DCML Digest Issue 18

Don Rosa donrosa at iglou.com
Thu Mar 18 15:05:40 CET 2004


> From: Nat Chrenshaw <natchrenshaw at yahoo.se>
> Subject: The Center of the Earth
> I just read (please correct me if I'm wrong...) a message posted
> a long time ago here on the board by Don, saying:
> > I'm doing a story that I've had in my head ever since 1959 when
> I saw > "Journey to the Center of the Earth".
> I'm sorry if I've missed some further messages about this
> subject, but did you ever continue on this great idea?

You *were* digging through old archives, eh? That was over 10 years ago that
I did that story!
You'll need to go digging again in the back-issue bins to find a copy to
read, but I can at least mention that my depiction of the earth's core was
nothing like the fantasy stories you were wondering of any similarities to.
No lost civilizations, no prehistoric animals, no hollow earths. I depicted
the earth's core according to scientists' best theories -- a solid ball of
metal. The only fantasy was in my Omnisolve(tm) and what it could do. (Well,
I did show a "cameo-appearance of Terry-Firmy which in Barks' story was
obviously relatively near the surface in the earth in the outer mantle, just
because I figured there'd be readers expecting the whole story to be about
the Terries and Firmies and I didn't want to disappoint them altogether.

About the 1959 movie and the prehistoric animals and the discovery of part
of Atlantis -- I love that film! But... when James Mason and Pat Boone find
a portion of downtown Atlantis that "sank into the sea in a volcanic
eruption"... even when I was 8 years old I thought "huh?". A city is
involved in an eruption, sinks into the ground, the sea closes over it, it
sinks to nearly the very center of the planet... and the water never touches
it and the lava magically hardens in a bubble around it... and the pancakes
aren't even disturbed on the cook's griddle in the kiosk? Huh? But anything
seems tolerable when you wrap Bernard Herrmann music all around it. I wish
he could write scores for my stories.

> The general idea seems to be an ancient world (like Robert E.
> Howards 'Pellucidar'

You mean Edgar Rice Burroughs, by Crom.





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