• Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I have a working theory that Donald Duck comics never got popular in the US because of the ever-present scathing critique of capitalism

    • snor10@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      They’re not!? Colour me surprised!

      Super popular in Sweden, at least when I grew up.

      • Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Donald got comics in Sweden that characterized him completely differently than how he’s shown in the US. I think he’s a much better character there.

        • Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Donald was always a more appealing character to me than Mickey Mouse because he’s so relateable. He has trouble with love and with money and he’s impulsive and impatient.
          Mickey, on the other hand, is such a nothing-character. He’s basically just a brand mascot at this point, with no recognizeable character traits.
          And while there are iterations of Mickey that actually give him a personality, it’s much less consistent than Donald.

          • DroneRights [it/its]@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            And I don’t understand why anyone likes Minnie either. She has exactly one more character trait than Mickey, and it’s “girl”. Which is just a perfect little example of patriarchy’s normalisation of manhood and why the 1900s sucked at writing female characters

            • Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Yeah they probably only created Minnie just to have a female character, without thinking about trivial stuff like a personality. Same for Smurfette

              • DroneRights [it/its]@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                Oh, Smurfette is actually interesting. Smurfs are a single-gender species in nature, but Smurfette was created by an evil wizard to inflitrate the smurfs and help the wizard capture them. So the fact that her only personality trait is “girl” is actually diagetically justified and it can lead into some interesting directions. That said, after breaking free from her programming she has the personality traits of guilt for her past actions and appreciating a new family. So there’s actually a bare minimum of depth there and tons of room to grow the story and the character in interesting directions, though unfortunately that promise wasn’t really explored because… it’s the fucking smurfs

      • samus12345@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I recall them being popular in Germany, too, but yeah, they never took off like that here in the US.

        • snor10@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Disney had (has?) a very strong cultural position in Sweden.

          It’s a Christmas tradition to watch a TV broadcast of a Disney cartoon medley that started 1960 and is still going strong, the majority of Swedes watch it every year.

          Before the dedicated cartoon channels made their debut in the latter half of the 90’s, the only time you could watch cartoons where on Friday night, and it was all Disney. It was called Disneydags, or Time for Disney translated.

        • snor10@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Sweden in the 90’s and 00’s kids would collect the Disney pocket books like they where shonen manga.

          The spines would make a continuous picture and having no gaps where a mark of pride.

          • kerf@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Spot on! I looked upon my collection with pride when I visited my parents last time. Even have most of the early ones where only half of the spreads were printed in color

            • snor10@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Haha, nostalgin alltså.

              Samlade aldrig själv, men hade vänner som var galna i Kalle Anka pocketböcker lol.

          • Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Was it also possible to subscribe to the pocket books in Sweden? I had a subscription growing up in Iceland (Donald Duck is huge over there as well)

            • snor10@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              I didn’t collect them myself, so I actually don’t know.

              But it seems like a pretty safe bet to assume you could.

              What is Donald Duck called in Icelandic? In Sweden he is kalled Kalle Anna and in Denmark I think Anders And.

              Hewey Dewey and Lewey is called Knatte Fnatte and Tjatte.

              • Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                The comics were only available in Danish for a while so we mostly took the Danish names, so in Icelandic Donald is Andrés Önd (similar to Anders And).
                The nephews are Ripp, Rapp and Rupp (Rip, Rap and Rup in Danish).
                Funnily enough there’s a generational gap between people who call Goofy Fedtmule (the Danish name) or Guffi (the Icelandic translation name)!

          • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            The spines would make a continuous picture and having no gaps where a mark of pride.

            That usually only happens in “complete collections” or something like that in the US. With any medium, I mean. Movies, books, comics, etc… And it doesn’t always happen, either.

    • FedFer@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      1 year ago

      In Italy, for some reason, Mickey Mouse comics (including a lot of Donald Duck stories) are SUPER popular, Donald’s depicted as always in debt, losing any job he can get and going on extreme life-threatening adventures with Scrooge just to get a cent off his uncle’s debt list, but nobody uses this to actually think that this might be a real world problem and brushes it off as an exaggeration. Are Italians (including me) blind?

      • snooggums@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        That’s because he was shown to care about a few people he was related to without needing to give up his vast amount of wealth.

        • samus12345@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          This despite him being named after Ebeneezer Scrooge for a reason. I guess he was post-ghost visit Scrooge.

      • Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Funny thing is, I feel like the new Ducktales series is the closest TV representation of the comics-versions of the characters. They change some things (most crucially they give Huey, Dewey and Louie individual personality traits), but overall it really feels like watching the European comic books come to life. Scrooge is still too much of a good guy, where in the comics he’s often a kind of villain.

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      That would sadly explain it. We only recently got out of the Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaire phase and only because we were basically forced to.

    • bane_killgrind@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Nobody is actually this wealthy, it implies Scrooge McDuck has more than 525 trillion dollars.

      Elon could only lose a half million dollars every minute if he was going broke in 600 years.

      Edit I screwed up my math someone correct me

      • vortic@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That’s off by a bit:

        600 years * 365 days/year * 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour = 315,360,000 minutes

        315,360,000 minutes * $1,000,000,000/minute = $315,360,000,000,000,000 or $315 Quadrillon

        For Musk:

        $225.5B current NW

        $225,500,000,000 / 315,360,000 minutes = $715/minute

  • tweeks@feddit.nl
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    1 year ago

    Well, he has a position to uphold; what about future generations growing up with a broke Scrooge.