Time Magazine cover

Dwight Decker deckerd at agcs.com
Fri Dec 16 18:18:50 CET 1994


I don't think anybody's mentioned this yet, but the American
edition of Time Magazine had an interesting cover this week.
As our overseas friends may have heard, the recent American
mid-term elections resulted in a drastic realignment of power
in the national legislature. The Republicans are now a majority
in the lower house for the first time in 40 years, and are
talking about severe cuts in social programs. So the Time
cover had a caricature of Newt Gingrich, the Republicans'
leader in the lower house, featuring him as a combination
of Uncle Sam and Ebeneezer Scrooge. The caption, in big
letters, read: "UNCLE SCROOGE."
	Meanwhile, the competing newsweekly, Newsweek, used
some remark of Gingrich's about orphanages as a possible
solution to problems caused by illegitimacy and welfare
to run a cover of some vintage photograph of children in
an orphanage. The picture looked like it dated from the
1930s if not earlier -- and all the orphans were wearing
white gowns. Suddenly some Mickey Mouse cartoons start to
make sense (in particular, "The Orphans' Benefit"), in
which orphans are all shown wearing those gowns. It must
have been a standard uniform for orphans at one time,
though I would guess only for the very youngest children.
(Gowns would make potty training easier, for one thing.)
Actually, the really puzzling thing about that Mickey 
Mouse cartoon (and its later color remake) is the fact
that all the orphans are juvenile mice in gowns. Given
that mice seem to be a minority on Earth-Disney (beyond
Mickey, Minnie, Mortie, and Ferdie, how many mouse
characters are there -- even "Mickey's Rival" seemed to
be more rat than mouse), was there some horrible plague
that wiped out most of the adult mice, leaving Mickey
and Minnie and a whole slew of young children? I'm
thinking about this too much...
	Getting back to the Time cover, I haven't opened
the magazine to see if some more specific reference is
made to the World's Richest Duck. Somehow, I doubt it.
This may gabberflast the Europeans to hear this, but
Uncle Scrooge is not a really well-known character in
the US, even after his Duck Tales exposure. Disney
comics had enormous circulations in the '50s, so some
large percentage of the American public must have
grown up reading comics that featured Scrooge, but he
still isn't nearly as familiar to the population at
large as he is in Europe.

--Dwight Decker




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