Where Scrooge lives

[Dan Shane]

TOMMI WRITES:

> If you're grown reading italian disney, an American who both locates
> Duckburg in American west coast, sets their time to fifties and admits,
> he doesn't know anything about euroducs seems bit, eh, arrogant, like
> "To hell with thousands of pages euroducs produced in last 50 years!"

AND I REPLY:

While I will be the very first to agree that Americans in general seem to
think they are the only people on the planet, I think you're being harsh to
call Don arrogant for his choice of setting his stories where and when he
wants.  I perceive that decision as having absolutely nothing to do with a
nationalistic or overly patriotic spirit, but simply a matter of simple
geography and time.

$crooge was created, not by countless Europeans or even an international
committee, but by a single man who placed his newly thought up character
squarely on the West coast of North America.  He wrote plenty of stories
that made it pretty clear where and when $crooge was meant to exist, and
$crooge's travels reinforced that setting.  Anyone else who wrote stories
based on that character changed $crooge himself if he or she said he lived
elsewhere.

Should we accept OZ sequels that say Dorothy was not really from Kansas, and
that OZ is in fact now located in Siberia?

How about moving Middle-Earth to Argentina?  I'll bet there are folks in
South America who would like to pen stories about hobbits with Hispanic
accents.  The comparison may sound ridiculous, but the truth is that it
doesn't matter if we are talking about "history" thousands of years old, or
just half a century.  The creator had a particular setting in mind, and
anyone else who buys the "rights" to adapt a character to his own whims is
changing the original character into a new person.  Even Don's stories come
perilously close to that on rare occasions, but only to my perception.  That
is my problem, not his.

Those thousands of pages of "euroducs" are about a $crooge I never knew.
I'm not saying that as an American; I'm saying it as someone who grew up
reading comics written and drawn by Carl Barks.  It is not arrogant to say I
favor that duck over later incarnations, it is simply a matter of taste.


Dan Shane
(danshane at bellsouth.net)