Disney-comics digest #686.

[9475609@arran.sms.ed.ac.uk]

MARTIN:
> a chain gang who roar with laughter when taking part in the only 
> pleasure of their brutal lives - watching Mickey Mouse cartoons.
        Actually, it's not MICKEY they're laughing at.  The cartoon used 
in this sequence is 1934's "Playful Pluto," including part of the famous 
"flypaper" sequence.  (Mickey does appear in the film, but I'm not sure 
if he's in the sequence SULLIVAN'S TRAVELS uses.)  As I recall, the film 
is shown to the convicts in a church on an old home-movie projector;  
it's silent, and the characters in the film play an organ to it.
        HOW TO READ DONALD DUCK, by the way, is still in print in the 
United States;  I've seen it in MANY college bookstores, and it's 
actually been used in courses by my home university.  I don't think the 
instructors realize what the authors' real goals were.  It's used, I 
think, to show us dumb Americans that our country is manipulative and 
produces propaganda just like any nation, something we goggle-eyed 
america-firsters often forget.  ;-)

GIANFRANCO:
> [Disney Italy] pay the artist about 35$ each page of text and 60$ each 
> page of drawing.
      Good gosh, that's AWFUL!  That's a LOT less than Egmont and Oberon 
(and Gladstone, back in the States) pay their comic-makers.  Did 
Mondadori pay more before Disney took over?  I'm really surprised!  
(Particularly because I have been doing a story for Disney Italy 
recently without knowing what their rates were!)

DIXON:
>Any opinions on the Complete Carl Barks in Hardcover--fifteen volumes,
>isn't it?  VS. the softcover volumes coming out as Donald Duck 
>Adventures, et al?  
      The WDC&S in Color albums reprint nearly all the articles from the 
corresponding hardback CBL and also include DOZENS of new articles.  
Very good collections.  The color is great most of the time, although 
now and then there's a story that's colored very darkly.
      On the other hand, the DDA in Color albums aren't quite as good.  
Many very good articles from the hardback CBL aren't in them, and the 
editorial style is quite strange (there's a second title page in issues 
that contain stories from two comics, for example;  these title pages 
feature merely poorly-traced blowups of panel art, while the stories' 
original covers are not reprinted in the album).  The albums are NOT a 
big loss, though, because the color really is great (except for that in 
"Ghost of the Grotto/Adventure Down Under" in album 7, where the colors 
are extremely dark).
      The Gyro albums are a must-have.  The color is uniformly GREAT and 
there are a few good articles too (although two of the volumes have no 
articles whatsoever).  The Scrooge One-Pagers albums are great too, with 
an absolutely wonderful article in the second one about Scrooge in 
animation.  Which brings me to...

      The appearance Scrooge made in the titles of the MM Club:  he 
bursts out of the Big Bad Wolf's top hat (wearing a top hat of his own, 
of course).  This is ONLY in ONE season of the club's opening, by the 
way;  the more common opening is the one they usually showed on the 
Disney Channel, way back when.  I've only seen the earlier opening, 
including Scrooge, on a few special compilations.
       Scrooge is actually drawn nicely in the MM Club opening, which is 
more than I can say for all but a few DuckTales episodes and that 
excellent 1985 Sport Goofy program.  (Any real Scrooge fan has to catch 
this when the Disney Channel shows it next time -- aside from the 
bizarre use of Goofy, this is Scrooge and the Beagle Boys animated the 
way they really should be.)

>thought it was Hewey Green, Louie Blue and Dewey Red.
Nope.  Huey = Red (the brightest HUE), Dewey = Blue (the color of DEW), 
and that leaves Louie (and "leaves" = GREEN).  Gladstone and Disney have 
both fudged this occasionally, but most of the time they're on target.

David Gerstein
<9475609 at arran.sms.ed.ac.uk>