DCML digest, Vol 1 #218 - 7 msgs

[Don Rosa]

From: "Fernando Ventura" <
>>>>If I put this character
into a more "real"world, living on the 40's in Brazil, I will be doing a
contrariety, because the Brazil we see in "Saludos Amigos" and "The Three
Caballeros"is not REAL, in fact it is Surreal world, and it is one of the
reasons because this films are not very much accept in Brazil, because the
critics didn't see that Disney ARE NOT triyng to represent a realistic
place, they are doing then vision of it.

Right, and this caused me some problems, as well. I was not taking these
two characters from a previous "Universe" -- "The Three Caballeros" was not
a "story" film... it was a fantasy-travelogue where the characters simply
sang and danced and made barely restrained sexual advances toward women
while they introduced other sequences in the film. I wanted to
"reintroduce" Jose Carioca and Panchito Pistoles into Donald's life even
though they had actually never been there before -- I made vague references
to the adventures they'd had and the pretty girls they'd chased, but I
couldn't make any direct references since no old adventures actually
existed, not the way all of Barks' old stories "actually exist" as history
for my normal Duck stories.
Reading my own message in the last Digest -- I think of how Barks limited
his parameters (or wanted to) even more than I do. He originally wanted to
place Donald in a world of realistically drawn humans, but was finally
ordered by his editors to back off from that. So he started using humans
with round black noses and saying they were "dogs". I would imagine these
Barks dog-humans looked very weird in 1948, but I grew up with them to such
an extent that I thought that's how you were supposed to draw humans. I
never for a moment thought those were dogs -- I thought that cartoonists
drew humans with those black snoots -- and all my old comic books that I
drew when I was 7-14 years old were all about humans with round black
noses.
Barks limited himself more than I do in another sense in that he never
allowed himself (for reasons I've never heard) to use ghosts or witches or
the occult, whereas I like to use Sir Quackly as the occasional link
$crooge has with his ancestors. No, Barks' Magica DeSpell was NOT a witch
with occult powers, she was a sorceress, a normal person who needed to use
old wands and to learn ancient spells to perform magic... she used
preternatural powers, not supernatural powers. European writers *after*
Barks turned Magica into a witch. The only two times Barks used actual
witches, in "The Golden Christmas Tree" and "Trick or Treat", it was at the
orders of the bosses.
That reminds me of that idea of crossovers -- in the "Golden Christmas
Tree", Donald actually meets the Witch from "Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs".
The story even opens with him reading in a newspaper "Sightings reported of
figure who looks like Snow White's evil witch". Huh? How could a newspaper
reporter transcend reality to know this?! But this report makes sense to
Donald rather than causing him to say "Who the $#@* is 'Snow White'?" Then
the story goes on to involve Donald in a very boring tale of talking trees
and "saving all the world's Christmas Trees" and other really too-cute,
too-obvious, surreal stuff. I never liked that story and I was delighted to
find out in later years that Barks did not write it, it was all the ideas
of the sorts of editors who would put Huey, Dewey and Louie playing
baseball with a ghost on the cover of a comic, and not see anything
intrinsically wrong with the concept.