digest #127

[Don Rosa]

From: Jakob Soederbaum
>>>>When he gets up,
someone slams a window over his hands. In the next scene, we see Donald as
he (probably) yells of pain outside the window, and the boss saying to his
secretary "Don't ever speak to me like that again, Gretta!". This seems to
imply that he's hearing bad language, probably from Donald

Yes, it seems to imply that, but it had no reason to. Donald had not
uttered a sound up to that time. If anyone inside could hear him yelling
after the window is shut on his fingers (even if he was shown yelling
rather than just making a face), I, as a reader, would wonder how someone
in some distant location offscreen somewhere (NOT shown in a room with an
open window) would hear him while the person only a few feet away hears
nothing. But besides that, no one in comic-book-sequencial-timing in the
first balloon of that panel could be asking about any sounds except those
made in the *previous* panel, which was only the window slamming. This
showed someone's misunderstanding of logic and timing in sequencial
storytelling. That why it puzzled/worried me more than some other sort of
goof... thinking that any of this would seem "right" to any comics editor.
And that's the only reason such a very small matter still warrants such
discussion so many years later.

>>>But what did the original say, then? (No one says he/she is
*going* to shut the window, since this is already done) In the Swedish
version, the boss says (translated) "Don't yell at me, Kerstin!" onto which
she replies "I just shut the window!". So there's no big difference between
the Egmont and the Disney version,

Well, I didn't know when I mentioned that incident in "Incident" that part
of this mystery would be solved. So, It wasn't a crackpot at Disney that
made a senseless rewrite... it was someone at Egmont a year earlier in
their version of my script. (This was before Byron Erickson who understands
comics eminently and who now edits from my original scribble-pages came
along to take charge.)
So, what DID the original scribbles say? I dug into the archives to correct
my memory of the matter by seeing my actual writing. No one said they were
going to shut the window, she was answering a question. Voice from
offstage: "Did you shut the window, Gitte?" Gitte: "Yes, it was getting
drafty." Simple as that.
(Gitte was the name of the secretary in the Egmont editor-in-chief's office
at the time.)
The other annoying change in that script, as I recall, was the closing gag.
My original had Donald, after he has been through so much, had such a
hair-raising adventure, and thinks his falling is all done and he's safe,
falls down an open manhole where $crooge had gone at the beginning of the
story to search for a lost coin. When Donald lands in the ooze next to him,
$crooge with an irritated expression says "Aren't you supposed to be
washing windows?" This appeals to my sense of British understatement
humor... $crooge being so unaware and uninterested in all that's happened,
and is only concerned about his windowcleaner not taking a break. Not a
huge gag, but I liked it as a nice deadpan ending. But the Disney version,
and I now assume the Egmont version, had $crooge saying "What goes up must
come down".          Huh?  Yeah, but so what? Huh?