Editorial office suggested that is the most likely to have occurred. 

The video in question is clearly from 1975, rather than 1994, as that is EXACTLY how Carl looked in 1974, the last time I visited his house (and saw him in person).  He looked significantly older in 1994. Furthermore, his interviewer in that video, who was one of the fans who met him in the '60s (when I did), looked like a middle-aged man in 1994, with some gray hair, and other signs of aging.