Duckburg, Mouseton, $crooge's finances et al

[RMorris306@aol.com]

    A lot of interesting topics since the last time I posted!

    According to the Egmont scripts I've seen, Mickey and his friends are 
assumed to live in Duckburg just as the Ducks do, though apparently 
crossovers were discouraged. I've never had trouble with occasional 
crossovers, especially since the definitive writer/artists of both characters 
used them...Donald himself appeared in several of Gottfredson's Mickey 
sequences (at first seeming to be no older than his early teens...but, this 
being the '30's rather than the '40's, it fits in rather neatly with Don's 
timeline), and Barks used several of the Mouse cast (Black Pete especially) 
in some of his early Donald Duck stories. Barks probably used Pete because 
Donald didn't really have any separate recurring villains at the time...at 
least, unless Neighbor Jones counts. (And even he was arguably based on Pete; 
he seemed to derive from a cartoon..."Trombone Trouble," IIRC...in which the 
neighbor with whom Donald feuded WAS Pete.) Not until the '50's did Barks co
me up with his own recurring villains, and most of them...the Beagle Boys, 
Magica deSpell, Flintheart Glomgold...were more $crooge's foes than Donald's.

    Even today the Disney projects and other comics generally intermingle the 
characters; I've mentioned a Mickey Mouse newspaper sequence a year or so ago 
with Emil Eagle...a recurring rival of Gyro Gearloose, who's most assuredly 
in the Duck universe...as the villain. Yes, I know Don doesn't care for those 
stories (or for Emil, for that matter), but it does underscore the work of 
Gottfredson and Barks himself to the effect that Donald and Mickey do indeed 
live in the same universe, if not the same town. 

    Where was the name Mouseton first used? I've never seen it in a 
Gottfredson strip; indeed, I've read that Gottfredson used the name 
"Homeville," but I've never seen that, either. At that, both names seem a bit 
ironic since both towns seem to be populated mostly by anthropomorphic dogs, 
with ducks and mice in a minority. Duckburg makes sense because it was f
ounded BY a duck...Cornelius Coot...but, then again, I'm also inclined to 
basically agree with Don (and Unca Carl?) to the effect that these are all 
"really" people, not ducks or mice or dogs.

    And Barks has repeatedly shown that $crooge owns property and businesses 
all over the world, so Don is no doubt right that the Money Bin contains the 
money that $crooge earned personally in cash. And that it's mostly silver. 
(Which would mean that, like the gold coins of the '30's, most of it would 
now be worth more for the silver content than its denomination, since most 
coins now in circulation are made of cheaper metal. Then again, I know Don 
doesn't like to think of $crooge as living into the 21st century...and even I 
tend to think of him, like Barry Allen, as having essentially being as 
thorougly dead as his creator is now...)

    The only difficulty with that is, as Mike Barrier noted, that Barks never 
let consistency of details get in the way of a good story. Certainly the 
other businesses $crooge owns would undercut the force of a story like "Only 
a Poor Old Man" (among many others) in which the Beagle Boys succeed (if only 
temporarily) in walking off with the entire contents of $crooge's money bin. 
$crooge still would hardly be bankrupt if they'd actually succeeded in doing 
so, though, to obtain operating expenses, he WOULD either have to sell a 
profitable business or use his property or business as collateral for a loan, 
both of which he'd find intolerable. Between that and his personal attachment 
to all those coins (none to quite the extent as "Old #1," but all together 
would probably multiply it a hundredfold), he'd react almost as he would TO 
losing all his property. (This is the world's greatest miser, after all, who 
gets upset even when he loses a dime that ISN'T Old #1.) But I'll admit it 
undercuts a certain amount of the significance (to Donald and the rest, if 
not to $crooge) of a story of this kind...

Rich