DCML digest #1042

[Don Rosa]

From: Goofy313g at aol.com
>>>This question is directed to Don Rosa but I ask him here because I
thought it
could interrest people here...
It is about Scrooge's paternal grandfather...
The character only appears in your Duck Family Tree...
In the original American version, this character is called "Dirty" Dingus
McDuck. Dingus McDuck was a SCOTTISH MINER.
Doing some researches with my friends from dcml, my comics collection and
inducks, I found that in the story "The Search for Cyril", from "Donald
Duck"
# 70, from 1960 Bob Gregory and Tony Strobl already gave a grandpa to
Scrooge. His name was Titus McDuck (TitUS sounds a little bit like DingUS),
and he is a SCOTTISH MINER too!...
I thought that maybe you had been inspired from the character to create your
Dingus...

No, I was inspired by $crooge saying that his grandfather was a miner... I
think it was in Barks' "The Golden River". I'm not familiar with the story
you mention since I never paid a lot of attention to any story that was not
by that "good artist", not even when I was very young. But if I had known
that there already was a story that had named a character that MUST have
existed (as opposed to a character that Barks did not first say existed), I
would have used that name. That's how I treated the name of Elvira for
Grandma -- it was not a Barks "fact", but it still had been used in a story
long ago that I had made a note of for possible use in my "Lo$". I would
have been happy to use "Titus" for $crooge's Grandfather... that's a good
name.

>>>But the story doesn't stop there!!! Titus McDuck was translated Titus Von
Anka into Swedish. And guess what was Dingus' translation? Titus Von Ankka
too ! ! ! So I decided to consider them as the same character in my Duck
Family Tree...

Well... they'd hafta be the same character, right? $crooge has two
grandfathers, but the other is not named "McDuck". So, I'll bet the Swedish
translator is a Duck expert (aren't you, Stefan?), and used that earlier
name instead of my "Dingus". Good for him!!!! Maybe if I ever need to use
that character again, I'll see if they'll let me use "Titus" rather than
Dingus.

>>>>Did you know about the swedish translation of Dingus?

I don't know about the anything translation of anything!

>>>I was also wondering if you had already seen this tree :
http://goofy313g.free.fr/calisota_online/trees/gisletree.html
It's a tree from 1973... (more on the page)
and I was wondering if, before to build your own tree, you had seen that
one:
http///goofy313g.free.fr/calisota_online/trees/germantree.html
In both trees, "whitewater" Duck is Fethry's brother, and they have been
published before yours... Did you get the idea about making whitewater
Fethry's brother from one of these trees, or did you have the idea yourself?

The English-translated names on that first Tree must have been added after
my Tree was published -- that's too much of a coincidence that the names are
the same. Also, I don't see any way to tell that those English translations
of the names were done in 1973 or last year. And I think I have seen that
German Tree you mention even though your link appears "dead" to me. I would
be amazed if either Tree used the name Whitewater Duck because I don't see
how they could -- those old Trees were never "officially" translated into
English until perhaps someone did it recently with no idea what the original
Tree creator would have intended.
But all I know for sure is that I had never seen or heard of those other
Trees when I did my Tree -- my Tree was based solely on characters created
by Barks or characters that MUST have existed for Barks' characters to exist
(parents, grandparents, etc.)... well, with the exception of the addition of
Fethry which the editors insisted on.