"DUCKTALES Remastered": No More Games

David Gerstein was in the area doing some research and stayed overnight at our place.  Some of his and my time together included a bit of ogling of the "movie" (between-game-play) portion of the DuckTales Remastered video game.  Never having been a gamer, THIS is the part of greatest interest to me.  It is the closest we're ever going to get to a 101st episode of the series (or, if you prefer, a second theatrical feature film).

I'll post some thoughts on the action when I have time. For the moment, I'm concentrating on doing screen-grabbing from the second-season eps in preparation for resuming my regular RETROSPECTIVES in January.

Wilkes 21, Stevenson 17

While Nicky and I were away for the weekend -- visiting Nicky's sister and hospitalized brother-in-law in NYC and meeting up with David Gerstein and Joe Torcivia -- Stevenson was, in all likelihood, kicking away any chance of its first .500 season, thanks to a dreadful fourth-quarter meltdown at Wilkes.  For three quarters, the Mustangs had things their own way against the Colonels, building a 17-0 lead.  Wilkes finally managed to score on a gadget play early in the fourth.  An SU fumble and a subsequent personal foul penalty helped the Colonels narrow the margin to 17-14 with about 1 1/2 minutes left.  The Mustangs needed only one first down to ice the game but couldn't get it.  Working with no timeouts, Wilkes connected on two long pass plays to get down to the SU 1, then scored on another pass to take the lead with :24 remaining.  A desperation pass by the Mustangs was intercepted as time ran out.

The Mustangs' mental mindset will be key as they host winless Misericordia this weekend.  This should be win number four at long last, but who knows how long that Wilkes wilt will linger.

Book Review: WALT DISNEY'S MICKEY MOUSE COLOR SUNDAYS Vol. 1: CALL OF THE WILD by Floyd Gottfredson (Fantagraphics, 2013)

With four superbly-mounted and highly praised volumes of Floyd Gottfredson's MICKEY MOUSE daily strip behind it, Fantagraphics "opens up the magic paintbox" with its first collection of MICKEY Sunday strips, covering the years 1932-1935.  The "many colors you'll find" here, especially in the early strips, may be a bit surprising.  The Sunday version of MICKEY represented the first time that most people had seen Mickey and friends in anything other than the black and white of the contemporary animated shorts, and so it took a while for the characters' chromaticity to develop any consistency.  Poor Pluto gets the most schizophrenic treatment: his tint changes from brown with a pink muzzle (in the first Sunday, which was actually drawn by Earl Duvall), to light brown, to dark brown, to pink, to white as the proverbial sheet!  (That last choice suggests that Pluto may be a distant relation of that notoriously cowardly canine Scooby-Doo.)  Mickey and Minnie endure a short period in which their faces are flesh-colored before settling down to the standard Kabuki mask look, while the early, squat, long-beaked version of Donald Duck is yellow, or, as he probably would have put it, "yella."  The whole process of color restoration here is nothing if not thorough.

During his time on the Sunday page, Gottfredson alternated sequences of "done-in-one" gag strips with short continuities.  The complexity of the latter gradually ramped up until they approached daily continuities "in miniature" -- and with a slightly lower "seriousness" quotient.  "Dr. Oofgay's Secret Serum" (1934) tackles the same basic trope as the earlier daily story "Blaggard Castle," with a scientist's invention altering Horace Horsecollar's personality, but the metamorphosis occurs in the context of a gag-laden camping trip, occurs by accident (Horace sitting on a serum-filled needle), and is caused by a much dottier and more "lovable" miracle-provider than the fearsome trio of Professors Ecks, Doublex, and Triplex.  In "Hoppy the Kangaroo" (1935), Mickey undergoes a test run in the "training an unwanted gift animal to win an athletic contest" sweepstakes several months before having to deal with Oscar the Ostrich in the daily strip, but the stakes are nowhere near as high; Mickey's simply trying to best Pete and Pete's trained gorilla, as opposed to staying out of jail for non-payment of debts.  "Rumplewatt the Giant" (1934) and "Foray to Mount Fishflake" (1934-35) is arguably the most "Sunday-centric" of this collection's continuities, primarily because they're very consciously constructed in a cliffhanger format within the general Sunday format itself, complete with "To Be Continued" boxes and first-panel recaps from Mickey.

Early on, Gottfredson seems to have realized that the Sunday page was a good vehicle for the introduction and/or development of new characters.  Various bands of cute-on-the-surface-but-anarchic-underneath Nephews who come to disrupt Mickey's home life ultimately settle down to the twin urchins who will become Morty and Ferdie, while "The Case of the Vanishing Coats" (1935) gets several weeks' jump on the daily strip's "Editor-in-Grief" in terms of being the strip's first continued story to feature Donald Duck.  "Coats" might be considered the template for all future Donald and Mickey teamups, albeit with a considerably rawer version of Donald (though Don's not really all that intolerable in this brief tale, with his antics mostly limited to one well-meaning false arrest) and a solution that is, in all honesty, pretty lame.  In gag strips, Don "enjoys" (if that's the word) a brief period as the successor to Mickey's role as comical fall guy before literally being shifted "upstairs" to the SILLY SYMPHONIES "topper" page and, later, to his own stand-alone strip.  Goofy (nee Dippy Dog/Dawg) makes appearances in "The Lair of Wolf Barker" (1933), the first of the major Sunday continuities, and "Mount Fishflake"; the sideways logic that will so memorably inform so many of his gag-strip appearances in the late 30s has just barely begun to blossom.

The volume's ancillaries include a fine essay by J. B. Kaufman detailing the development of the Sunday page, David Gerstein and Sergio Lama's description of the earliest attempts to bring MICKEY (or a strange-looking approximation of same) to Italy, and Joe Torcivia's not-to-be-missed explanation of why Mickey's tall tale of "Rumplewatt the Giant" qualifies as the "Longest Short Story Ever Told."  Thankfully, we won't have to wait long for the other volume of Gottfredson's Sunday best to drop on our doorsteps; COLOR SUNDAYS VOL. 2 is scheduled to be released in October.

DUCKTALES RETROSPECTIVE: Episode 42, "Time Teasers"

Between TV reruns, repeated viewings of the VHS collection "Masked Marauders," and voluntary video-entertainment choices made during treadmill sessions, I've probably seen "Time Teasers" just about as often as any of the 22-minute DuckTales episodes.  You might gather that I like it a lot -- and I certainly do; I think it's the prolific Anthony Adams' best script for the series.  Though the "Time Teaser" only actually plays a role during the first half of the episode -- with the balance of the adventure comprised of a memorable and funny three-hander between Scrooge, Gyro, and the Ducks, the Beagle Boys "B" team from "Hero for Hire," and a gang of pirates led by Pete (aka Captain Blackheart) -- a lot of the discussion surrounding the ep has tended to focus on which previous "time-travel timepiece" productions may have influenced it, and, more to the Duck-point, whether it influenced Don Rosa to create the suspiciously similar comic-book story "On Stolen Time."  I've gone back and forth on the latter matter several times, and I think that I've finally come to a reasonable conclusion, which I'll detail below.  First, though, we have some back history through which to thrash.

UPDATE (7/4/13):  I've slightly rewritten the historical matter below, based on helpful commentary from Mark Lungo and David Gerstein.   

The idea of a stopwatch that can be used to manipulate time dates at least as far back as the novel THE GIRL, THE GOLD WATCH, AND EVERYTHING (1962) by sci-fi/thriller writer John D. Macdonald.  This effort seems to have inspired similar notions to start ticking away in other creators' brains during the "Era of Fantastic Television."  In October 1963, The Twilight Zone broadcast the episode "A Kind of a Stopwatch," which starred, remarkably enough, King Artie and Rufus B. Pinfeathers himself, Richard Erdman, as the bumbling nebbish who comes into possession of a time-stopping chronometer.  I've never seen that one, but, thanks to Joe Torcivia, I was able to enjoy two fourth-season Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea adventures, "A Time to Die" (1967) and "No Way Back," (1968) guest-starring Henry Jones as Mr. Pem, a strange little man with a "time displacement piece" that he intends to use for evil purposes.  Interestingly, these are the only examples of the genre of which I am aware in which the device was consciously constructed by a villain from the off.  In both "Time Teasers" and "On Stolen Time," of course, the time-stopper was built by Gyro Gearloose, only to be swiped by a group of Beagle Boys.  (I'm being nice to the Nephews, BTW, by classifying their "borrowing" of the Time Teaser from Gyro Gearloose as something other than stealing.)  Mr. Pem's relatively speedy return in "No Way Back" -- which turned out to be the final original VBS episode broadcast -- suggests that he made something of an impression in "A Time to Die," especially since he supposedly died at the end of that initial episode.

Next came a cheerfully cheesy syndicated TV adaptation of The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything (1980) starring Robert "The Forgotten Tony Stark" Hays and Pam "Mindy" Dawber.  The film was offered to TV stations in both a two-hour "movie" version and a five-part "cliffhanger" version (where have we seen that arrangement before?).  It apparently features a rather politically incorrect take on female sexuality, so I don't imagine that it appears on TV much any more, but it does enjoy that nebulous thing known as a cult following.  Given Anthony Adams' interests outside of his relatively brief career in animation writing, I think we are on fairly safe ground in assuming that he had at least some knowledge of some or all of the aforementioned versions of the "time-stop-watch" story when he wrote "Time Teasers."  

Rosa produced "On Stolen Time" four years after "Time Teasers" was first broadcast, with the story's first appearance in American Disney comics taking place in DONALD DUCK ADVENTURES #24 (1992).  Clearly, Keno Don would have had ample time (hyuck) to peruse the TV episode beforehand.  For a long time, I assumed that it did influence him in some fashion, even if he would have been loath to admit it.  Now, however, I lean more towards the theory that Rosa came up with the idea independently, or, at the very least, had no knowledge of "Time Teasers" when he wrote his story.  That's not to say that the tales don't have some points of similarity beyond the simple (and, as GeoX points out, the completely logical) notion that Gyro would create such a device and the Beagles would try to use it to rob Scrooge blind.  For example, both stories open with Scrooge tasking his relatives with a seemingly impossible assignment involving the sorting of his money: stacking bills in Donald's case, stacking all the coins by dinnertime (!!) in HD&L's.  At least Rosa, who's never been accusing of giving Donald an easy time of it, didn't impose a specific time limit on Don's task.  Adams, by contrast, seems to have the idea that Scrooge's fortune is a whole lot... well, smaller than we've traditionally been led to believe.  And it won't be the last time that he gives that impression, either.

As one might expect of a detail-obsessed former engineering student, Rosa seems to have thought through the details of the time-stopping matter rather more carefully than Adams.  The latter holds to the relatively simple idea that those who are within the sphere of influence/event horizon/penumbra/whatever of the Time Teaser when the Teaser is activated can move freely, while everything around them is frozen in time (or, more accurately, is moving much more slowly than the "Teased" individuals).  This allows for the many manipulations of the "frozen world" in which Gyro, HD&L, and the Beagles subsequently indulge.  The main problem with this approach is that the characters influenced by the Time Teaser can't interact directly with the immobile folks around them.  Greg correctly notes that this gives the early part of the episode a somewhat static, slow-moving feel, especially when the boys are finagling with the baseball game.  The repetition of the time-stopping gags on the two consecutive pitches does tend to retard the ep's progress.  (For my own part, I found the boys' foiling of the Beagles' attempted robbery and their "surprising" of the high-diving Scrooge to be the funniest parts of this whole business; they're over with quickly and include much better sight gags.)

 

Unfortunately, Adams messes up things in at least one instance; he never explains how Scrooge, HD&L, and Gyro were able to get to the docks in time to see the Beagle Boys leaving the country on the steamer.  You might argue that the Beagles needed a very long time to get Scrooge's money from the docks onto the ship, but the non-Teaser-aided return of the money to the Money Bin, which is tossed off during the episode's extremely rushed final minute, seems to have taken no more than a couple of hours!  Either Scrooge has a relatively modest fortune, or Scrooge and the boys managed to accomplish a moving task that compares favorably with HD&L's original charge to stack all of Scrooge's coins.  This hastily-cobbled-together windup is arguably the one really major weakness of "Time Teasers."

In "On Stolen Time," Rosa literally and figuratively livens things up through his inclusion of the "ten-meter clause" (a direct consequence of the "five-second rule"?) and the stipulation that one has to briefly turn off the time-device before being able to move anything in the frozen world.  This allows for the chase scenes between the Beagles and the Ducks, which are further enlivened by the knowledge that the Beagles will be able to short-circuit the Ducks' attempt to catch them if they can get outside the ten-meter radius.  This represents a distinct advantage for Rosa's story...

... which Keno Don promptly punts away by his questionable handling of the other consequence of his setup: the idea that the Beagles and Ducks are constantly placed in physical peril as they race through the frozen world.  Adams didn't address this at all, allowing the characters' manipulations of time to take place in "wide-open spaces," such as the ball park, the environs of the Money Bin, and the streets of Duckburg.  As Rosa chivvies his characters through a crowded park, the cruel edge that occasionally tainted his stories suddenly comes to the fore, and his attempts to serve up side-splitting sight gags result in a parade of panels that are painful to behold.

Given a choice between enduring these pratfalls and "having my gun replaced with a weiner," I'd gladly swallow my pride and opt for the latter.  The Toon Disney version of "Time Teasers" doesn't even force me to make the choice; it actually snips out the scene in which Louie replaces Bankjob's gun with the hot dog, presumably because we're not supposed to see a kid handling a gun for ANY reason. The scenes of the security guard shooting at the fleeing Beagles, however, are allowed to remain. If GeoX was worried about the ramifications of sanctioning an authority figure's indiscriminate firing at criminals before, then he should really be worried now.

 

Finally, of course, both time devices are smashed... but the destruction of the Time Teaser merely sets the stage for the rest of Adams' episode, while the far more overblown obliteration of the gizmo in "On Stolen Time" serves as Rosa's bravura (and, true to the form of the rest of the story's gags, rather unpleasant) slapstick climax.  Here is where I think a crucial distinction between the stories can be made: While Rosa has a better grip on the logic and mechanics of time-stoppage, Adams delivers the better narrative, in the sense of creating memorable moments, scenes, and character bits that can be fondly recalled long after the episode has been viewed.  This, by the way, is why I now tend to believe that Rosa was not influenced by Adams: Rosa's storytelling style is so focused on detail and minutiae that it's entirely believable that he pulled the "time-stop-watch" idea out of his own mental pop-culture Rolodex and decided to create a story that went to considerable length to examine the logical consequences of having and using such a device.  The result is a fine story that one can marvel at for its ingenuity, but not necessarily a story that needed to be influenced by anything other than Rosa's own highly clinical approach to storytelling.  In short, the two stories are sufficiently different in tone that I'm willing to accept the theory that they were developed independently.

* UPDATE (7/4/13):  David Gerstein provides a reference to this 2003 post on the Disney Comics Mailing List in which Don Rosa claims that he never saw "Time Teasers" and that he got the idea for "On Stolen Time" from John Macdonald's story.

The last third or so of "Time Teasers" -- the point at which Adams and Rosa part company -- is stuffed with incident in the manner of a Thanksgiving turkey, which does result in the episode having what Greg called an "overbooked" feel, but this is also the part that helps boost the ep to classic status.  All of Pete's appearances in the series are good, but this is the one that I would like to think HE enjoyed more than any other, and not simply because he's reunited with his peg leg for the duration.  The sense of "gleeful menace" that has informed many of Pete's most memorable roles over the years has rarely been displayed to better advantage than it is here.

A simple conflict between the pirates and the Time Tub-transferred Gyro, Scrooge, and HD&L would have been enjoyable enough, but for Pete to demand "command performances" from the good guys to celebrate his birthday party... now that's the sort of idea that would be hard to pull off in comics form but is tailor-made for animation.  (We never do find out what nefarious plans Pete has for the Ducks after the party is over, but, in truth, we don't really mind.)  Considering that the Ducks-Beagles teamup plan was of Scrooge's creation, one would think that he and Gyro would have put a bit more effort into their soft-shoe routine...

Uh, second cane?  From where?

... but at least HD&L's *shudder!* breakdancing has the virtue of killing off some time before the Beagle Boys are ready to test their pipes.  I can't say that I was particular wild about the boys doing this even back in the 80s, and the whole business seems horribly dated now, but at least we can draw a direct link between Scrooge's head-bouncing "sea monster" temper tantrum and Louie's ability to revolve on his head while standing upside down.  I didn't realize that such traits could be inherited.

Then, of course, we get Babyface, Bugle, and Bankjob and their out-of-deep-left-field barbershop "quartet-but-it's-actually-a-trio" performance.  I don't know what's weirder, the boys' choice of century-old musical numbers or the fact that they can actually SING.  In the second season's "Beaglemania," part of the joke was that Frank Welker and Chuck McCann's performance of the Beagles' hit song featured more vigor than actual talent; the performance on the Disney Afternoon soundtrack CD was better, but only marginally so.  Peter Cullen, Brian Cummings, and Terry McGovern, on the other hand, do so well that one winds up wishing that at least one of "I Want a Girl," "Sweet Adeline," or "Down By the Old Mill Stream" could have been wedged onto the CD as well.  For sure, this one bit imprints itself onto one's memory far more successfully than anything Rosa included in the busy, busy world of "On Stolen Time."  I'd love to know how Adams came up with this whole idea.

But wait, we're not done; we still have time to enjoy the Beagles' dramatic escape from the pirates as they jump down...a waterfall emanating from a cave shaped like a skull?!  Cornelius Coot didn't mention anything like this in his diary, did he?  Which river was that flowing into the sea -- the Duckburg, the Tulebug, or the Goose?  Given that we saw a couple of Natives in canoes fleeing the scene when the steamer arrived in Duckburg Bay, can we infer that "Skull Cave" may have been some sort of Native shrine?  What entity or entities disassembled that natural formation over the ensuing centuries -- and were there any protests?  A serious "Donaldist" could probably mine a Master's thesis, at the very least, out of an examination of these questions.

In addition to singing, the Beagle "B" team is apparently also adept at long-distance swimming.  At least, they'd better be.

After piling all of these incidents atop one another and then also including the Ducks' final efforts to use the Time Tub to transport the steamer back to modern Duckburg before the pirates can overrun them, Adams whooshes through the denouement with a haste that can only be described as indecent.  At least the Nephews wind up paying for their attempt to "grease the skids" for the Duckburg Mallards... not that we seriously expected any other outcome, of course.

While one can criticize Adams for trying to do too much here, I don't think that one can fairly criticize him for not delivering a first-rate time-travel ep.  In truth, if I could only preserve one of either "Time Teasers" or "On Stolen Time," I would choose the former without hesitation.  It may not be quite as finicky, but it's definitely more FUN.

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"DuckBlurbs"

(GeoX) The Duckburg Mallards game is in the morning, for some reason. Also, "by stopping time with every pitch, we can help the Mallards win their first game EVER!" Look: I've watched plenty of really dreadful minor-league baseball teams in my day, and none of them have had anything close to a "perfect" losing record. This would only be possible if the episode were taking place early in the Mallards' inaugural season.

Charlie Brown would like a word with you.  :-)   Yeah, it would have been more believable had the Mallards simply been a really lousy team.  Perhaps they're the perpetual poor relation of the Calisota Stealers mentioned in "Yuppy Ducks."  I always imagined the Stealers as being headquartered in St. Canard, which I take to be a larger city than Duckburg.  Large-market vs. small-market... you take it from there.

As for the fact that the game is in the morning, perhaps this is the Duckburgian equivalent of Patriot's Day in Boston.  The Red Sox have played games with late-morning starting times on that date for a number of years.

(GeoX) I like how HDL apparently were initially under the impression that a frozen baseball game would be fun to watch. A bit slow on the uptake, eh?

I don't know... they were certainly quick-witted enough to cadge refreshments from SOMEWHERE in the frozen world they'd created.  I suspect more "creative borrowing" was involved.

(Greg)  Gyro opens the door and asks them to come in since he has the deliveries ready to deliver so to speak as they go in and we pan over to see Gyro's latest invention for the Invention Of the Month Club: a combination hair dryer/popcorn maker. 

I don't recall Barks ever using the "Invention of the Month Club" idea, which seems rather surprising. Usually, Barks' Gyro worked out of his home/lab (cf. "Sir Gyro de Gearloose"), sold his inventions by pushcart, or was commissioned by the city of Duckburg to perform some task.  BTW, Gyro's dryer/popper combo here was anticipated by Barks on a 1969 cover for an issue of WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES.  I think that Gyro was correct in avoiding the use of a live test subject... and a notoriously volatile one, at that.

(Greg)  So we cut into the office as the Beagle Boys are dressed as movers (check the blue shirts) which would be fine if they didn't [have] those stupid masks on. Gyro decides to demonstrate by invoking the Time Teaser and he disappears as we see some flashing off the coat rack and then Scrooge realizes that he has his top hat and cane OUT OF NOWHERE. One problem: There was no hat and cane on the coat rack. Logic break #3 for the episode as Scrooge calls this fantastic. No; I call this logic breaking from TMS.

Nope; here is the scene outside the vault as the Beagles approach it.  The hat and cane are clearly visible.

(Greg)  After the commercial break; we return as the Beagle Boys return. And since they are fast in time; Scrooge, the nephews and Gyro are frozen in time. One problem; Gyro is now IN the vault when he should be outside.

Again, this is incorrect.  Shown below is the shot of Gyro at the end of Act Two.  He is clearly inside the vault (check the sliver of office space that you can see to the left).

(Greg)  Gyro then takes out a wooden box which contains a thermometer and time places as he puts it into the sky. See; they burned a hole in the fabric of time which makes no sense either way and Gyro needed something to justify the obvious cartoon logic. They went back to 1687 which makes sense for the time period that the Beagle Boys are in; but didn't Gyro already say that they went back 100 years? 

No, he actually said that "That steamer and your money simply slipped into another century."  He didn't specify which one.  I love the way that Scrooge cries "Simply SLIPPED?!" here.

(Greg)  Now the pirates and the [Beagle] boys start singing the song on stage together which is silly considering that now they have a clear line of sight to see the ocean. 

I don't think that you have to worry about the pirates picking up on what Gyro and the Ducks are doing out in the bay.  For one thing, they're swaying back and forth with their eyes closed.  For another, they're probably drunk by now... or at least, they would be if WDTVA sanctioned the use of alcohol.

Next: Episode 43, "Back Out in the Outback."

Haven't We Seen These Tales Before?

Long-time readers of my reviews -- going back to the days when this blog was a bare-bones enterprise housed in the "Baratcave" -- may recall the warm praise that I gave to this wonderful, David Gerstein-edited collection of the Disney GOOD HOUSEKEEPING pages of the 30s and 40s.

I'm not sure how well the volume ended up selling, but Amazon says that it has only one copy left in stock, so I'll take that as a good sign.

If there were any justice, then MICKEY AND THE GANG would forever remain the definitive collection of the HOUSEKEEPING features.  An interloper appears to have arrived on the scene, however, judging by the most recent issue of PREVIEWS magazine. 

The publisher -- either Universe or Rizzoli (what, no Isles?), depending upon what source you're reading -- credits Walt Disney (!) as the "author" of this book, which will feature "50 of the funniest and most fascinating features" from the HOUSEKEEPING years.  Rizzoli is apparently connected in some manner with the Italian edition of the Gottfredson Library, so this probably isn't some fly-by-night project, but still... are these people aware that MICKEY AND THE GANG even exists?  And if so, then what's the point?

Book Review: WALT DISNEY'S MICKEY MOUSE, VOLUME 4: HOUSE OF THE SEVEN HAUNTS by Floyd Gottfredson (Fantagraphics, 2012)

It's high-gear, open-throttle Gottfredson all the way in this latest volume, which covers a fertile period that sees the pupil-less Gottfredson Mouse scale his highest heights.  With the exception of the ethnically dodgy and relatively uninteresting "In Search of Jungle Treasure," every continuity herein can be considered a classic.  I admit that it requires something a stretch to admit "Oscar the Ostrich" into this pantheon of deathless works, but that story can certainly be considered a classic of its kind (the "Mickey unwillingly adopts a destructive animal" gambit or the "Mickey inadvertently gets in trouble with the law" trope -- your choice), and the "battle royal on the track" that wraps up the brief tale fills in the deficit of meaningful incident with all-out slapstick fun.  Gottfredson gives us some of his best-realized one-shot characters -- the reclusive atom-aligner Dr. Einmug of "Island in the Sky", the corpulent Southern gentlehound Colonel Bassett of "The Seven Ghosts," the round-eared reprobate replica King Michael XIV, aka "The Monarch of Medioka" -- in these stories, even as he is making some significant moves on the chessboard in terms of realigning Mickey's stable of supporting players.  In short, if you only get ONE volume in this collection covering the button-eyed period, then this is the one.  (However, if you PLAN to get only one volume in this collection, then perhaps you should reconsider!)

Many folks would probably argue that "Island in the Sky," aka "The Sky Adventure," is the best continuity in this volume.  It's certainly had the hardiest afterlife, as Joe Torcivia describes in great detail here.  The memorable characterization of Dr. Einmug -- which Gottfredson, remarkably, never saw fit to use again, though he's popped up a couple of times in more recent Mouse stories -- certainly distinguishes the tale and gives it a genuine note of tragedy, with the good Doctor ultimately realizing that his discovery of unlimited power holds only unlimited potential for evil in a fallen world.  From a technical standpoint, "Island" may also be considered a key story in that it is here that fully-realized Goofy takes over the role of Mickey's major sidekick.  Previously, Goofy (born Dippy Dawg) had been but one of a number of cast members, and not a particularly likable one at that.  The "classic" comics Goofy, he of the humorously twisted logic and slow-but-not-quite-that-slow brain, finally begins to snap into focus during "The Seven Ghosts," an enjoyable shout-out to the great Mickey-Donald-Goofy team-up cartoons of the era (not to mention an historical touchstone for future exploiters of the "phony ghost" trope).  Goofy's development came just in time; with Donald moving off to his own comic strip, such old standbys as Horace Horsecollar quietly being phased out, and Minnie becoming steadily more "domesticated," a new male partner was sorely needed to accompany Mickey in high adventure.  "Island in the Sky" points the way to a number of Mickey-Goofy team-ups to come, and it just may be the best of the lot.  In my opinion, however, it's not the best story in this collection.  That particular palm has to go to "Monarch of Medioka."

"Medioka" would have earned cachet even if it had been an average story, thanks to its having sparked an international incident in which Yugoslavian censors found that the story of an irresponsible king and a would-be usurper cut a little too close to the bone and pulled the MICKEY strip out of local papers.  Thankfully, it's much more than a curio, with Gottfredson kidding political doubletalk, irritating protocol, and other such "official" nonsense at considerable length.  "Medioka" might be considered an earlier, and somewhat milder version, of the savage satire of human cupidity that Gottfredson would later dish up in "The Miracle Master."  In that latter case, the audience didn't have the luxury of laughing off the gags as the product of some comic-opera European kingdom; the sins uncovered by the genie's largesse were much more universal in nature.  "Medioka" has more of the flavor of one of Roy Crane's mock-serious continuities in WASH TUBBS or CAPTAIN EASY.  It's still quite biting, though.  In one of her last really significant roles in a newspaper-strip adventure story, Minnie comes storming into the picture at the end (for perfectly selfish reasons; she learns of the roistering Michael XIV's partying in European capitals and thinks that it's Mickey throwing away the fortune he'd made during "Jungle Treasure") and contributes heavily to the achievement of a happy ending.

This volume's featured "heir of Gottfredson" is Cesar Ferioli, who rates a nice, though rather brief, tribute essay from David Gerstein.  Included as a sample of Ferioli's fine work is a reprint of "The Mystery at Freefer Hall," a sort-of-homage to "The Seven Ghosts" written by Donald Markstein and published by Gemstone in 2006.  Ferioli had a delicate balancing act to perform here -- he has to mimic the artistic look of the original story and supporting characters while making Mickey, Donald, and Goofy look at least somewhat more modern -- but manages to pull it off.  The other ancillary materials are all up to the earlier volumes' high standards.  In truth, the only disappointment about this volume is that we will probably have to wait for quite some time before the next daily-strip collection appears; the next release, slated for June of next year, will double back and begin reprinting the color Sunday strips.  I can certainly understand the rationale behind this decision, but it's still something of a bummer that we'll be a bit delayed in getting to the pupiled-Mickey era.

Book Review: WALT DISNEY'S MICKEY MOUSE, VOLUME 3: HIGH NOON AT INFERNO GULCH by Floyd Gottfredson (Fantagraphics Press, 2012)

With Volume 3, the GOTTFREDSON LIBRARY well and truly swings into the "Golden Age" of the MICKEY MOUSE strip (button-eyed version).  These strips from 1934-1936 show "creator-in-chief" Floyd Gottfredson taking full control of his stories and testing his range with tightly plotted domestic dramas and semi-dramas ("Bobo the Elephant," "Pluto the Racer," "Editor-in-Grief"), swashbuckling ocean-going adventures ("The Captive Castaways," "The Pirate Submarine"), Western sagas ("The Bat Bandit of Inferno Gulch," "Race for Riches"), and even a tentative stab at an extensive sojourn into another cultural milieu (the trip to Umbrellastan in "The Sacred Jewel").  There's literally something here for everyone, and one's favorite story will simply be a matter of taste and personal experience.  For me, "Race for Riches" takes the palm, being the first Gottfredson story that I ever read, thanks to the late Bill Blackbeard's invaluable SMITHSONIAN COLLECTION OF NEWSPAPER COMICS.  That early-1980s exposure predated my "deep dive" into Disney comics collecting by a couple of years, and I recall being both surprised and amazed at how much this mysterious man Gottfredson had been able to wring out of a character then universally regarded (by the vast majority of Americans, at least) as a bland corporate symbol.  In retrospect, the fairly straightforward "Race," which sees Mickey and Horace Horsecollar (sharing their last "classic" adventure together) trying to beat the inevitable Pegleg Pete and the grasping Eli Squinch to a cache of hidden gold and prevent foreclosure on Clarabelle Cow's home in the process, was an ideal introduction to the world of the "death-defying, tough, steel-gutted Mouse" celebrated in Blackbeard's pioneering essay "Mickey Mouse and the Phantom Artist" (which is reprinted herein).  It shows Mickey as a character capable of adventure, yet, in a sense, locked into what was even then considered a pretty conventional, melodramatic plot line.  The "cognitive dissonance" between what I thought The Mouse was in the early 80s and what Gottfredson had conceived him to be half-a-century before would have been far more severe had I commenced my Gottfredson studies with the crusading Mickey who battled racketeers and corrupt politicos in "Editor-in-Grief" or the Mickey who took down the would-be world conqueror Dr. Vulter in "The Pirate Submarine."

In their commentaries and essays on the stories, Tom Andrae, David Gerstein, Leonardo Gori, and Francesco Stajano make the point that the Mickey seen here is a rather more mature character than the happy-go-lucky "kid" of the earlier strip adventures.  This maturation process allowed for a somewhat more sober tone to creep into the stories.  Reading the adventures in chronological order, I was also struck by the tone of cynicism (or, if you're being kind, realism) that Gottfredson brought to these tales.  Isn't Carl Barks supposed to be the "master satirist" of Disney comics, the one who looked with a jaundiced eye on the faults and foibles of a fallen world?  Here, though, Gottfredson presents us with a lengthy parade of crooked landlords, phony "community pillars," racketeers, petty race-fixers, insensitive kibitzers, pompous officials, wannabe dictators, apathetic (until roused) Mousetonians, bumbling sheriffs, knuckle-headed Middle Easterners...  It's just a short walk from here to the approach taken by Gottfredson in his most misanthropic masterpiece, "The Miracle Master."  I suppose that I can understand why Gottfredson did this -- to permit the occasionally-fallible-but-usually-competent Mickey to shine by contrast, and, needless to say, to make it easier to get laughs from the newspaper readership, with its expectation of a proliferation of gags to spice up the adventure narrative.  But, geez, Gottfredson certainly doesn't need to apologize (or would that be the right word?) to Barks or anyone else when it comes to painting a begrimed background upon which to display his hero.  The good cheer and simple competence of Mickey's Air Mail/Air Force ally Captain Doberman stand as a shining beacon by contrast.  Perhaps in gratitude, Gottfredson slicks Doberman up considerably during this period, shaving a goodly number of pounds from the captain's frame, giving him a thorough shave, and even bobbing his ears between the time of "The Captive Castaways" and that of "The Pirate Submarine."

The presentation of "The Sacred Jewel" -- one of the few "classic" Gottfredson stories that Gladstone Comics did not reprint during the period 1986-1990 -- brings to mind another interesting point about Gottfredson's tactics during the "classic" era, one that, in this case, places him in direct opposition to Barks.  "Jewel" marked one of the few times that Gottfredson took his characters to another civilized country, as opposed to a desert island, the high seas, the jungle, a prehistoric land ("The Land of Long Ago"), and other climes where civilization cannot be said to have wholly taken root.  Therefore, this story has something of the air of a tentative, "feeling-one's-way" exercise, and its inconsistent nature reflects this.  In the later, and much superior, "Monarch of Medioka," Gottfredson notably does not feel the need to inject Pete, Sylvester Shyster, Squinch, or any other familiar figures into the proceedings as visiting villains; the scenario and the setting of that story are strong enough to support themselves.  He doesn't seem to have had nearly the same level of confidence in the denizens of Umbrellastan in "Jewel."  As Gerstein notes, the characterization of the Umbrellastanians is all over the map, borrowing various French, Elizabethan English, and (of course) Middle Eastern tropes right and left.  This tale provided an opportunity for Gottfredson to create a completely original adversary that reflected the local environment, but "the evil Prince Kashdown" gets virtually no screen time, with Pete and Shyster (who speak phony "Umbrellastanese" even when no one else can possibly hear them!) taking up the camel's share of the water, er, beer, er, oxygen.  Barks, by contrast, dove right into exotic settings in "The Mummy's Ring" and never looked back; his depiction of such settings became more sophisticated over time, but the larger point is that Barks seemed drawn to creating and exploring unusual civilizations in a way that Gottfredson truthfully was not. 

In the back of the book, following the "usual" features on characters, overseas reprints, and the like, Gerstein and Alberto Becattini present "The Heirs of Gottfredson: The 1930s School," focusing on Britain's Wilfred Haughton and Italy's Federico Pedrocchi.  Pedrocchi gets especially cushy treatment with the reprinting in its entirety of "Donald Duck and the Secret of Mars," the creator's first serial for the fledgling Italian Disney publication PAPERINO.  Donald may have been the star of this story, but it bears the mark of Gottfredson throughout -- an accurate reflection of just how immense of an impact Floyd had on the world market for Disney comics.

Comics Review: DISNEY'S FOUR COLOR ADVENTURES, VOLUME 1 (July 2011, Boom! Studios)

For all the optimistic good cheer evident in David Gerstein's introduction, I think that we're more likely to see the deployment of a FIFTH color than to see a follow-up to this collection of American Disney comics rarities. That's not to say that the reprintings of ONE SHOT COLOR COMICS #4 (February 1940) and ONE SHOT COLOR COMICS #13 (1941) -- to give these tomes their rather awkward "official" names -- aren't heartily appreciated. As, respectively, the first all-color English-language Disney comic and the first comic-book adaptation of a Disney (sort of) feature film, they deserved to be brought back into the light.

COLOR #4 is as meat-and-spuds as it gets -- a great, quivering, 64-page hunk of DONALD DUCK daily-strip reprints from early 1939. The strips are presented one after another, without even the slight attempt at gag-dividing that was seen in the first two issues of WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES. With the idea of American Disney comics being so new at the time, I wonder how many readers unfamiliar with the nature of the DONALD strip thought that the "narrative" was "mighty confusing." While the collection of work by Bob Karp and Al Taliaferro (..."with Carl Barks"? Why wasn't that explained?) suffers from the same "law of diminishing returns" that plagued "Gladstone II"'s relentless reprinting of old strips in its DONALD DUCK title, the gags are somewhat easier to take now that Donald has graduated from his previous stint as "The Compleat Asshole" and is now starting to faintly resemble the harried suburban Everyman and ineffective parental figure whom Barks would inherit and raise to a higher creative plane. The Nephews (whose earliest appearance in the SILLY SYMPHONIES DONALD Sunday strip are also reprinted here, complementing an informative article on Taliaferro by Thomas Andrae) have likewise been toned down from their earliest, most "hellionish" incarnation and are now just as likely to flummox Unca Donald, or innocently get him into trouble, as to actively torment him. Sometimes the point of a gag has curled up and died in the intervening seventy-plus years -- when was the last six-day bike race YOU saw? -- but most of them are pretty decent, even today.

COLOR #13 is a fairly thorough "panelization" of the various featured items in The Reluctant Dragon (1941), now perhaps best remembered as (1) the first appearance of a Goofy "how-to" short ("How to Ride a Horse"); (2) the first big-scale "How it's Made" tour of the Walt Disney Studio, as experienced by humorist Robert Benchley (who himself famously pioneered the "how-to" genre in a series of live shorts); (3) the film that came out during the bitter Disney strike of 1941 and thereby mocked its own "just one big happy family" pretensions. David Gerstein describes how artists Irving Tripp and Jack Hannah relied on storyboard materials to produce this pioneering effort, but Tripp almost takes it too far in his adaptation of "The Reluctant Dragon" itself, drawing "backgrounds" that are more like a rumor and using pose after pose that appear to have been cadged directly from the 'boards. This can also be seen in Tripp's adaptation of "Baby Weems," but that was presented in the movie in storyboard format to begin with. "Dragon" was more ambitious and deserved better, but instead, we get static poses and text, text everywhere. Several full pages include just one smallish character drawing afloat in a sea of explanatory verbiage. It's as if we've gone back to the dawn of the comic strip at times. At least the figure drawing is good. Jack Hannah's putative rendition of the Donald short "Old MacDonald Duck," which was also presented in rough format in the film, and "How to Ride a Horse" (artist unknown, according to inDucks) look a bit more like many of the original Disney comics that would be coming down the pipeline in the early FOUR COLOR days, though there is still lots of text. (I do hope that the letterer got paid more than anyone else for this issue.) There's an unexpected bonus in the form of a text adaptation of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" from Fantasia (1940), the first attempt of several to put this story into comics format, and a column about Fantasia (which was then in the process of bombing big-time at the b.o. in first release) by Leopold Stokowski. Since The Reluctant Dragon was seen as a "cheater" by many critics at the time, the inclusion of the Fantasia material here may have been an effort to give the Dragon adaptation "class by proxy," not to mention convince just a few more folks to go see Fantasia in the process.

Boom! has made many missteps in its handling of the Disney characters, but one can't really fault the company's archival efforts, nor the high quality of the CLASSICS hardbound line. Had Boom! refrained from reprinting everything it released in the early stages and reserved the collections for "special events," perhaps its bottom line would have been boosted and the traditionalist fans whom the company turned off with its radical "new directions" would have been sufficiently mollified to support the company. Sometimes, I think that Donald's Nephews should have been named Coulda, Woulda, and Shoulda when they appeared in Boom! releases... If this is, in fact, the last of the vintage wine, then it was a generally enjoyable potable on which to part ways.

kaboom! Goes the Dynamite -- FOR REAL??

DUCKTALES #4, the immediate successor to the utter disaster that was DT #3, was originally scheduled to be released this week. Curious thing, though... I could find no sample preview of the issue on the Boom! Web site or anywhere else. I checked the "Extended Forecast" lists at ComicList (see link below) and was presented with this shiny nugget of news:

DUCKTALES #4: Release date TBD (to be determined)
DUCKTALES #5: Release date 9/14/2011
DUCKTALES #6 (last issue): Release data 10/12/2011

Wuh-oh! I've never seen anything like this in my time. (Perhaps someone more familiar with the Whitman Comics "plastic bag" era has; Joe, David, how about you?) Since #4 is the final issue of the "Rightful Owners" arc, something major must be up here. A couple of suggestions for the delay, suggested by me and others on the Disney Comics Forum:

(1) DT #4 was SO HORRIBLY DREADFUL that even Boom! wasn't willing to try and release it, especially in light of the fallout from DT #3.

(2) Someone at Disney got wind of the abysmal quality of DT #3 and nixed the publication of DT #4 until it could be reviewed for, as they say, "quality control purposes."

(3) Disney may be so appalled by DT #3 that it pulled the plug on kaboom! Disney comics two months before the scheduled end of the line.

What say you?

Book Review: WALT DISNEY'S MICKEY MOUSE: "RACE TO DEATH VALLEY" by Floyd Gottfredson (Fantagraphics Press, 2011)

High-quality newspaper comic-strip reprint projects have become so commonplace in recent years that there may be an unconscious tendency among some readers to simply lump Fantagraphics' new FLOYD GOTTFREDSON LIBRARY in with the crowd. This temptation should be avoided with extreme prejudice. Of all the comics libraries I've seen, this one has by far the most complete and diverse collection of ancillary material. The intrigue of reading the earliest (1930-1931) MICKEY MOUSE strips (including a number written by Walt Disney himself) in restored and remastered form would have been reason enough to pick this book up, but the essays, commentaries, character sketches, and archival features all add immeasurably to one's appreciation of Gottfredson, the creator who invented the funny-animal adventure genre. Only some of the LIBRARY OF AMERICAN COMICS collections come close to this in terms of being a "total package." I'm glad to see Fantagraphics, which has dropped the ball badly on ancillaries in its COMPLETE PEANUTS series and has relied a bit too heavily on previously existing material in its POPEYE collection, taking the hint from IDW and rising to the challenge in the increasingly heated "reprint wars." Hopefully, the company will continue the trend in the upcoming Carl Barks collections.

The volume includes the pre-Gottfredson continuity-of-sorts "Mickey Mouse on a Desert Island" by Disney, Ub Iwerks, and Win Smith, but fittingly stows it away in the archival section. Instead, the first Gottfredson-influenced continuity, "Mickey Mouse in Death Valley," receives pride of place. Once Floyd takes over the writing duties from a too-busy Disney, the classic strip slowly begins to emerge, though, at this early stage, Gottfredson is just as interested in learning how his characters operate as in putting them through adventurous paces. "Death Valley" and the gypsy-infested "The Ransom Plot" are the only continuities here that can even tangentially be described as "exotic." Most of the rest of the action is set in and around the city that would become Mouseton and is rooted in quasi-domestic situations that could easily have arisen in contemporary cartoons: Mickey becomes a circus roustabout, tutors a laid-back boxing champion, helps Clarabelle Cow run a boarding house, etc. When he is responsible for dialogue as well as plotting, Gottfredson at first has a distinct tendency to overwrite, but he seems to be getting this tic under control by the volume's close.

The Mickey we see here is a slightly tamer version of the scrappy rapscallion of the early shorts, with one glaring exception. "Mickey Mouse vs. Kat Nipp" finds Mickey determined to best a pugnacious newcomer to the neighborhood by fair means or foul; a most disreputable battle of wits results. The scenario is a bit like Barks' Neighbor Jones stories in that Mickey more or less welcomes the antagonism and thus can be held at least partially responsible for a number of the things that subsequently befall him. Any number of cartoon stars have been made to look bad in this manner, of course, but seeing Mickey lean so precipitously over the "jackhasm" takes some getting used to!

Butch, a reformed moak who serves as Mickey's uncouth-yet-lovable pal in several 1931 stories, will no doubt be unfamiliar to a number of casual readers, but it's worth considering how the strip -- heck, how the history of Disney -- would have evolved had this character had more staying power. As it was, Butch sneaked his way into a publicity picture that was advertised in the strip and subsequently given away in the thousands, indicating that his fate was at a "tipping point" of sorts. He also appeared at the start of the "Circus Roustabout" continuity but then abruptly vanished, not to be seen again for many decades. What would have happened had Butch really caught on? Would the retention of Butch have meant that Goofy would never have been created? How would Butch's "dem, dese, and dose" patois have worn with audiences, compared with Goofy's hick accent? Would the fact that Butch was an ex-villain have ultimately been suppressed and Butch turned into a generic "lovable lug," only to have some "alternate-universe fanboy" later rip the scab off "the awful truth"? So might we speculate on how the history of America might have been altered had the Pilgrims landed on Manhattan Island, as they were supposed to.

Regarding the extras: The essays are a nice balance of single-story intros (by David Gerstein), reflective pieces (by Thomas Andrae), personal appreciations (by Warren Spector and Floyd Norman), and "out-there" esoterica ("interviews" with the cartoon stars). Among the particularly precious paraphernalia are some original penciled roughs by Gottfredson, the model sheet on which Ub Iwerks sketched the first images of Mickey and Minnie, and a cavalcade of covers from foreign reprint books, mostly Italian (I now begin to understand why Mussolini was so unwilling to ban the strip in Italy). There are thumbnail biographies of all the creators associated with the strip during this period, but, if you want to know exactly who was responsible for penciling and/or inking a specific strip, you'll only find that information in the table of contents. Likewise, it would have been interesting to have learned more about specific non-Disney creators who influenced Gottfredson's approach and humor style. For example, Gottfredson once cited the appearance of the black children "The Blots" in the strip JERRY ON THE JOB as having given him the germ of the idea that led to The Phantom Blot. It appears to me, however, as if that strip may have also influenced Gottfredson's frequent use of "nutty" background gags and signs -- perhaps even MICKEY's early style of lettering. Perhaps this connection should be explored in the future.

The GOTTFREDSON LIBRARY is off to a grand start and I dole out "gobs of good wishes" to everyone involved in the project.

Comics Reviews: MICKEY MOUSE #309 and WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES #720 (June 2011, kaboom!)

All credit to Boom! for figuring out a way to squeeze the most out of its last two "classic Disney" comics releases. The second part of Romano Scarpa's adventure "The Treasure of Marco Topo" (1984) wasn't originally supposed to be in WDC&S #720, but the company wisely bumped a previously announced feature so as to slip Scarpa's entire story under the wire before the guillotine fell. (Those metaphors aren't mixed, they're positively tangled!). The last-minute switch actually wound up making a whole lot of sense, as Scarpa's tale, with its clever and entertaining crossover of the Duck and Mouse "universes," frankly deserved to appear in WDC&S, the omnibus comics title par excellence. "Here's to the greatest bunch of characters I know!" Mickey declares at the end of "Topo." If this is, in fact, fated to be the last original line of dialogue ever delivered in WDC&S, then it would be hard to come up with a more fitting one.

These last two issues' return to the "first principles" of Disney comics -- create funny and memorable characters, let 'em bounce off of one another, and watch what happens -- stand in marked contrast to Boom!'s original plans for these titles. WDC&S and MICKEY MOUSE both began life at Boom! as wholly unrecognizable entities -- WDC&S as the home of the Ultraheroes, MM as the home of WIZARDS OF MICKEY. Both "New Directions" were actually somewhat faithful to the spirits of the titles that housed them, just in completely off-the-wall ways. Once ULTRAHEROES and WOM split off to go their merry way (assuming that full-scale power-dives into the Earth's surface qualify even tangentially as "merry"), Boom! caught lightning in a bottle with Casty in WDC&S and kept MICKEY readable with a generally good mixture of new and old material. It wasn't enough to save the day, but "Topo" allows Boom! to cede its control of these titles with a considerable amount of grace.

The story of Mickey's search for a golden gondola ornament hidden in Venice by his ancestor Marco Topo contains surprisingly little "real" action -- at least, less than originally seems to be promised by a European treasure jaunt involving Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Pluto, Scrooge, Brigitta MacBridge, Pete, Trudy Van Tubb, and The Phantom Blot. (Where are Donald and his Nephews, you ask? Let co-scripter Joe Torcivia enlighten you on that point himself.) A good portion of Part One is taken up by Mickey's wordsmithing neighbor's translation of Marco Topo's diary, and, once the gang gets to Venice, all of the action takes place in a single square in the city's Getto Novo district. Scarpa does pay good attention to local color in setting the action during the Carnival of Venice and using a real podium in the square as a key marker in the search for the ornament, but I rather wish that "The Maestro" had made use of a few more locations in his native city. What makes the story work are the believable interactions between the characters -- and here, Joe and David Gerstein shine. Everyone gets something to do (though The Blot spends most of his time skulking around in the background and muttering to himself before making one big push for the McGuffin near the end), and everyone is written perfectly in character. It "feels" very much like a modern-day version of the Gold Key PHANTOM BLOT comic, in which the writers effortlessly mixed and matched various characters to extremely good effect.

There are a couple of weak spots in the plot that Joe and David, try as they might, can't quite manage to paper over. If the spirit of Marco Topo is doomed to hang around the square until some descendant finds his ornament, then shouldn't Marco have made double-extra sure that his descendants would be able to find the instructions for locating the ornament a bit more easily? Even Mickey would have had a hard time finding Topo's diary had Pete not crushed The Mouse's newly-inherited "18th-century cupboard" with a steamroller and revealed the precious parchments "hidden in the paneling." At least Topo doesn't appear to particularly regret his foolishness, even getting into the spirit of the Carnival revelers who enjoy playing pranks on Mickey and his friends. A more serious (and frankly annoying) issue arises when the Carnival-goers greet Mickey's gang as...

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... stars of a reality series back home. Oog! Here, Joe and David were trying to make sense of the obvious fact that the Venetians clearly recognize Mickey and his gang as "celebrities" of some sort. However, I would have tried to tie the explanation into previously established Disney material, as opposed to riffing on The Jersey Shore. How about regarding the House of Mouse short cartoons as "reality TV" of a sort... or DuckTales as "The Further Adventures of the Famous Scrooge McDuck with a Camera Along"? We could then explain the presence of Trudy and Brigitta by positing that they appeared in "later seasons" of HOM and/or DT -- seasons that we unlucky denizens of "Earth Prime" never got to see but the inhabitants of "Earth-Disney" did. Anything is preferable to trying to figure out which of the cast members of Calisota Shore corresponds to "Snooki."

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Picked nits aside, this was a most delightful way to conclude Boom!'s tenure on the "classic Disney" titles. Uh... over to you, Stan? (And I don't mean Blather.)