DCML digest #501

[Don Rosa]

From: Kristian PEDERSEN <K.PEDERSEN at OBERTHURCS.com>
>>>However, some of Barks phrases original phrases have also stuck with me.
One
of them is "Oh my stars and little comets!".

I think that's my own personal favorite, and one that Barks invented -- at
least I've never seen or heard it elsewhere. Another favorite is "Great
howling crashwagons!" I don't even know what a "crashwagon" is, but one
that is great and is howling sounds *really* scary! When I first started
writing U$ stories for Gladstone in 1986, I made a long list of Barksisms
to use in my dialogue, but I don't think I ever used more than a few of my
favorites, like those two.

>>>Another is "Well doesn't that take the cake" was a fairly common
expression long before Barks.

Yes, he made up lots of great ones, but that one he can't take any credit
for. Just like the "doggoned" which someone was asking about recently.

>>>Question: Somebody recently mentioned the Uncle Scrooge story - the one
with
the "Wages of Fear"-trucks - in which Donald is suspended by ropes over a
collapsed bridge and swings into the side of a llama. I've been meaning to
ask about that scene: from the nephews' calculations, shown in close-up, it
would seem to be the case that Donald weighs 23 kg (or at least that *they*
estimate this mass!) Is this a 'Barksian Fact', I wonder, or did Don Rosa
make it up himself?

I just made it up myself on the spot for that calculation. I don't recall
how I came up with it, but I probably simply guessed at what a person would
weigh if he was only about 3.5 feet tall... or, say, about waist tall to a
6 ft. adult. But since I am not very experienced with metric weights, I
can't vouch for how well I guessed.