> 
>       DWIGHT:  I always find the Blum and Ault articles interesting 
> and enjoyable.  I just simply don't find the stories quite as 
> disturbing as they do -- but the elements are there if you want to 
> interpret them that way.  I FILL my scripts with "dark" elements, 
> hoping to give something suitably grim to fans of that kind of thing. 
> In my "Animal Farm" parody (the Pig story) Vicar went along with it a 
> bit.  And after I was finished with the script, I sat around trying 
> to analyze my subconscious from what I had written.  ;-)

I think the essay that annoyed me the most was the one looking for
allegories of atomic doom in Barks's immediate post-War stories. The
essay quoted Barks right up front as saying he had no such thing in mind,
then proceeded to ignore what Barks said and spent hundreds of words
analyzing the allegories of atomic doom that Barks didn't intend. It
just seemed like insufferable academic arrogance on the essayist's
part to presume to interpret the stories better than the actual author.
A case could be made that atomic doom was on everybody's mind right
after Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- heck, the world had just been through
a devastating war that had drastically changed everything -- and Barks
had unconsciously absorbed and reflected the overall fears and 
uncertainties of the period, but the writer wasn't even that common-
sensical. He had a monomania to take out for a walk, and he did it at
Barks's expense. 

>       Many of your translations in the first period of Gladstone were 
> simply "intermediate" steps -- you'd translate a Dutch or Italian 
> story, and then someone else would do the final "dialogue" on it. 
> But now, you both translate and dialogue.  In the case of "The Money 
> Ocean," which of the two systems took place?  Did you do a dialogue 
> which was adhered to, save that one explanation of Scrooge's 
> business enterprises?  Or was your work an intermediate step?
> 
With "The Money Ocean," I translated the original Italian story and
provided what I thought was a finished script. Somebody else (who
got the official credit) went over it and gagged it up a bit --
though not, in my biased opinion, to the story's benefit. I forget 
now quite how the Italian original explained things, but my version
of Scrooge's problem at the end of that story was that with all of
his money stored in the one gigantic money bin, and with all the
money inaccessible during Magica de Spell's hurricane, the regular
bills of McDuck enterprises weren't being paid and now Scrooge was
being hit with late charges and lawsuits for non-payment. As I
recall, even that got slightly scrambled in the rewrite.

--Dwight Decker


