| 1 | [[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/holiday_in_duckburg.png]] |
| 2 | [[caption-width-right:350:[[https://www.flickr.com/photos/gameraboy/43392295595/ Holiday in Duckburg by Carl Barks]]]] |
| 3 | |
| 4 | From the Creator/{{Disney}} Comics centering around Scrooge [=McDuck=] and WesternAnimation/DonaldDuck. The major works were by Creator/CarlBarks and Creator/DonRosa. This also includes the ''Franchise/DuckTales'' franchise. |
| 5 | |
| 6 | This is a key part of the ComicBook/DisneyMouseAndDuckComics, which is a ModularFranchise that's formed when this {{Verse}} is used in tandem with the ComicBook/MickeyMouseComicUniverse. |
| 7 | |
| 8 | See Creator/CarlBarks and Creator/DonRosa for Tropes specific to their stories. '''Numerous''' other authors in both America and Europe have written stories set in this universe with some of the more notable and popular ones being Al Taliaferro, Romano Scarpa, Marco Rota, Tony Strobl, Vicar, Daan Jippes, William Van Horn, Fecchi and Silvia Ziche. As such, there's a [[DependingOnTheWriter LOT of diversity between stories depending on who wrote them]]. |
| 9 | |
| 10 | Stories set in the Duckburg universe with their own pages, grouped by author: |
| 11 | |
| 12 | [[index]] |
| 13 | |
| 14 | [[folder:Carl Barks]] |
| 15 | * ''ComicBook/BackToTheKlondike'' |
| 16 | * ''ComicBook/AChristmasForShacktown'' |
| 17 | * ''ComicBook/ChristmasOnBearMountain'' |
| 18 | * ''ComicBook/TheGildedMan'' |
| 19 | * ''ComicBook/TheGoldenHelmet'' |
| 20 | * ''ComicBook/GoodDeeds'' |
| 21 | * ''ComicBook/TheHorseradishStory'' |
| 22 | * ''ComicBook/LetterToSanta'' |
| 23 | * ''ComicBook/LostInTheAndes'' |
| 24 | * ''ComicBook/TheMidasTouch'' |
| 25 | * ''ComicBook/TheOldCastlesSecret'' |
| 26 | * ''ComicBook/OnlyAPoorOldMan'' |
| 27 | * ''ComicBook/TheSecondRichestDuck'' |
| 28 | * ''ComicBook/TheThinkBoxBollix'' |
| 29 | * ''ComicBook/TrailOfTheUnicorn'' |
| 30 | * ''ComicBook/TrallaLa'' |
| 31 | * ''ComicBook/VoodooHoodoo'' |
| 32 | * ''ComicBook/WintertimeWager'' |
| 33 | [[/folder]] |
| 34 | |
| 35 | [[folder:Don Rosa]] |
| 36 | * ''ComicBook/BeagleBoysVsTheMoneyBin'' |
| 37 | * ''ComicBook/TheBlackKnight'' |
| 38 | * ''ComicBook/TheDuckWhoNeverWas'' |
| 39 | * ''ComicBook/TheDutchmansSecret'' |
| 40 | * ''ComicBook/EscapeFromForbiddenValley'' |
| 41 | * ''ComicBook/GuardiansOfTheLostLibrary'' |
| 42 | * ''ComicBook/GyrosFirstInvention'' |
| 43 | * ''ComicBook/TheLastLordOfElDorado'' |
| 44 | * ''ComicBook/ALetterFromHome'' |
| 45 | * ''ComicBook/TheLifeAndTimesOfScroogeMcDuck'' |
| 46 | * ''ComicBook/ALittleSomethingSpecial'' |
| 47 | * ''ComicBook/TheLostChartsOfColumbus'' |
| 48 | * ''ComicBook/NobodysBusiness'' |
| 49 | * ''ComicBook/TheQuestForKalevala'' |
| 50 | * ''ComicBook/ReturnToPlainAwful'' |
| 51 | * ''ComicBook/ReturnToXanadu'' |
| 52 | * ''ComicBook/TheSignOfTheTripleDistelfink'' |
| 53 | * ''ComicBook/TheSonOfTheSun'' |
| 54 | * ''ComicBook/TheThreeCaballerosRideAgain'' |
| 55 | * ''ComicBook/TheTreasuryOfCroesus'' |
| 56 | * ''ComicBook/TheUniversalSolvent'' |
| 57 | * ''ComicBook/{{WHADALOTTAJARGON}}'' |
| 58 | [[/folder]] |
| 59 | |
| 60 | [[folder:Other authors]] |
| 61 | * ''ComicBook/TheCallOfCRusso'' |
| 62 | * ''ComicBook/DoubleDuck'' |
| 63 | * ''ComicBook/{{Dragonlords}}'' |
| 64 | * ''ComicBook/PaperinikNewAdventures'' (''Duck Avenger'' in the US) |
| 65 | * ''ComicBook/ThePaupersGlass'' |
| 66 | * ''ComicBook/TheSanctuaryTree'' |
| 67 | [[/folder]] |
| 68 | |
| 69 | [[/index]] |
| 70 | ---- |
| 71 | |
| 72 | !!! ''Disney Ducks Comic Universe'' is the {{Trope Namer|s}} for: |
| 73 | * NumberOneDime |
| 74 | |
| 75 | !!Tropes: |
| 76 | |
| 77 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 78 | |
| 79 | [[folder:#-D]] |
| 80 | |
| 81 | * NumberOneDime: Trope Namer, with Scrooge treasuring the very first dime he ever made for an honest day's work. Because of Magica de Spell's avid pursuit of it to make an amulet that would grant her fortune, it often becomes [[{{Flanderization}} exaggerated]] into being the actual source of Scrooge's wealth. Don Rosa ''hated'' this interpretation of the #1 Dime. |
| 82 | * AbandonedMine: The third (and last) Carl Barks story featuring Flintheart Glomgold was about an abandoned gold mine being put for auction in Africa. Both Scrooge and Flintheart believed the mine to still have gold and Glomgold tried to prevent Scrooge from attending the auction. [[spoiler:The story had an open ending as we never get to know who won the auction or if the mine had enough gold to be worth the trouble.]] |
| 83 | * AccidentalVentriloquism: In one story, Donald is taking care of Uncle Scrooge's pet talking parrot, which is obsessed with counting. Of course, the parrot gets away and Donald has to search for it. At one point, Donald is accosted by a woman who has recently been called "old". She questions him whether she has wrinkles and the parrot, hidden behind a fence, answers a very large number. The woman thinks it was Donald and punches the lights out of him. |
| 84 | -->'''Woman:''' I'm not old! Do you see any wrinkles on my face?\ |
| 85 | '''Parrot:''' ''(behind a fence)'' 32,923!\ |
| 86 | ''(Woman punches Donald)'' |
| 87 | * AdaptationExpansion: Carl Barks' comic book adaptation of the Donald Duck short "Trick or Treat" expands a bit on why Donald is so mean to his nephews (he hates Halloween because of trick-or-treaters interrupting his privacy), and adds a few extra gags (like Witch Hazel disguising herself as an attractive lady duck, and later summoning a monster to steal Donald's candy). |
| 88 | * AllJustADream: |
| 89 | ** A dream ending was hastily written into the Barks story "The Firebug" where Donald becomes a {{Pyromaniac}} but is pardoned when he catches a more dangerous person who was starting similar fires. In the original ending, Donald sets the judge's waste basket on fire and is thrown in jail as well, but in the altered ending Donald is woken up by one of his nephews instead. |
| 90 | ** There's an Italian comic by Marco Rota where Donald takes a nap on a bed in Gyro Gearloose's workplace, but accidentally activates a dream device by releasing a nightmare potion. The rest of the comic features freaky scenes such as [[DirtyCop the Beagle Boys running the police force]] and pursuing Donald, Uncle Scrooge dying when he activates his Money Bin's self-destruct before turning into a [[AttackOfThe50FootWhatever giant coin-monster]], and Little Helper becoming a robotic MadScientist by switching places with Gyro. At the end Donald wakes up back in Gyro's workplace and realizes it was all a dream. |
| 91 | ** This is the conclusion that Donald comes to at the end of ''The Duck Who Never Was'', after wishing that he was never born and having a genie (Who happens to live in an urn instead of the typical vase) he met in the Duckburg Museum grant said wish. After Donald runs off and leaves the museum however the Genie's voice is seen emanating from the urn in which he lives, proving that [[OrWasItADream it really did happen]]. This is partially revisited in the later story ''Treasury of Croesus''. When Donald, along with his uncle and nephews, once again visits the museum he sees the same urn from the previous story and is then the only one to notice the lid of the urn being lifted up by a hand from inside the urn, which looks to be in greeting to Donald. |
| 92 | ** Also shown to be the case at the conclusion to Barks' ''The Money Stairs''. Dealing with Donald and Scrooge competing to see whether there are some things that Scrooge's money can't accomplish, it ends with Donald waking up and telling his nephews that he realized it was a dream after Scrooge offered to buy him a soda. In retrospect, the events being a dream make sense, as the story features Scrooge being fairly carefree with spending his money to beat Donald. One panel survives from an aborted non-dream ending that Barks drew at first but scrapped—he went with the dream ending because the "money stairs" of the title, a mountain-size stairway built out of coins, seemed too impossible to be real. |
| 93 | ** In the story "Paperino e l'incubo dello zione" Uncle Scrooge is seemingly visited by characters from his recurring nightmares, then Donald discovers it's all a plot by the Beagle Boys to rob Scrooge. Scrooge then promises that he'll reward Donald with ''half of his entire riches''. At this point it's revealed that the entire story was just Donald's happy dream. |
| 94 | ** Used in an unusual way in "Cave of Ali Baba" (March, 1962) by Carl Barks. Scrooge and his nephews are in the deserts of Iran, inspecting oil pipelines. They start wondering about lost cities and civilizations of the area. The five of them meet traveling entertainers who perform for them, but then mysteriously vanish. Shortly after, the Ducks meet a mysterious archaeologist who is in search of the Cave of Ali Baba and needs partners. The Ducks jump at the opportunity of another treasure hunt, and follow him through several cryptic clues and dangers. When they do find the Cave and its treasures, they awake and find themselves back in the oil pipelines. They realize that their last real memories were the entertainers, who somehow hypnotized them and stole their wallets. The archaeologist and all subsequent events were dreams, as the Ducks slept for quite some time. |
| 95 | * AllThatGlitters: In Creator/CarlBarks' "The Golden Fleecing", Scrooge becomes enamored of the idea of finding the Golden Fleece and making himself a coat that would reflect his wealth. At the end, Donald and the nephews are surprised to see him wearing his new golden coat but fishing his threadbare old one out of a garbage can, irately explaining that the Golden Fleece is the coldest thing he's ever worn. |
| 96 | * AlternateUniverse: In ''Paperinik... un eroe dell'altro mondo'', Paperinik accidentally travels to another dimension via Gyro's invention where he meets an alternate universe Donald Duck, who has not become a crime-fighting superhero like he did. |
| 97 | * TheAlternet: European comics often have Donald log onto "Ducknet". (Or "Anknet", or whatever the word is for "duck" in the language the comic is published in.) It's exactly like the real Internet, except for the name. |
| 98 | * AlwaysALiveTransmission: In "The Lentils of Babylon", the Beagle Boys interrupt a live commercial. |
| 99 | * AlwaysIdenticalTwins: |
| 100 | ** Huey, Dewey and Louie naturally. It is especially evident in many of the comics storylines, as a lot of the time instead of their trademark red, blue and green the three of them wear identical black shirts, making it impossible to tell apart whenever they're not wearing [[IdenticalTwinIDTag their hats]]. |
| 101 | ** And April, May, and June Duck, Daisy's identical triplet nieces. In more recent decades, some artists have attempted to give them distinctive hairstyles to tell them apart. |
| 102 | ** {{Downplayed|Trope}} with the Beagle Boys. They are just brothers not necessary twins but they pretty much look all the same - at least the main ones - and can just be called apart thanks to their prison numbers they're wearing above their identical red overalls. |
| 103 | * ArtisticLicenseSpace: ''Once and Future Duck'' puts Camelot at Cadbury Castle, which isn't a problem in itself (it's one of several hypotheses that are unlikely to be discredited)... but the characters easily get back and forth between it and Stonehenge, in less than a day, ''on foot''. Stonehenge and Cadbury Castle are about forty miles apart. |
| 104 | * AncientPersia: In the eponymous chapter, Donald and his nephews are taken by a mad scientist to the ruins of an {{Ancient Persia}}n city where he intends to revive the dead king to learn his secrets about [[ReducedToDust turning people to dust]]. |
| 105 | * AnotherStoryForAnotherTime: In Barks' ''The Lost Crown of Genghis Khan'' features Donald asking Scrooge just how his agents found the titular Crown. Scrooge responds with these exact words. Years later Don Rosa would cover that other story during the events of ''Return to Xanadu''. |
| 106 | * AntiInterferenceLockUp: A movie company once tried to shoot some scenes at a school but Ludwig Von Drake, who is portrayed as a teacher there, insists on hogging the scenery and telling the others how to do their jobs. To get him out of the way, the Principal tricks him into rehearsing a line in a room and locks him inside it. Unfortunately, the room is full of chemical products and Ludwig blows his way out. To make matters worse, Ludwig lands on the camera, ruining all the work and prompting the company to leave. Ludwig [[WorkOffTheDebt ends up getting an extra job as a janitor to pay the the damages caused by the explosion]]. |
| 107 | * ArbitrarySkepticism: Pops up every now and again, such as in ''The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone'', where both Scrooge and Donald are fully willing to believe in and search after the stone, but for some reason find the idea of the Labyrinth in Crete to be nothing more than a myth when Huey, Dewey, and Louie suggest going there. |
| 108 | * ArbitrarilyLargeBankAccount: Scrooge has more money than God. His money bin, large as it is, is just his most visible and well-known money storage facility. |
| 109 | * ArchEnemy: |
| 110 | ** Scrooge [=McDuck=] has several different enemies competing for the title. He often combats the Beagle Boys, though Blackheart Beagle, the oldest member and their founder, is the only one whom Scrooge has a personal vendetta with. His business rivals, Flintheart Glomgold and John Rockerduck, sometimes function as his own personal arch enemy(ies) too, given their status as {{Evil Counterpart}}s of Scrooge. However, his most dangerous opponent is the witch Magica De Spell, who threatens to steal his lucky dime and melt it in the Vesuvius volcano. One could also add Arpin Lusene, a GentlemanThief who holds the distinction of being Scrooge's only WorthyOpponent. |
| 111 | ** Donald Duck considers both Gladstone Gander and Neighbour Jones his personal arch enemies, though these are of the [[SitcomArchNemesis sitcom]] variety. |
| 112 | * ArtifactOfDoom: An Italian story center around a mysterious item from outer space that did absolutely nothing, but was still more an Artifact of Doom than a MacGuffin. It was so absolutely and completely useless that anything done with it was automatically a waste of time and amounted to nothing. It was in the possession of Scrooge [=McDuck=] first, so he naturally tried to make money out of it, but his every attempt merely broke even, until he managed to sell it to Rockerduck (at zero profit). As time went on, the sheer uselessness of the item made it hold a peculiar fascination to people, and news of it apparently spread globally. Everyone was in fact so affected by the uselessness that they began to turn apathetic and think nothing was worth doing because it was useless, or were inspired to start doing completely useless things themselves. A researcher then came to the conclusion that the item could cause TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt unless it was launched back into space to remove its effect on the collective psyche. [[spoiler:But when they did this, the story subverted its own premise, because the item saved the entire planet; it was picked up by an alien armada of doom, whose leader consequently decided attacking the Earth would be pointless, and decided not to bother.]] |
| 113 | * ArtisticLicenseSpace: In one comic, Earth appeared improbably big in the sky of Mars. |
| 114 | * AsYouKnow: Used all the time in Donald Duck comics, usually clumsily as anything; lampshaded in Don Rosa's ''The Last Lord of Eldorado''. |
| 115 | * BadgeGag: One comic has a "doctor" get Donald out of a difficult situation with Daisy by flashing his card. As Daisy points out in the very same panel he shows it, it's a subway ticket, but by then the man is already gone, taking Donald with him. |
| 116 | * BanditClan: The Beagle Boys are a family of thieves. |
| 117 | * BankToaster: The August 27, 1982 Donald Duck strip [[https://scrooge-mcduck.fandom.com/wiki/The_Right_Bank "The Right Bank"]] involves Donald running to tell Scrooge [=McDuck=] about a new bank that opened across the street that is giving out free toasters to anyone who opens an account with $500 or more. Donald even proudly shows off his own toaster, and Scrooge just keeps responding "I know" with the final panel revealing that Scrooge has an entire closet packed with the free toasters. |
| 118 | * BankruptcyBarrel: |
| 119 | ** "[[https://inducks.org/story.php?c=D+91068 Barrel Bargains]]" has Donald bid for a barrel at an auction. He wins the auction, but doesn't have the money to pay, so he puts his own sailor suit up for bid and storms off while wearing the barrel. |
| 120 | ** The Danish story "[[https://inducks.org/story.php?c=D+97054 A Stitch in Time]]" has Donald and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie discover a meteorite that turns out to have alien moths inside, which end up [[TheNudifier eating the clothes of everyone in Duckburg]], forcing the denizens to start wearing barrels until they can find a way to get rid of the alien moths. |
| 121 | ** The daily comic strip edition also had examples of wearing barrels. |
| 122 | *** The [[https://inducks.org/story.php?c=YD+41-06-07 June 7, 1941 strip]] has Donald pick up Daisy for a party while wearing a barrel. |
| 123 | *** The [[https://inducks.org/story.php?c=YD+47-08-30 August 30, 1947 strip]] has Donald notice a human woman in the water at the beach. Thinking she's naked, he rushes over to provide a barrel for her to wear, only to get hit on the head with the barrel when the woman turns out to have a swimsuit on that just wasn't visible above her shoulders. |
| 124 | *** The [[https://inducks.org/story.php?c=YD+47-10-10 October 10, 1947 strip]] had one of Donald's nephews coming home from school wearing a small barrel and looking embarrassed. The remaining panels show Donald going to the school with a ladder and retrieving the nephew's gym shorts from the top of a pole vault bar. Made even funnier when you realize that normally, [[HalfDressedCartoonAnimal the ducks never wear pants in the first place]]. |
| 125 | * BarefootSage: One of the issues of "Donald Duck & Co", released by Egmont, featured a wise old sea king called Saltomon who was always barefoot. |
| 126 | * BattleInTheCenterOfTheMind: In the 2002 story ''The Dream of a Lifetime'', Donald has to fight the Beagle Boys in Uncle Scrooge's dreams (thanks to one of Gyro's inventions) before the Boys find out the combination to Scrooge's vault. If Scrooge wakes up, anyone connected to his mind will be rendered braindead. |
| 127 | * BeneathTheEarth: It's revealed in the aptly titled ''Land Beneath the Ground'' that the entire Duck Earth is apparently filled with two races, the Terries and the Fermies, with the world they live in being referred to as Terry Fermy by these residents. They are the ones responsible for causing earthquakes. |
| 128 | * BecomingTheMask: Has happened with Magica De Spell at least twice, each time under a relatively unknown author. ''A Gal for Gladstone'' (sometimes known as ''A Girl for Gladstone''), by Carol & Pat [=McGreal=], has her hex away Gladstone Gander's luck and then pretend to be an ordinary girl in order to get a shot at Scrooge's #1 Dime -- she ends up sufficiently touched by Gladstone's sincere devotion to her that she ends up forfeiting the dime so she can save his life. Handled better, in some people's opinion, in Kari Korhonen's ''Date with a Munchkin'', in which she kidnaps Daisy, takes on her shape, and pretends to be her, ending up chosing to stay at a Duckburg ball with Donald rather than go along with her original plan, willingly dispelling the illusion and leaving Donald because she can't bear to hurt Daisy by keeping him, and wondering to herself if what she got to feel during the facade actually makes up for the fact she still didn't get the dime. |
| 129 | * BreakoutCharacter: |
| 130 | ** Scrooge [=McDuck=] started off as a supporting character / antagonist in a one-off Donald Duck story written by Carl Barks as a clear pastiche of Charles Dickens's ''A Christmas Carol''. Fifty years later Donald Duck has shown trouble keeping his own title in publication, while Scrooge is the star of one of the two longest-running classic Walt Disney comic properties (along with the anthology ''Walt Disney's Comics and Stories''). |
| 131 | ** The Beagle Boys often get their own Italian stories where they try [[FailureIsTheOnlyOption and fail]] to pull off some great heist. |
| 132 | ** Magica de Spell has her own stories about her trials and tribulations as a witch. Some of them are about her attempts to rob Scrooge, while others concern different matters, like beating magical rivals, or using magic to secretly help her favorite football team win the cup. |
| 133 | ** Gyro Gearloose started off as a background character in a Donald Duck-story. Barks reused him and eventually he became popular enough for the publishers to give him his own magazine as a titular character with his own stories. He nowadays is a main stable of the comic universe with a lot of appearences in various media and his own adventures and supporting cast, including Little Helper and his nephew Newton Gearloose. |
| 134 | * BrickJoke: One that stands out is in Barks' "The Money Well", in which a RunningGag of Scrooge repeatedly having mishaps because of his worn-out old eyeglasses, later results in catastrophe that causes Scrooge to nearly lose all his money, just because of his refusal to pay a few dollars to buy new eyeglasses. |
| 135 | * BunglingInventor: Gyro Gearloose sometimes, though his inventions do tend to work perfectly -- when problems arise, it's usually due to some detail Gyro has failed to consider, or simply due to unfortunate circumstances. However, it doesn't help that he often follows Scrooge's instructions in the literal sense (at least in ''Duck Tales''). |
| 136 | * CannibalTribe: These always show up in jungle or tropical island settings, especially in the older stories. |
| 137 | * CelebrityParadox: Some of Don's Hidden Mickeys refer to Mickey's real-life status as a fictional character, while the Ducks are "real" people. Take into account that Donald started off as Mickey's co-star in the cartoons, and you see how this fits. |
| 138 | * CharityWorkplaceCalendar: Shows up in a comic by Creator/DonRosa. Scrooge looks through the trash Donald is about to throw out after cleaning out the office, and picks up a calendar which gets him... ''excited''. Donald, surprised at his [[SingleTargetSexuality normally chaste]] uncle's reaction, asks to see, only to find that it depicts the most beautiful ''banks'' in the world. |
| 139 | * ChasedOffIntoTheSunset: Frequently pops up in the European Scrooge [=McDuck=] stories, usually with Donald or Scrooge chasing after various characters. When one of many [[ZanyScheme plans to make more money]] fails, rather than accept responsibility, Scrooge [[NeverMyFault blames Donald Duck]]. The story then ends with an angry Scrooge chasing after Donald, often carrying a big club or mace. Huey, Dewey, and Louie usually look on, sometimes with [[UnusuallyUnInterestingSight indifference]] but sometimes [[ComedicSociopathy chortling with amusement]], unless it was Donald's plan in the first place, in which case their uncle chases them [[DontMakeMeTakeMyBeltOff twig in hand]]. And sometimes both happen at the same time, Donald being simultaneously the chaser and the chased. Other characters might appear depending on the story. |
| 140 | * ClarkKenting: |
| 141 | ** In Italian comics, Donald has a superhero / AntiHero alter ego called Paperinik, who is Donald with a costume based on [[GentlemanThief Fantomius]] with a domino mask and Donald's signature hat, yet ''nobody'' notices in spite of people knowing their resemblance. It's explained, as in the previous case, due to a combination of people not wanting to believe the lazy Donald is the city's idol and [[TheDreaded scariest person]], Donald and Paperinik having appeared before people at the same time (due either robots taking Donald's place or volunteers replacing Paperinik), and Paperinik being a MasterOfDisguise who has disguised himself as Donald multiple times (or, in one memorable occasion, as [[ItMakesSenseInContext a monster disguised as Paperinik disguised as John Rockerduck disguised as Paperinik]]). The rather obscure video game adaptation, ''PK: Out of the Shadows'', reinforces the difference by adding the fact that, as Paperinik, Donald uses a voice modulator to disguise his voice (while Donald is still voiced by Creator/TonyAnselmo, Paperinik's voice is done by Creator/RobPaulsen). |
| 142 | *** The only people who saw through Paperinik's disguise and couldn't be fooled into thinking it was an error are Everett Ducklair, Lyla Lay and the Griffin, all from ''ComicBook/PaperinikNewAdventures'', and bypass Paperinik's usual tricks: Everett has PsychicPowers and read it out of Paperinik's mind, while Lyla and the Griffin have technology that allows to see through LatexPerfection, and saw that Paperinik doesn't wear a Donald mask with a domino mask on it but only the domino mask (at which point it was easy). |
| 143 | *** In the first story it was even ''worse'', as Paperinik only wore Fantomius' costume with his trademark hat and ''no kind of mask''. It was actually a colouring error, as Paperinik was supposed to wear Fantomius whole costume (that includes a blue silk mask covering the whole face except the beak), but the colourist missed it and depicted Paperinik's face white (the novelization of the story {{Retcon}}s it away as showing that Donald ''had'' considered wearing Fantomius' mask but in the end opted for the domino mask). Due the second story having Paperinik acting disguised as Fantomius (he had to infiltrate a costume party in Gladstone's place, with Gladstone planning to enter disguised as Fantomius), it wouldn't be until the third story that the domino mask debuted, by which time Paperinik was already TheDreaded. |
| 144 | *** Speaking of the third story... most of Duckburg actually suspected Donald of being Paperinik, but after the police inspected Donald's car (that doubled as Paperinik's ride) and failed to find Paperinik's devices (that had been removed beforehand in expectation of this inspection), the issue was dropped. The story ended with the first instance of Donald being seen in public at the same time as Paperinik (with Paperinik actually being a flying robot). |
| 145 | *** The greatest example of people being fooled into believing Donald isn't Paperinik is the 2014 story "Raceworld", in which, due the peculiar circumstances, Donald's heroic side takes Paperinik's form... and Mickey, who in Italian stories is depicted as a great detective, quips that, until then, he had believed that Donald was Paperinik. Apparently he had guessed the bots and replacements, and it took the ''real'' Paperinik appearing at the same time as the ''real'' Donald to fool him. |
| 146 | ** Daisy has her own superhero alter ego, Paperinika, who is a female and StrawFeminist counterpart to Paperinik. Despite this, the two don't actually like to work together and neither knows the other's secret identity. Which is fine... except that in the American translations, Paperinika is renamed "Super Daisy", but the stories are otherwise translated straight. This has the effect of making Donald look like a complete moron since he can't figure out who she really is, unless you've read Paperinika's original story: Donald's reaction to seeing Paperinika the first time was to ask Daisy why she was dressed that ridiculous way, and only got convinced it's not Daisy due to her acting much coldly and keeping a cool head in situations where Daisy would usually lose it (she was ''really'' pissed at the time. She later became an actress good enough to pull Paperinika's personality on purpose). It's also implied that ''Donald'' is the reason Paperinika's disguise works: if Daisy's fiancee, who is known to be able to recognize [[IdenticalTwins identical triplets]] from near-invisible details, says she's not Paperinika and has a very vocal dislike for the latter, most people capable of recognizing Daisy through her costume will think it's just a casual resemblance. |
| 147 | ** In the Netherlands Paperinik is known simply as Superdonald, though a few early stories call him Fantomerik. Also over here Daisy is called Katrien and her alter ego is known as Superkatrien. |
| 148 | ** Another example is when Paperoga (Fethry Duck) becoming the debatably useful superhero Paper Bat (or "Red Bat" in other countries). It's an obvious spoof of Batman and it doesn't even ''try'' to hide the actual identity. It's PlayedForLaughs, and the identity is kept by a combination of the Red Bat's outfit giving actual cover and the Red Bat being seen as awesome (in his first story he humiliated the Beagle Boys with the help of a [[ItMakesSenseInContext headless gorilla]]) instead that the lucky FakeUltimateHero he is. |
| 149 | ** And taken ''even further'' with José Carioca's alter-ego Morcego Verde (Green Bat), ''another'' Batman spoof:[[note]]The main difference between the two being that Red Bat is a parody of [[UsefulNotes/TheSilverAgeOfComicBooks Silver Age]] Batman (both in terms of costume as well as goofy gadgets) while Green Bat is a parody of the modern Batman (dark ominous costume and little to no gadgets - his revised origin story is even a spoof of ''ComicBook/BatmanTheDarkKnightReturns'')[[/note]] His costume is less concealing than Fethry's (despite him wearing a beat-up Batman cowl/cape combination) and while he's wearing it ''his friends still call him "Zé"'' or, at their most secretive, "Hey Zé... I mean, Morcego!" In this case there's no justification, only RuleOfFunny. |
| 150 | ** The Beagle Boys once robbed a jewelry shop and avoided recognition by ''not'' wearing their masks despite being otherwise dressed in full Beagle Boy regalia. Also played straight by Creator/DonRosa in ''ComicBook/TheLifeAndTimesOfScroogeMcDuck'': when Scrooge first met them in his youth, the Beagle Boys (the original outfit composed by Grampa Beagle and his sons) were wanted criminals who couldn't show their faces in public, and started wearing the masks to hide their identities on suggestion of their employer Porker Hogg. It worked: they were even tricking the river police into leaving when Scrooge unmasked one of them, at which point the police recognized them and proceeded to arrest them. |
| 151 | * ClothesEatingWager: John D. Rockerduck has a RunningGag of eating his hat whenever he is defeated by Scrooge. In one story, he complains to Glomgold about how he's got a stomach ache from having to eat his hat after every defeat. |
| 152 | * ComicBookTime: Most apparent with Scrooge's history in the Klondike, which was perfectly plausible when Carl Barks introduced it in the comics but would've meant Scrooge was over a hundred by the time of [=DuckTales=]. Some Italian stories play with it to imply that he is effectively immortal. For example, a story with Scrooge celebrating the New Year of 2000 has a brief flashback with him celebrating the New Year of 1900. |
| 153 | * ContinuityNod: Don Rosa pretty much shaped his entire career working with the Duck Family around this. Nearly all, if not all, of his stories reference a previous one ''or'' one of Carl Barks stories in some shape or form. The greatest contribution to this might be Scrooge's trophy room inside his Money Bin, which Rosa features in a few of his stories, such as ''Return to Xanadu''. It allows for the display of various treasures and items that Scrooge and his nephews have collected on their previous adventures, such as the golden fleece (From Barks ''The Golden Fleecing''), the goose egg nugget (From Barks ''Back to the Klondike''), and the crown of Genghis Khan (From Barks ''The Lost Crown of Genghis Khan''). |
| 154 | ** Besides just things like the treasure room Rosa would often include throwaway lines into his stories which would include references. For example, from ''Return to Xanadu'' |
| 155 | -->'''Donald to Scrooge:''' First Plain Awful and now here! Uncle Scrooge we can't take you anywhere |
| 156 | ** Plain Awful of course is from the Carl Barks story ''Lost in the Andes'' and was revisited in the Don Rosa story ''Return to Plain Awful'', and it's the second visit Donald is referring to. |
| 157 | ** ''The Quest for Kalevala'' has Scrooge himself make a few comments on his previous adventures. |
| 158 | -->'''Scrooge to his Donald:''' You seem to forget, nephew, that I've had some success with "wacky legends"--like Jason's golden fleece, the philosopher's stone, king solomon's mines, vulcan's hammer, and plenty more! |
| 159 | * ContemporaryCaveman: The Danish comics had a recurring female caveman who was brought into the present by Donald and his nephews. Of course, she had super strength--[[DoesNotKnowHisOwnStrength which got her into a lot of trouble]], with people blaming Donald for her actions. |
| 160 | * ConvictedByPublicOpinion: A recurring theme. In ''Pool Sharks'' by Barks, Donald lets a couple of kids use his brand new swimming pool. This leads to dozens of kids getting wind of it, using and ruining the pool, which leads to their parents getting worked up about accidents happening to their kids, which leads to Donald closing the pool without ever having gotten to use it, which leads to everyone hating Donald. To be frank, the people of Duckburg are dicks. |
| 161 | * CoolOldGuy: Scrooge, once CharacterDevelopment brings him out of being the crusty, skinflint, gouging, near-heartless old miser that he is when Carl Barks first introduces him to the Ducks Universe, anyway. |
| 162 | * CrossReferencedTitles: [[ComicBook/ALetterFromHome A Letter from Home's]] alternate title "The Old Castle's Other Secret" is a reference to Carl Barks story "The Old Castle's Secret". |
| 163 | * CrouchingMoronHiddenBadass: |
| 164 | ** Donald is the most prominent example of this, most notably when he changes into the Duck Avenger, though he has plenty of badass moments even when he's just himself. |
| 165 | ** Fethry is a less prominent version of the trope, as he usually succeeds by accident, but he has his moments of this as well. (He has a superhero identity as well, the Red Bat, but one that's more of an IdiotHero compared to the Duck Avenger's badass) |
| 166 | ** Even the Beagle Boys will, DependingOnTheWriter, sometimes display surprising competence and appear as a credible threat to Scrooge. |
| 167 | * CulturalTranslation: The comics are this all over the world, which makes things more varied and interesting. Though in some (fortunately few) cases it crosses over to bad ThinlyVeiledDubCountryChange. |
| 168 | * DefeatingTheCheatingOpponent: Scrooge [=McDuck's=] entire dynamic with Flinthart Glomgold can be defined as this trope. Glomgold is determined to usurp the moniker of "the World's Richest Duck" away from Scrooge through whatever dirty or unscrupulous means possible -- predictably a lot of Glomgold's fortune is stolen goods. But even with all his stolen loot, Glomgold never quite manages to outdo Scrooge, who takes pride in having earned every last penny he has by being "[[CatchPhrase tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties]]", all from the ground up, fair and square. |
| 169 | * DependingOnTheWriter: |
| 170 | ** There's quite a few characters that only appear in stories by some authors whose existences are ignored by others, including cousin Fethry, Birgita [=McBridge=], Donald's superhero alter ago, Paperinik, Scrooge's butler Battista, Scrooge's half-brother Rumpus [=McFowl=], Scrooge's ''actual'' brother Gideon [=McDuck=], John D. Rockerduck for most American authors, Flintheart Glomgold for most Italian ones, etc. |
| 171 | ** One other thing that's wildly inconsistent between authors is the 'verse's relation to the ComicBook/MickeyMouseComicUniverse. Some authors have them share a universe, but have the Mouse stories set in a different town called Mouseton, whereas others have both set in Duckburg, like the Duck stories. Some authors seem to set the stories in separate continuities. As noted under CelebrityParadox, Don Rosa has an odd take on this: WesternAnimation/MickeyMouse seems to exist within his stories... as a cartoon character. |
| 172 | ** The Italian-produced comics view the characters through a completely different cultural lens: most evident with Scrooge, who tends to be less of a crafty SelfMadeMan and more of a cross between CorruptCorporateExecutive and {{Cloudcuckoolander}}. It's not rare to see him cross the line from AntiHero to straight-up VillainProtagonist, or be used as the villain against Donald (who isn't much better). |
| 173 | ** Is the money bin actually all of Scrooge's money? Don Rosa and most of the European comics establish that Scrooge has untold billions in banks from his businesses and investments, while the money bin is simply all the money Scrooge ever made personally. Other writers go the Ducktales route and have Scrooge instantly become penniless every time the bin gets stolen. |
| 174 | ** On a lesser note, most writers draw the mayor of Duckburg as a pig. Don Rosa, on the other hand, draws him as one of the many {{Dogfaces}}. |
| 175 | * DetectivesFollowFootprints: The comics get a lot of mileage out of this trope. For instance, they have a whole subtrope for characters exploiting the trope, knowing they are being followed, manipulating the footprints to mislead the pursuers. |
| 176 | * DidntThinkThisThrough: In "The Golden Fleecing", Scrooge wonders if he can have a coat made from gold, which he has in ample supply. He takes a gold bar to the tailor, who tells him that he could make a sort of cloth from it, but it would be like wearing tinfoil. When Scrooge succeeds in acquiring the legendary Golden Fleece, he has a real coat made from it, but quickly discards it, finding that the "wool", while both genuinely golden and soft enough to be woven, is also the coldest thing he's ever had next to his skin. |
| 177 | ** In one Barks story, Scrooge decides to buy up all the quarter coins minted in 1916, then disposing all but one in the ocean, making that one coin one of the rarest and most valuable in the world. After his original coin is destroyed, leading to an adventure retrieving a replacement from the bottom of the ocean, Scrooge finally has it appraised by a collector, not having realized that the coin is now so rare that ''he'' is the only person who could possibly buy it. |
| 178 | * DirtyCop: There have been at least two stories where the Beagle Boys were shown to be in charge of the Duckburg police force. In the first, it was part of an AlternateHistory where they changed occupation because Scrooge had already lost his fortune, and in the second it was just part of a [[AllJustADream weird-ass nightmare]] that Donald was having. Also, in the former example they said Donald could buy his way out of a ticket. |
| 179 | * DragonsVersusKnights: In a story where one of Gyro Gearloose's inventions allows creatures and characters from imagination to enter reality, a fairytale dragon is amongst the newly real beasts roaming around Duckburg. He makes it very clear that he does ''not'' like [[KnightErrant knights errant]], which he considers to be dragons' worst enemies, and pointedly questions Huwey, Dewey and Louie as to whether any of them plans to become a knight errant when he grows up. |
| 180 | * DramaticThunder: In one of the chapters of the classic ''ComicBook/TheLifeAndTimesOfScroogeMcDuck'', Scrooge fights a duel with swords against the scion of the Whiskervilles -- ancestral enemies of the [=McDuck=] clan, while a thunderstorm rolls across the Scottish Highlands. The thunderstorm, as it turns out, plays a key role in the end of the duel... |
| 181 | * {{Dogfaces}}: Your average person off the streets of Duckburg has a black button nose, may have unusually shaped ears and something of a snout but doesn't really resemble any known animal. Some stories by Barks have actual realistically drawn humans which makes things more confusing. The story is that Barks for a while tried to incorporate realistic human characters into his stories against the prescriptions of the company, because he felt they were of higher artistic value than funny animals (and also enabled him to draw more "sexy" female characters). After a while his editor caught on and made him stop. It can get even weirder when characters appear who are basically humans with a ''beak''! (In fact, Gyro Gearloose comes very close to this; he even has human feet.) Occasionally some colourist even has the gall to give such a character a human skin tone, instead of white feathers. |
| 182 | * DoubleStandardViolenceChildOnAdult: Subverted in one particularly JustForFun/{{egregious}} story revolved around a child psychologist selling Donald on the idea that beating the kids up was evil, and that he had been stifling their creativity and should let them do as they please; Huey, Dewey and Louie abuse the situation to extreme levels, and act like whimsical, irresponsible brats. Once Donald catches on, he invites said psychologist at home for dinner and a chat, and, while he pompously lectures Donald, the kids ''blow fireworks under his armchair''. His clothes singed, his face a mask of fury, he leaps at the kids, ready to beat the crap out of them, while Donald looks on, a smug grin on his face. |
| 183 | * DubSpeciesChange: The Beagle Boys have been referred to as different species in foreign translations to keep the "BB" initials, such as bears in Sweden or dachshunds ("bassotti") in Italian. |
| 184 | * DurableDeathtrap: Donald and his uncle Scrooge [=McDuck=] along with their nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, often run into these. |
| 185 | |
| 186 | [[/folder]] |
| 187 | |
| 188 | [[folder:E-L]] |
| 189 | * EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: Uncle Scrooge didn't use a red/orange overcoat in his first comic book appearances. He was rather depicted wearing a business suit (sans pants of course). |
| 190 | * EasyAmnesia: This happens to Scrooge, his nephews, and the Beagle Boys at the conclusion to Carl Barks' ''Seven Cities of Cibola''. All of them wake up in a pile of rubble not remembering how they got there and proceed to return to Duckburg afterwards. They therefore never discover that all the treasure of the titular cities is buried beneath them and the world at large never learns of the amazing discovery either. This isn't the first time that Scrooge loses a treasure, but it is the one time where he doesn't even remember having found it. |
| 191 | * EastwardEndeavor: |
| 192 | ** This trope backfired in Carl Barks' classic "Tralla La" story. Uncle Scrooge is so stressed by his money-centric life that he tries to escape it for a while, searching for a place without a monetary system to relax. He and his nephews discover [[TheShangriLa Tralla La]], hidden in the Himalayas. However, Scrooge brings his troubles with him, accidentally making bottle caps the new money of Tralla La and ruining the paradise he was looking for. |
| 193 | ** A sequel by Don Rosa has the ducks searching for the mythical city of Xanadu and discovering it's actually Tralla La. The bottle cap situation was solved while they weren't there and Tralla La was back to being an utopia. Scrooge and co. start to enjoy it again until they accidentally flood the city. They actually solve that problem (ironically with the help of the bottle caps, forged into saws to access the floodgate) and leave the city for good. |
| 194 | * EcocidalAntagonist: [[NamesToRunAwayFromReallyFast Ravage DeFlora]] from Don Rosa's "War of the Wendigo" is the manager of Scrooge's logging operations in Northern Ontario. He's not too bad at first, but when his timber plant is [[GaiasVengeance attacked by the animals in an effort to stop him]], he switches from anti-environmentalist into straight-up ecocidal. Ravage retaliates by stoking the furnaces with dioxin and pumping acid into the drain pipes to kill the animals clogging them (and destroying the forest as collateral). Even this is not enough, and he ultimately becomes a [[VillainousBreakdown raving lunatic]] trying to burn down every tree and animal in sight with a flamethrower. |
| 195 | * EerieArcticResearchStation: There's a comic (by William Van Horn, a Canadian writer) where Donald joins a shady company during a HeatWave in Duckburg so he can get a job at an arctic mining station. Sure enough, it turns out that it's actually part of a smuggling operation which Donald has to dismantle. |
| 196 | * EleventyZillion: |
| 197 | ** Scrooge [=McDuck's=] fortune is always measured in "fantasticatillions", "obsquatumatillions", etc. -- often ending in "... and sixteen cents". |
| 198 | ** In the climax of "The Crazy Quiz Show", Donald Duck's final question (and his UnexpectedlyObscureAnswer) was the following: |
| 199 | --->'''Q:''' How many drops of water pass over Niagara Falls in a week?\ |
| 200 | '''A:''' [[LudicrousPrecision Nine trillion multipadillion, six hundred and eighty-six squadrificillion, fifty octodecimadillion, eight hundred and sixty-three centrifipillion, nine hundred and forty overplusillion, six hundred and five duplicatillion, thirty-three impossibadillion, seven hundred and ninety-one compounded ultrafatillion, three hundred and forty super trillion, fifty-nine duper dillion, twenty-nine billion, seven hundred and fifty million, four hundred and six thousand, five hundred and thirty-three drops]]. |
| 201 | * {{Elseworld}}: There are way too many examples to count where the Ducks are plucked out of Duckburg and put into wildly different settings. For example, a prominent Italian one by Marco Rota has Donald Duck as a down-on-his-luck Caledonian warlord trying to repel a Viking invasion. |
| 202 | * EnemyMine: One story features the Beagle Boys hosting a family reunion where Beagles from the whole world will pick a rich target in Duckburg to rob. Scrooge [=McDuck=], Flintheart Glomgold[[note]]He's South African but holds enough ventures in Duckburg to be a potential target[[/note]] and John D. Rockerduck set their differences aside to make a mutual defense pact since each one knows how to defeat the Beagle Boys the other billionaires never faced before. After being defeated, [[spoiler:the other Beagle Boys team up with a rival criminal family for another raid at the Money Bin but it lasts less than five minutes because Glomgold and Rockerduck tricked them into thinking each family betrayed the other]]. |
| 203 | * EscapedAnimalRampage: One Carl Barks comic strip had Donald Duck walking around with a necklace that brings good luck. When he hears that a dangerous gorilla escaped he decides to turn the giant ape in, believing that he will be prevented by his Lucky device. Of course, it doesn't work. |
| 204 | * ExactWords: In "Cash Flow", after seeing the Beagle Boys easily go through the traps of the money bin, Scrooge begs Donald to help and he agrees in exchange for "all the thousand dollar bills that he can carry". Scrooge agrees and honors the deal... except the money doesn't have friction and Donald is unable to hold onto any money, leaving him with nothing. |
| 205 | * EvenEvilHasStandards: In "An Eye For Detail", the ''Beagle Boys'', of all people, call Scrooge a villain for overworking Donald. |
| 206 | * EveryCarIsAPinto: In the ''Creator/DonRosa'' story "Guardians of the Lost Library", Donald watches [[RunningGag a succession of television shows]] that repeatedly feature the hero's transport catching on fire, be it a car, a speedboat, or even a horse. In a sci-fi version of that show, even the comet the hero is riding bursts into flame. Or possibly not, as, to use Donald's words "It's kinda hard to tell with comets." |
| 207 | * EveryoneWentToSchoolTogether: When there are stories with flashbacks or stories set in the past there is a great chance it will introduce the concept certain characters knew each other since childhood and/or went to school together. Likewise, in the ''Young Donald Duck''-series set in Donald's high-school years that shows that the adults from both the Duck Universe and the ComicBook/MickeyMouseComicUniverse went to school together. |
| 208 | * ExtremelyOverdueLibraryBook: In a story which was published in the Dutch ''Donald Duck'' magazine, Donald's nephews discover that Donald has a couple of library books in the attic that are ten years overdue. After having calculated the overdue fee and concluding that he will never be able to pay it, Donald desperately attempts to get rid of the books, but due to his perennial bad luck, the books keep finding their way back to him. After breaking into the library at night to return the books unseen and nearly getting caught by the police, he discovers the very next day that the library has decided to waive all fees for overdue books. |
| 209 | * ExtremeOmniGoat: Scrooge once bought a goat to guard his money bin in the comics. Unfortunately, it both guarded and ate the money so Scrooge sold it back to the previous owner. |
| 210 | * FinishingEachOthersSentences: Huey, Dewey, and Louie are often scripted like this. |
| 211 | :::--Since they're-- |
| 212 | :::--pretty much-- |
| 213 | :::--one character! |
| 214 | ** Lampshaded in at least two Rosa stories where, when Scrooge mentions how alike they are, they immediately protest... saying the exact same words, perfectly synchronized, and even making the same facial expressions. |
| 215 | %% * FunetikAksent: Scrooge and his family in ''Life and Times'' as well as Arpin Lusene. |
| 216 | * FunWithAcronyms: Woodchuck titles. The story W.H.A.D.A.L.O.T.T.A.J.A.R.G.O.N.[[labelnote:*]]When Huey And Dewey And Louie Originally Thought To Adapt Junior-woodchuck Attitudes, Regulations and Grandiose Organizational Nomenclature[[/labelnote]] is particularly full of this. |
| 217 | * Fiction500: Scrooge, Flintheart Glomgold and John D. Rockerduck are all ridiculously wealthy. Scrooge is so rich that he's effectively got infinite funds, while Glomgold and Rockerduck are still richer than most real-life billionaires. Famously, in the Carl Barks story "The Magic Hourglass", Scrooge laments that if he loses a billion dollars a minute, he'll go broke in 600 years. That adds up to 315 ''quadrillion'' dollars. You could remove three zeros from that and Scrooge would still have more money than currently exists in the world. |
| 218 | * FictionalCountry: There have been loads of these over the years as they're often disposable. Special mention must go to Barks for injecting real-world political satire into them, such as with Brutopia (a parody of the Soviet Union) or Unsteadystan. |
| 219 | * TheFriendNobodyLikes: In "The Status Seekers", after acquiring the Candy-Striped Ruby, the world's greatest status symbol, Scrooge gets invited to every high society event in Duckburg; the hosts whisper among themselves that they have no choice, even though no one can stand Scrooge's company, since he doesn't talk about anything except money. |
| 220 | * FriendOfMaskedSelf: According to Donald and Paperinik, they're mutual friends. This makes it conveniently easy for Donald to "call" Paperinik if necessary (either Donald changes into Paperinik for the occasion, or he gets someone or something else to stand in for Paperinik and by his side to prove that he isn't the masked vigilante) and for both to share certain knowledge. |
| 221 | * FriendsRentControl: Despite PerpetualPoverty being one of Donald's major characteristics, he maintains residence in a nice two-story house in the suburbs. Some stories HandWave this by saying it is Scrooge who really owns the property and Donald has to pay next to no rent because of this, and whenever Donald doesn't feel like participating in his newest treasure hunt with no pay, all Scrooge has to do is to remind him of all his outstanding rent debts to get him to agree. |
| 222 | * FunnyAnimal: What the average citizen tends to fall into. Some stories however, such as Barks' ''Dangerous Disguise'', will actually feature regular humans instead. |
| 223 | * FunnyBackgroundEvent: In the spirit of Barks, who often included humorous incidents in the background of most of his stories. ''The Life and Times of Scrooge [=McDuck=]'' is especially rich in these. |
| 224 | * GameBetweenHeirs: The story "Family of Fore" features Scrooge [=McDuck=] and Flintheart Glomgold learning they're distantly related and must play a golf match against each other for a treasure left behind by a relative named Bogey [=McDivot=]. [[spoiler:After Scrooge wins]], both competitors are dismayed to learn the "treasure" is the golf course. |
| 225 | * {{Gamebooks}}: There have been a few "Choose Your Own Adventure" stories, for instance one where Donald and his nephews go on a holiday and meet various obstacles where they have to make a decision that will effect the rest of the story (like whether to give a traveling Scrooge a lift, or whether to make a detour through the countryside or not). Endings varied from good (for the Ducks) to mediocre to straight-up bad. |
| 226 | * GenreSavvy: In "Gift Lion" Scrooge discovers the lock to his vault is broken and it can't been fixed in time for him to go to a meeting that night. The Beagle Boys overhear this and decided to "gift" him a guard lion that's actually a Beagle Boy in disguise so they can get into his money bin easily. Scrooge, however, knows better than to look a gift horse in the mouth, and once he discovers the ruse, decides to surprise the crooks by placing a ''real'' lion to guard his money when they go to sneak in. |
| 227 | * GentlemanThief: Arpin Lusene. Or rather, [[BlatantLies his friend]] the Black Knight. |
| 228 | * GreatBigBookOfEverything: The Junior Woodchucks' Guidebook. This is {{lampshade|Hanging}}d ''and'' [[JustifiedTrope explained]]. |
| 229 | * GreenAesop: Barks' ''Land of the Pygmy Indians'' and the sequel by Don Rosa, ''War of the Wendigo'' both have Scrooge learning one of these. The first ends with him declaring part of the land he owns, which the titular Indians live on, a nature preserve and the second has him promising the same group, after one of his plant manager's devastates a forest in the north, to plant two trees for every one that he cuts down. |
| 230 | * GoodLuckCharm: A recurring theme in Barks stories and also later writers. |
| 231 | ** "The Magic Hourglass" by Barks deals with a hourglass that enriches the people who hold it, and gives bad luck to the people who lose it. By the time the hourglass is activated, the meaning of luck changes dramatically for the cast. |
| 232 | ** A later story "The Backdated Lucky Charm" published by Egmont was about Donald creating a lucky charm by following instructions from a book. The lucky charm is a special one that enchants and preserves happy moments so that they can last as long as the wearer wishes. When Donald wishes that a particularly good evening for dinner never ends, the entire evening falls into a pattern of eternal repitition, with Donald the only one noticing something's wrong. He had wished that moment never ended, so at the point at which the moment should end, it repeats itself. As Donald realizes later: ''That's not a lucky charm!'' (He finally cancels the curse by wishing that the event never happened, which makes the entire plot AllJustADream). |
| 233 | * GroundhogDayLoop: The story "Again and Again..." (Donald Duck 336, 2006), Donald is forced to relive the same day over and over until he discovers what he did "wrong" on that day. The story spoofs elements of both Groundhog Day and Film/TheHudsuckerProxy—with mouse-eared "Daddy Time" (i. e. Moses) being wise to the time loop, and a Phil-like character reliving a similar time loop in a movie on Donald's TV. |
| 234 | * HaveAGayOldTime: |
| 235 | ** In the first ''WesternAnimation/TheThreeCaballeros'' comic Rosa did, he changed the lyrics of the eponymous song to remove the verse "the three gay caballeros". In the second one, the line is intact. [[labelnote:Aside]]You could almost swear there's a guy giving them a knowing gaze as they sing it that time...[[/labelnote]] |
| 236 | ** In the Barks story "The Case of the Sticky Money" Scrooge stops the Beagle Boys from siphoning his money out through a hole in the bin...and they lament "this ends our glory hole!" |
| 237 | * HeadsOrTails: In "Flip Decision", Donald is conned by a charlatan into believing in [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipism Flipism]]: the idea that all of life's choices can be made on the flip of a coin. HilarityEnsues, of course, though the coin does show uncanny predictive power. |
| 238 | * HeistClash: One story has a falling out between the Beagle Boys after yet another failure to plunder Scrooge [=McDuck=]'s [[PooledFunds Money Bin]]. Each Beagle, and their Grandpa, splits up, disgruntled with each other, and comes up with their own idea for breaking into the money bin. The following night has the plans individually commence, and between a silent subterranean DrillTank, HollywoodHacking and a little bit of deception, the money bin doesn't stand a chance, with each Beagle amazed that the other dimwits managed to get in. Unfortunately, it's all foiled when Grandpa Beagle releases a KnockoutGas through the money bin's vents but neglects to read the instructions, leading to him entering the money bin before the gas has dispersed - his last sight before being knocked out is the other three beagles inside the bin as well. When the staff arrives the following morning and discovers the beagles, they call the police - [[StatusQuoIsGod the story ends with the Beagle Boys back together, happy to go to prison, as they are now convinced that if they put their heads together and coordinate, nothing will stand in the way of their escape or their next plan]]. |
| 239 | * HereWeGoAgain: ''The Legendary Crown of Queen Kazabra'' has Daisy possessed by the titular crown. After the kids manage to knock it off her head, though, the Mayor's wife thinks it's a gift for her and starts to the put it on, much to the horror of everyone else there. |
| 240 | %%* HistoricalInJoke |
| 241 | * {{Homage}}: The two stories with WesternAnimation/TheThreeCaballeros. Complete with them performing the theme song. |
| 242 | * HollowWorld: As revealed in ''Land Beneath the Ground'', the entire planet has another land beneath it, which is home to the Terries and the Fermies who clam that their land "extends all over the inner crust of the world!". |
| 243 | * HowDoIShotWeb: |
| 244 | ** Paperinik (Donald superhero alter-ego) sometimes has troubles with his gadgets, both in PKNA and non-PKNA stories. It's downplayed in PKNA, given he has One to help him with those (but still doesn't know how to use the full potential of his [[MorphWeapon Extransformer shield]], and when One gets deactivated he finds out he has no idea how to fuel the [=PKar=]... Or what the fuel ''is''), but in non-PKNA stories he has some added problems because Gyro either forgets to explain how they work or gives him a ''gigantic'' user manual he cannot possibly read. |
| 245 | *** Actually {{Invoked}} in the non-PKNA story in which the Beagle Boys stole his 313-X car and some of his weapons... Only to get repeteadly humiliated because Paperinik knows how to use them and they don't (the paralizing pistol, for example, is single-shot). |
| 246 | ** In her debut, Paperinika (Daisy superhero alter-ego) had some serious problems at using her skating boots, and the first attempt ended with a ridiculous pratfall. Averted for the other gadgets, as her supplier has the common sense to explain how to use the things and provide sensibly-sized user manuals... Or simply provides gadgets that are based on something she already knows how to use (such as her [[BadassBiker bike]]). |
| 247 | ** This happens rather often in ''The Amazing Adventures of Fantomius: GentlemanThief'', the prequel dedicated to the duck that would inspire Donald into becoming Paperinik: Fantomius' GadgeteerGenius is a relative of Gyro and just as much as a CloudCuckooLander as him, and sometimes forgets to tell him something-[[FlawedPrototype or to include working brakes]]. [[RunningGag Fantomius himself still has to figure how to dodge rose bushes]]. |
| 248 | * HumanityOnTrial: In a ''Donald Duck'' comic, Donald is taken by SufficientlyAdvancedAliens (who mistake him for a sports champion who happened to be in Donald's vicinity) to represent Earth in an intergalactic tournament that will determine whether or not Earth will become part of their [[CityInABottle collection of miniaturized planets]]. He keeps losing each part of the competition horribly to the other champions, which include much stronger, faster, and intelligent aliens and robots. The way he eventually wins is ingenious: He claims that no form of life can sleep longer than him, which the other contestants challenge by going into hibernation for centuries or millennia. The judges angrily revoke the contest and send Donald back to his home world when they realize that they'll have to wait ''50,000'' years before they can declare the winner. |
| 249 | * HumanlikeHandAnatomy: WesternAnimation/DonaldDuck and the rest of the more FunnyAnimal bodied ducks have human-like arms and hands, but webbed feet. |
| 250 | * HypocriticalHumor: In ''Gyro's First Invention'', Scrooge sees Gyro getting sentimental with Lil Helper and chastises the inventor for basing his life on one achievement. Donald, for his part, just smirks at his uncle and points out the pedestal for Scrooge's Number One Dime. |
| 251 | * IveComeTooFar: In "The Money Champ", it's revealed that, after betraying his mother's hopes and becoming a scoundrel just to become the world's richest duck, Flintheart Glomgold feels like he ''must'' become the richest duck no matter what else he must do to reach that goal. |
| 252 | %%* ImpossibleThief: Arpin Lusene |
| 253 | * InadequateInheritor: Whether or not Scrooge views Donald as this tends to vary across multiple stories. ''Some Heir Over the Rainbow'', written in 1953, had Scrooge declare Huey, Dewey, and Louie his heirs, due to viewing Donald as this because of how he spent $1,000 that Scrooge secretely gave him, Gladstone, and the triplets. Notably, that story features Scrooge even considering Gladstone to be a better successor than Donald. However, ''Race to the South Seas'', from 1949, had Scrooge declare Donald as his heir at that story's end. 1956 had the story ''Two is Company'' where Scrooge is again trying to decide between Donald and Gladstone as to who will inherit his business. Then, 1961's ''Bongo on the Congo'' has Scrooge trying to teach Donald how to be a chief because he will inherit his business empire one day, and no mention is even made of the nephews doing so. So there are some stories showing the triplets being Scrooge's heirs and others showing that Donald is. |
| 254 | * InsaneTrollLogic: Italian stories like this. There's a story where Scrooge is continuously hit by lightning because he's "at the top of the world", a story where Scrooge moves in with a group of fishmen on the bottom of the sea to learn to handle deep sea pressure so he can cope with the pressure of being the world's richest, and a story where bureaucratic red tape is the perfect retardant for a makeshift explosive because it's the slowest-moving anything in the universe. The stories just tend to handwave it off and ask you to pretend it makes sense. |
| 255 | * InsanelyInternationalAncestry: By force of ContinuityDrift and DependingOnTheWriter, Donald and Uncle Scrooge's ancestors include two Egyptian pharaohs, various Ancient Roman characters, Native Americans, French noblemen, Italian merchants, Spanish Conquistadors, the Scottish [=McDuck=] clan, and more. In the 1970's, a special comic arc that ran over twelve issues in Italy attempted to [[JustifiedTrope Justify]] it by showing how the family line had moved across the world [[ItMakesSenseInContext for various reasons]], but later writers couldn't keep that timeline straight and by now it raises more questions than it answers [[note]]For one thing, it showed Scrooge's parents as having lived most of their life in the Klondike, even though in ''ComicBook/TheLifeAndTimesOfScroogeMcDuck'', Scrooge seemed to have lived all of his childhood in Scotland, and his parents didn't give any sign of having ever lived anywhere else, let alone been gold diggers![[/note]] |
| 256 | * ItsAllUpstairsFromHere: In one story Magica [=DeSpell=] steals Scrooge's NumberOneDime but he finds and stops her before she can complete her ritual. This results in them being sucked into a giant maze-like challenge, where Scrooge has to scale a mountain filled with all sorts of bizarre ''Alice in Wonderland''-type sceneries before moonlight hits the top or Magica wins. |
| 257 | * ItsAWonderfulPlot: |
| 258 | ** Creator/DonRosa did a story about Donald Duck, "The Duck Who Never Was", based on this trope to celebrate his 60th birthday. Donald, who's been feeling down on his luck [[TheChewToy even for him]], spends his birthday trying to get a job at a museum; he's immediately laid off for exceeding the retirement age due to a nearsighted curator misreading his application. As he leaves, he bumps into an urn and releases the "birthday genie," a powerful spirit that [[CripplingOverspecialization grant one wish to a person if that person releases him on their birthday]]. Donald gets upset and wishes that he'd never been born, and the birthday genie grants his request--and Duckburg instantly transforms into [[CrapsackWorld a miserable, graffiti-riddled hellhole.]] Nearly everyone Donald knows is worse off. Because Donald didn't get [[ItMakesSenseInContext kidnapped by a talking wolf]], Gyro Gearloose accidentally blasted himself with his own intelligence-reducing ray, robbing him of his inventing skills and forcing him to become a miserable farmer. He bought said farm from Grandma Duck, who had to give up the property because Gus never came to work for her. Instead, Grandma works as Daisy's secretary; Daisy herself has become a successful romance novelist, but she only writes her books to make up for her horrible loveless life, and spends all of her time shut away in Scrooge's (former) Money Bin, which she's turned into her printing plant, hating the world and drinking heavily (the latter is implied through some empty bottles she throws at Donald). Gus, meanwhile, is a skinny, broke loser living on the streets--without Donald to become Scrooge's heir, the billionaire was forced to hire Gus, who lost the legendary Number One Dime to Magica [=DeSpell=] ''on his first day on the job.'' This broke Scrooge's spirit and led him to lose everything to Flintheart Glomgold, who's slowly draining Duckburg of its resources through a combination of naturally large taxes (which the Duck family once paid) and outsourcing to Africa. The only person who's still rich and successful (much to Donald's chagrin) is the [[BornLucky impossibly lucky]] Gladstone Gander, who continues to win sweepstakes and prizes on an hourly basis--the trouble is that Huey, Dewey, and Louie had to go to live with him without Donald to care for them. As a result of Gladstone's lazy attitudes, overindulgence, and philosophy of HardWorkHardlyWorks, the boys have become massively obese couch potatoes who think that any sort of movement besides eating takes too much effort. Finally, the Beagle Boys, who lost their motivation for robbery when Scrooge went broke, have become [[DirtyCop dirty cops]] in the extreme, and one brother is even the ''mayor.'' Donald rushes back to the museum and begs for the birthday genie to reverse the spell; he does so, and the now-enlightened duck returns home to find a surprise party waiting for him. |
| 259 | ** There was another Donald story with a similar premise, but only in the loosest of terms. For one thing, the story takes the GoodAngelBadAngel trope and exaggerates it, with the two actually being depicted as (magical?) creatures living in Donald's brain. The bad angel, fed up with how the good angel seems to always influence Donald, beats him up and ties him into a closet, then disguises himself as the good angel. What does this have to do with this trope? Well, the angels' recent conflicts inside Donald's brain have resulted in Donald demonstrating bipolar disorder-like behavior, so all his friends and family (plus Gladstone) hold a meeting which Donald eavesdrops on and thinks is about how much he sucks as a person. Furious, he wishes that he was never born, and the bad angel (disguised as the good angel) shows him what life would be like without him... and everybody's happier (i.e. Daisy is HappilyMarried to Gladstone, Huey, Dewey and Louie are in Scrooge's custody). Just as this little tour ends, the good angel breaks free, beats up the bad angel in return, and shows Donald what would ''really'' result (Daisy leads an empty life married to Gladstone; Gladstone thinks that Daisy is way too controlling; Scrooge is contemplating putting Huey, Dewey, and Louie in juvenile hall, etc.). And before you ask, no, this was not a fanfiction. |
| 260 | ** Huey, Dewey and Louie are preparing dinner for New Year's Eve in a geriatric care home using money provided by the Junior Woodchucks. They send Donald with the money to buy food, but he loses the purse. Donald decides Duckburg would be better off without him and seems to prepare to commit suicide, but is interrupted by his guardian angel (not the angel from the previous story, by the way). The guardian angel shows him how a new year's eve in Duckburg would be without him: Huey, Dewey and Louie live in an orphanage, are constantly bullied by their peers and are unable to celebrate new year's eve in peace. Daisy is dating Gladstone (again), but is unhappy with how Gladstone takes her to a horse racetrack rather than a restaurant and feels Gladstone doesn't really care about her. Scrooge has no friends or family and when he decides to invite his staff to a dinner party, he finds that none of them is willing to spend more time than necessary with him. |
| 261 | ** And another time (''Donald Duck'' comics will ruminate any trope to infinity) there was an {{inversion}} where Donald made the wish that he were alone without all his friends who were annoying him. No points for guessing he didn't like it when the wish came true, though there was more to the plot than that. |
| 262 | ** And one more: Donald gets to see what Duckburg would be with his hypothetical twin brother existing instead of him. Since the twin is [[SpaceWhaleAesop randomly]] a clichéd BigBrotherIsWatching dictator, this makes him feel better about being who he is. It's like the story changes clichés mid-swing. |
| 263 | * JailBake: The Beagle Boys tend to use these to escape from prison. For example, when they visit Grandpa Beagle in jail for his birthday they bring him a pie which contains a ludicrous amount of objects such as a file, the key to his cell, and a chainsaw. |
| 264 | * JustLikeRobinHood |
| 265 | ** The motivation for Fantomius, a GentlemanThief who Paperinik is a sort-of LegacyCharacter to (his equipment is based on Fantomius' designs, updated from the roaring 20s and he has access to Fantomius' old {{Elaborate Underground Base}}s). This trait is more marked in Danish stories: Italian Paperinik stories, including the one where Paperinik debuted and first mentioned Fantomius, make clear that Fantomius stole from the riches only out of a personal vendetta (as they called him a good for nothing just because of his British nationality, much like Donald Duck became Paperinik due having enough of being called called a lazy good for nothing in spite of all his efforts), and as much as he'd give to charity any cash he stole he usually grabbed jewels and other rare and valuable things. |
| 266 | ** Also, in some newer Danish ''Paperinik'' stories, the motivation of immortal ClassyCatBurglar Ireyon (who used to just steal for herself until [[LoveRedeems she fell in love with Fantomius]]). |
| 267 | * KeepingSecretsSucks: Duck superheroes are persecuted by this: |
| 268 | ** Paperinik, alias Donald Duck, suffers greatly from the contrast between [[DudeWheresMyRespect the lack of respect he gets in his civilian identity]] and the admiration, or at least grudging respect, he receives as Paperinik, especially because he fully understands the {{Irony}} in [[WhosLaughingNow having become Paperinik to take revenge for the disrespect]] and finally getting respected only in his masked identity while said identity sometimes making things ''worse'' for him, as he'll miss important engagements due his superhero duties and cannot explain why. In the "classic" stories (outside the ''ComicBook/PaperinikNewAdventures'' continuity) he even lacks a confident, as his identity is ''that'' important-to the point Gyro reacted to being told about his identity for this purpose by ''[[LaserGuidedAmnesia wiping his memory of it on the spot]]''. |
| 269 | ** Paperinika, alias Daisy, goes through the same problem with balancing superhero work and civilian identity. Thankfully, her GadgeteerGenius did ''not'' wipe her memory of her identity, so she has a confidante. |
| 270 | ** The infamous BelligerentSexualTension between Paperinik and Paperinika is only made worse by the fact they hate each other as superheroes (or at least ''try'') and are loyal to their respective significant others... who just happen to be each other. |
| 271 | ** The Red Bat, alias Fethry, shares the same trouble with the different treatment his identities get as Paperinik. Differently from him he can take it in stride thanks to a more optimistic character and knowing he's treated that way because he's a terrifying {{Klutz}}. |
| 272 | * KnowWhenToFoldEm: In ''W.H.A.D.A.L.O.T.T.A.J.A.R.G.O.N.'', Scrooge is trying to destroy wood that was part of Fort Duckberg, the original base for the Junior Woodchucks. Once he learns that much of his workforce (including the worker preparing to destroy said wood) were former Woodchucks that will quit if anything happens to the wood, he rightfully decides to hand back the wood to the Junior Woodchucks (but not before passing out). |
| 273 | * LaserGuidedAmnesia: Magica's main spell in "Forget It" causes Scrooge and Donald to forget about certain things, like walking. |
| 274 | * LaserGuidedKarma: |
| 275 | ** Scrooge barely averts getting himself hit by this in Barks' classic "The Money Well", stubbornly refusing to replace his old eyeglasses just because he absolutely refuses to pay $10 for a new pair, despite his old glasses causing him to repeatedly suffer BrickJoke mishaps. This bites back on him really hard when he nearly loses '''ALL''' of his money to the Beagle Boys just because Scrooge's old glasses made him misread the numbers on a map. Declaring himself "licked", he finally buys new glasses which enable Scrooge to successfully pull off a plan to outfox the Beagles and get his money back. |
| 276 | ** In one story Scrooge forces Donald to be a swan diver for his restaurant, and at the end Donald finally snaps and has his new goat friend push him off the cliff. |
| 277 | * LiteralMoneyMetaphor: One comic has Scrooge being forced to pay Donald "a thousand thanks". Initially Donald wanted it as money, but when it was brought to court, it was ultimately ruled that Scrooge had to thank Donald a thousand times. |
| 278 | * LittleBitBeastly: The dog-nosed but otherwise human supporting cast. |
| 279 | * LongRunnerTechMarchesOn: With the notable exception of Don Rosa, most Duck-writers let their stories take place in the present. Thus, while none of the characters has aged a day, the technology since the times of Carl Barks has marched on. |
| 280 | * LoveTriangle: |
| 281 | ** Many stories involve Donald and Gladstone competing over Daisy's affection. |
| 282 | ** Averted with Scrooge. Despite the fact that Brigitta Mac Bridge and Glittering Goldie love the same man, Scrooge [=McDuck=], these two quite different ladies have never been in conflict in the rare comic stories where they both appear. In Scarpa's story ''Arriva Paperetta Yè-Yè'' ("The Arrival of Dickie Duck"), Brigitta feels really sad when she sees Scrooge and Goldie together for a brief moment, but then Goldie comforts her and says that she assumes Brigitta loves Scrooge's stinginess more than himself and Brigitta thanks for Goldie's "kind" words and calls her "my friend". |
| 283 | * LovecraftLite: You could call ''Land beneath the Ground'' a Barksian version of Creator/HPLovecraft, surprisingly enough - just read it. And while you're at it, check out ''Ancient Persia'' ... ''Literature/TheCaseOfCharlesDexterWard'', anyone? None of these are gloomy enough to count as real {{Cosmic Horror Stor|y}}ies, of course. Except for the obscure Danish story ''ComicBook/TheCallOfCRusso'', which is straight lovecraftian horror. |
| 284 | |
| 285 | [[/folder]] |
| 286 | |
| 287 | [[folder:M-P]] |
| 288 | |
| 289 | * MagicalNativeAmerican: The Peeweegah, a tribe of long-nosed pygmy Indians with the power to communicate with animals. First appeared in the Carl Barks story ''Land of the Pygmy Indians'', they then reappeared in the Don Rosa story ''War of the Wendigo''. |
| 290 | * MechanicalHorse: In a Paperinik (classic) story, Gyro Gearloose creates one for the eponymous hero after Scrooge [=McDuck=] confiscates Donald's car. |
| 291 | * MenAreUncultured: Daisy is forever trying to make Donald take an interest in the finer things in life instead of being a lazy slob. On the other hand, other stories has Donald show (or at least affect) a great regard for things like art and fine cooking - usually when trying to force his nephews to imbibe some culture. |
| 292 | * TheMenInBlack: |
| 293 | ** Recent European-produced stories sometimes include the half-parodic T.N.T (Tamers of Nonhuman Threats), of which Donald and Fethry are freelance agents, dealing with supernatural or alien threats to humanity while trying to hide their existence to the common public. Unlike many examples of this trope, the T.N.T. are unmistakable good guys and do not wear shades. |
| 294 | ** In one T.N.T story, Donald got tired of the BoringButPractical janitor-like uniforms and tried invoking a more traditional [[TheMenInBlack MIB]] look by dressing himself and Fethry up in stylish black tuxedoes and CoolShades. This phase lasted for exactly two pages, and was abandoned when Donald and Fethry discovered that the CoolShades were too dark for them to see anything, and they walked straight out into a trafficked road. The results were AmusingInjuries and ruined tuxedoes. |
| 295 | * MindControlDevice: |
| 296 | ** Actually kind of subverted in a Donald Duck story ''The Hypno Gun'' by Carl Barks. The titular hypno gun is in fact just a harmless toy gun that Huey, Dewey and Louie ''pretend'' to hypnotize one another with... however, Donald, overhearing them, thinks that it's a ''real'' hypno gun. Donald is, in fact so convinced that the hypno gun works that it actually ''does'' work on him, even if it doesn't work on anyone else. |
| 297 | ** Another, old comic[[note]]We're talking late fifties here[[/note]] had Donald buy a pair of hypnotic glasses to try and get his nephews to obey him. |
| 298 | * MirrorUniverse: In a comic, Paperinik ends up going into an alternate universe where Uncle Scrooge is poor, Gladstone Gander is unlucky, policemen are criminals, criminals are good, and Paperinik himself is evil. |
| 299 | * MobySchtick: The Italian Disney comics did [[https://www.cinquecosebelle.it/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/topolino3003.jpg their own version of Moby Dick]] with Scrooge [=McDuck=] as Captain Ahab. |
| 300 | * MoneyFetish: Scrooge loves to swim in his money, and knows where he got each coin. |
| 301 | * MonsterInTheIce: In one story, Uncle Scrooge starts melting tunnels through the Antarctic glaciers to find new mineral deposits beneath them. As he and his nephews explore the new tunnel system, they find a variety of Mesozoic creatures sealed in the ice, ranging from fern leaves to fishes to entire dinosaurs. |
| 302 | * MonumentalTheft: In his first incarnation Paperinik (Donald Duck's superhero-avenger of himself alter ego) steals huge amounts at once. |
| 303 | ** He steals Scrooge's money-filled bed while he was sleeping on it in the very first story. |
| 304 | ** In one story he faked a FaceHeelTurn caused by a supposed amnesia and ''steals half of Duckburg piece by piece'' (at that point the police just gave up and started playing with flowers), and gave it back once he had dismantled the criminal organization he had set to infiltrate. |
| 305 | * MultilayerFacade: Paperinik (the superhero alter-ego of Donald Duck]]) has to involuntarily do this in one story. At one point he decides to demonstrate ([[AsYouKnow for no reason and to no-one in particular]]) how his masks work, and too late realizes that he's out of the spray that would let him take the sticky mask off. Since the mask he is trying on is one of a caricatural alien, he is forced to wear a new mask on top of this one. (Later on, however, he manages to avoid having his secret identity exposed because he is wearing this additional mask). |
| 306 | * MrViceGuy: Scrooge and {{Greed}}. |
| 307 | * {{Nephewism}}: |
| 308 | ** The relation between Donald and the triplets is a contender for the TropeMaker. Donald himself also spends a lot of time with his own uncle Scrooge. And Scrooge is eventually revealed to have left Scotland at a young age to live with his own uncle Pothole (though only briefly). You'd think it was a family tradition. |
| 309 | ** Gladstone and Fethry both have nephews, Shamrock and Dugan, who basically play for the triplets the same role their uncles play for Scrooge. So does Gyro, come to think of it. |
| 310 | * MuggleInMageCustody: In one of the issues of ''Donald Duck & Co'', released by Egmont, Donald and Scrooge are on an underwater expedition when they meet the old wise sea king Saltomon. Saltomon hasn't had guests for about a thousand years, [[LeaveYourQuestTest so he wants Donald and Scrooge to stay with him just for a little while... a hundred of years or two]]. The protagonists manage to leave, and then the villainous Beagle Boys get stuck with Saltomon instead. |
| 311 | * NeverSmileAtACrocodile: Hungry crocodiles have shown up from time to time to chase the Ducks, or as part of a SharkPool. Probably the most effective moment is in a Creator/DonRosa story where Donald and his nephews are searching the Nile for unique crocodiles with a hieroglyph mark on their backs. They enter a quiet subterranean temple altar, only to realize far too late that the entire room is filled with sleeping crocodiles. |
| 312 | * NewYearsResolution: A few stories have this theme. |
| 313 | ** In one, Daisy Duck suggested him to promise he'd no longer get angry. When he suggested she make a similar promise, the result was a mixture of HypocriticalHumor and DoubleStandard. Donald's nephews then abused the resolution until [[spoiler:Daisy reminded Donald [[LoopholeAbuse he doesn't need to be angry to hit nephews as punishment]]. Having overheard that conversation, the nephews wrote a resolution to be good boys so he'd no longer have a reason to hit them. It didn't work]]. |
| 314 | ** In another one, Huey, Dewey and Louie promised they'd always make it on time to school and that they'd do the dishes for a whole month as punishment if they break the promise. Donald promised he'd no longer lose his temper. Growing tired of washing dishes, Donald tricked the nephews into being late for school. Wanting to get out of that, they tricked Donald into agreeing they'd have their meals in paper plates. Then they spent the rest of the story trying to enrage him. [[spoiler: It was GoneHorriblyRight]]. |
| 315 | ** In yet another one, Donald and the nephews agreed he'd do the dishes if he breaks his resolution before they break theirs and they'll do the dishes if they break their resolution before he breaks his. In order to avoid trickery, they kept their resolution secret and wrote them inside envelopes. Donald promised to only prepare desserts until they have any and the nephews promised not to have desserts. A few days later, Donald decided to figure out their promise and found a way to open the envelope without leaving signs. He then changed his resolution. The next day, one of the nephews asked Donald to pose for a photograph and he agreed. Later on, he tricked them into having dessert so he could punish them. While wondering how he knew what their resolution was, they asked him what ''his'' was. He then revealed he promised not to wear a hat inside the house. They then pointed out he was breaking his resolution but he claimed they broke theirs first. None of them remembered Donald wearing his hat inside the house before they broke their resolution [[spoiler:until the nephew who took the photograph produced it as evidence Donald was the first resolution breaker among them. That nephew then confided to the others he had seen Donald's papers at the table and, using a Literature/SherlockHolmes trick, had figured out Donald's new resolution and took the photo for that purpose]]. |
| 316 | * NiceJobBreakingItHero: In one story, Scrooge makes a bet with Flint to see who can last longer in the woods the cheapest. However, Donald and the triplets stumble upon their uncle and think he's gone crazy so they try to send him essentials, which Flint eventually discovers and causes Scrooge to lose. |
| 317 | * NoisyDuck: [[https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/6d6a235f_f04c_4c63_9e23_010975d7f624.jpeg This comic strip]] depicts Donald Duck's nephews making various noises while he is trying to read, eventually leading him to reading outside in the cold. |
| 318 | * NonIdleRich: Scrooge is wealthy, but is most certainly not idle due to how often he goes on adventures to find more treasures to increase his profits. |
| 319 | * NoodleIncident: "The Treasure of Crosecus" opens up in the aftermath of one of Magica's schemes being foiled. According to Donald, it was her most bizarre and complex scheme yet, and it involved animals in hats, Donald being pied, and one of the triplets swallowing a foof bomb. |
| 320 | * NotAllowedToGrowUp: Huey, Dewey and Louie have remained children for as long as the comic keeps going. |
| 321 | * NotThisOneThatOne: The gag of the crappy choice being what was picked rather than the one everyone finds ideal happens a lot in stories where Scrooge [=McDuck=] takes his nephew(s) on a trip - mostly with ships for a reason. |
| 322 | * TheNudifier: The Danish story "[[https://inducks.org/story.php?c=D+97054 A Stitch in Time]]" has Donald and his nephews find a meteoritie containing alien moths, which proceed to devour the clothes of everyone in Duckburg, [[BankruptcyBarrel forcing them to wear barrels]]. |
| 323 | * OldBeggarTest: |
| 324 | ** Used in one story with Donald Duck. In this story, Donald is a highly respected food critic who goes to restaurants to judge their food and determine if they deserve a star or not. In one restaurant, he first goes as himself, and after being treated like a king by the staff, he remarks that he might award them a fourth star (which would make the restaurant ''extremely'' prestigious), but needs to think about it. He then leaves, and comes back a moment later disguised as a beggar. He attempts to receive the same kind of treatment like a regular customer, but the staff scoffs him, relentlessly mocking him and suggesting that he should eat out of a bowl like a dog. Upon this outrageous treatment, Donald reveals himself and ''removes'' one of the stars, as a punishment for the staff for not treating all of their customers equally. [[DownplayedTrope Downplayed]], for Donald was just a food critic, and not a powerful entity. |
| 325 | ** Donald is just as likely to do the same mistakes himself, though. In another comic, he works as the head waiter at a prestigious restaurant and is warned that a food critic is going to show up. He quickly identifies the critic as the well-dressed man who keeps fussing over the cutlery, and spoils him massively while disregarding and unknowingly mistreating another, ordinary-looking customer (seating him in the back by the kitchen door, giving him the wrong entrees and drinks, ''stealing his tablecloth'' because it was cleaner than the critic's). Predictably, the mistreated customer turns out to be the critic, and is livid over his horrid treatment... whereas the well-dressed man turns out to be a silver-polish salesman who wants to give Donald a deal on something to clean up their filthy cutlery with. |
| 326 | %%* OlderHeroVSYoungerVillain: Scrooge to several members of his RoguesGallery. |
| 327 | * OnOneCondition: |
| 328 | ** One Creator/CarlBarks Donald Duck story featured Donald learning he's going to inherit one thousand dollars from a relative he never heard about before if he earns another thousand dollars. However, it was a plot by Scrooge [=McDuck=]. Donald had previously located a sunken yacht belonging to Scrooge and offered to salvage it for fifty thousand dollars but Scrooge refused to pay more than two thousand dollars for it. [[spoiler: After Scrooge sabotaged Donald's other attempts to earn that money, Donald accepted Scrooge's proposition. To further antagonize Donald, Scrooge saw to it that all conventional means to salvage the yacht would cost Donald three thousand dollars. Donald and his nephews then tried to outsmart Scrooge by buying several golf balls to float the yacht back to the surface. When Donald collected the inheritance, he also learned that it came from Scrooge. For a while, Donald believed he would keep the three thousand dollars but the company that manufactured the golf balls collected the money as payment for them and the collector told them that the company belongs to Scrooge.]] |
| 329 | ** In another Creator/CarlBarks story, Scrooge had a pocket watch that happened to be a family heirloom. When one of his relatives died, he was required to present the pocket watch when claiming the inheritance. Scrooge then took it to Gyro Gearloose for repairs (The terms of the will also stated that the pocket watch must be working perfectly when presented to the executors of the will). Gyro noticed that a small stone that used to be encrusted to the watch seemed to be missing but it didn't worry Scrooge, who was used to the empty spot. [[spoiler: The inheritance consisted solely of the stone]]. |
| 330 | ** An Italian Donald Duck story revolves around Donald Duck, Fethry Duck and Gladstone Gander recieving an inheritance from a distant uncle, who has a secret condition to determine who will be given his estate, which will be revealed after spending the night in his old castle. Donald and Fethry agree to team up and share the estate to try and offset Gladstone's infuriating luck. After several misadventures during the night, the executor of the will reveals that the uncle wanted his inheritor to be like him; lazy and plagued with bad luck. Donald has bad luck, but works hard. Gladstone is lazy but is extremely lucky. So the inheritance goes to Fethry, who is both lazy and has bad luck. Unfortunately for Fethry and Donald, the estate consists mostly of a massive debt, which won't be covered by selling off its assets, meaning that Gladstone's luck saved him by having him lose the inheritance. |
| 331 | ** In ''Die 13 Trilliarden Erbschaft'', Scrooge has been missing for so long he's been declared dead. As soon as Donald and Gladstone are informed Scrooge left his fortune to them, they hurry to spend it without listening to the rest of the will. Huey, Dewey and Louie read it and find out Scrooge, not wanting his nephews to squander his fortune, set a condition preventing them from inheriting his estate until they add one million dollars to it. By the time Donald and Gladstone are informed of that condition, they've already spent nearly that amount. Gladstone [[spoiler:decides to earn that money by selling lottery tickets, offering Scrooge's fortune as the first prize and buying a ticket so he can win. He does win but Scrooge turns out to be alive and is upset that the extra money caused the money bin to collapse. He's entertaining the idea of changing the will to include Huey, Dewey and Louie as beneficiaries.]] |
| 332 | * PacingATrench: Whenever Scrooge [=McDuck=] is in a rough situation, he goes to the Worry Room. He had often paced so much in that room that he's in at least a few feet inside the floor. In one extreme case, only his hat was visible above the floor. |
| 333 | * PayingInCoins: In ''Zio Paperone e il segreto di Cuordipietra'', Flintheart Glomgold abducts Huey, Dewey and Louie, takes them to an artificial island and demands a cubic hectare of money from Scrooge as ransom. Scrooge pays the ransom in coins [[spoiler:and it does more than merely annoying Glomgold. The cubic hectare's weight is so much the island sinks with it. Scrooge already has a special submarine to reclaim the coins.]] |
| 334 | * PollutedWasteland: In "Be Leery of Lake Eerie", (Walt Disney Comics #655, April 2005), Huey, Dewey, Louie and their Junior Woodchuck teammates attempt to go swimming in Lake Eerie, only to jump back out when they forgot to apply axle grease. The Junior Woodchucks discover mutant catfish that eat garbage and a dragon that lives off of the lake's refuse; unfortunately, the dragon can't live in water diluted down to a level of 98% impure. |
| 335 | * PooledFunds: In what is probably the most popular case, Scrooge has an entire pool of money where he dives when he's in a good mood. |
| 336 | * PuttingTheBandBackTogether: In the second story featuring the Three Caballeros, Donald becomes especially depressed and Huey, Dewey and Louie decide to reunite the Three Caballeros in the hopes that it will cheer Donald up. |
| 337 | |
| 338 | [[/folder]] |
| 339 | |
| 340 | [[folder:Q-Z]] |
| 341 | * RaptorAttack: "Escape From Forbidden Valley" has a pack of ''Velociraptor'' that Scrooge muscles his way through in order to get one of the dinosaur eggs they are eating. The ''Velociraptor'' actually have the correct skull shapes, and they are also accurate in size in that they are not much bigger than Scrooge. They still don't have feathers though, due to the comic being written in 1999. |
| 342 | * RealAfterAll: There's a ''Donald Duck'' story where Donald and Daisy have to seek shelter at a spooky castle whose owner turns out to be a vampire. This is revealed to be part of an elaborate commercial that was being shot at the castle, but when Donald asks him how he managed all those crazy "tricks" for the camera like floating in mid-air, the count states that they weren't tricks. Donald takes this to be a joke, but the last panel shows that he really wasn't kidding. |
| 343 | * RebusBubble: |
| 344 | ** The Creator/DonRosa ''Uncle Scrooge'' story "ComicBook/ALittleSomethingSpecial" features a more elaborate than usual application of this trope as Scrooge puts together the facts to realize that [[VillainTeamUp Glomgold and Magica have teamed up]]. |
| 345 | ** Also used in Don Rosa's story based on the Finnish national epic ''Literature/TheKalevala'', where a character's rebus bubble is translated into Kalevaic prose for the reader's convenience. |
| 346 | * ReducedToDust: An early ''Donald Duck'' story by Creator/CarlBarks, entitled ''In Ancient Persian'' saw Donald and his nephews discovering a lost Persia city whose nobility had used a special radium compound to turn themselves into fine dust — on purpose, as the dust could be regenerated back into a living body at any time in the future. The story's main antagonist, an OmnicidalManiac MadScientist is trying to seize control of the dehydrating formula to spread it throughout the planet and destroy the reviving formulas, thus becoming the last man on Earth. (Eventually, he suffers a KarmicDeath of being dried-up himself, with his dust quickly [[DeaderThanDead getting mingled with the sand]].) |
| 347 | * ReformedCriminal: The Beagle Boys actually tried to genuinely reform their criminal ways at least once, when they were offered parole in exchange for getting into an honest-job program. The problems only start when one of them begins an OfficeRomance, except the girl turns out to be a crazy AllGirlsWantBadBoys-type who pressures him to help her commit a bank robbery to get out of her boring life. |
| 348 | * RememberTheNewGuy: |
| 349 | ** A ''lot'' of characters have been introduced over the years, and several of them (especially the ones created by Carl Barks and Romano Scarpa) tend to be treated as if they've always been around, just not on-page. Barks rarely set out to create recurring characters; rather, he would see potential in characters he created for the sake of one story and re-use them. A particularly noticeable example is the Beagle Boys, who in their first story only make a silent cameo appearance on the very last panel... ''after'' Scrooge has spent the entire story worrying about them. |
| 350 | ** One notable aversion is Magica De Spell, whose first appearance is a proper introduction story, as she and Scrooge are meeting for the first time. This was because Barks conceived her as a recurring villain from the start. |
| 351 | ** This approach is also used by Italian authors: Brigitta [=McBridge=] is stated in her debut story to have known Scrooge since at least 1898 (back when Scrooge had moved to Whitehorse and became a businessman), with a later story showing their first encounter actually dates to when Scrooge was a prospector and had just struck rich; Jubal Pomp debuts as a recurring annoyance of Scrooge, and a later story actually puts their first meeting at the same time as the one between Scrooge and Brigitta; and Gideon [=McDuck=] was presented as Scrooge's younger ''brother'' (this was many years before ''ComicBook/TheLifeAndTimesOfScroogeMcDuck'' was published. Nowadays Gideon appears from time to time, but his relation to Scrooge is left out). |
| 352 | * RetroUniverse: DependingOnTheArtist to which degree. (Although considering that the [[OutdatedOutfit iconic outfits of Scrooge and other characters]] have been consistently used by everyone...) |
| 353 | * RichesToRags: |
| 354 | %%Happens to Scrooge in several WhatIf stories. |
| 355 | ** One more direct example is from "The Lentils from Babylon", where's he left broke thanks to the Beagle Boys' scheming. |
| 356 | * RunningGag: In the Don Rosa stories, there's a recurring background joke with the trophy vase the ducks were given by the Terra-Firmians in the Barks story ''Land Beneath The Ground'' being knocked off whatever pedestal or shelf it's currently being displayed on, forcing one of the characters, usually Donald, to dive down and save it from smashing against the floor. |
| 357 | ** Whenever the Beagle Boys stop time in "On Stolen Time", they take a moment to stuff their calling cards into the frozen Scrooge's face. |
| 358 | ** In Italian stories, [[TakeThat insulting garden gnomes]] out of nowhere. |
| 359 | * SameSexTriplets: Huey, Dewey and Louie as a male example. April, May and June as a female example. |
| 360 | * TheScapegoat: There's an Italian comic in which Uncle Scrooge goes to a mountain country to buy a ''literal'' scapegoat so everyone who complains to him can do so to the goat. However, eventually the goat gets so fed up with being blamed for everything that he goes ballistic and wrecks Scrooge's money bin. |
| 361 | %%* SceneryPorn: Plenty of amazing pages appear. |
| 362 | * ScifiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale: It may stretch the definition of "science fiction", but the Duck Universe still has a scale problem when it comes to Scrooge's Money Bin. Scrooge's favourite descriptor of the amount of money in the bin is "three cubic acres", a term that makes no sense, since an acre is a unit of ''area'', not distance, so a cubic acre would be a hyperdimensional construct. That aside, assuming that a "cubic acre" means "a cube where each face is the size of an acre", then the total amount of gold in Scrooge's money bin is 772,321 cubic metres, which is nearly 100 times the amount of gold ''ever mined in the history of the world''. |
| 363 | ** In one of the comic books' letters section, a reader wrote in pointing out these figures and calculations. The editors responded, "Great work figuring out the size of Scrooge's petty cash bin! Now, for his ''main'' money bin ..." |
| 364 | * TheScrooge: Guess who. His salaries to Donald and his closest workers are usually in pennies, and he'll do basically everything to not pay any service. |
| 365 | * SeaSerpents: The titular "varmint" in Carl Barks' 1951 story ''No Such Varmint'', which fortunately for Donald turns out to be susceptible to his newfound snake charming talents. |
| 366 | * SecretIngredient: In one comic, Donald insists on putting ketchup on all of Daisy's cooking, much to her annoyance, because it just doesn't taste as good as Grandma Duck's food. When Daisy checks with Grandma, it turns out the old lady's secret ingredient is...ketchup, which she puts in everything. |
| 367 | * SelfDisposingVillain: There's a story written by Creator/DonRosa where the Beagle Boys are the main characters and decide to break into Scrooge [=McDuck=]'s money bin once again after stealing the building's original architectural plans. They carry out the scheme while the building is closed at night, but they all gradually end up trapping themselves in various situations with the remaining Beagle Boys deciding to come back for them once they've successfully carried out the heist. The comic ends with the Beagle Boys discovered by a mightily surprised Scrooge and Grandpa Beagle hearing the cops talk about this from his jail cell and muttering that his grandsons can't even beat an inanimate building. |
| 368 | * SelfMadeMan: Scrooge. The point being that the "making" was more important to him than "getting made" in the first place. |
| 369 | * SeriousBusiness: The Junior Woodchucks guidebook, which contains all manner of priceless knowledge that's nearly impossible to find elsewhere, is restricted to members only, and no amount of money can buy a copy. Outsiders are only permitted to use it under special circumstances, and one senior member nearly collapses in shock at the suggestion that Donald be given access to it. There's never been any mention of pirated or stolen copies existing. |
| 370 | * SevenDeadlySins: There's a comic story where an ancient talisman worn by Donald causes the Seven Deadly Sins's personifications to emerge in Donald's shape and escape into Duckburg (except Sloth, who obviously didn't even bother to run). Donald and his nephews have GottaCatchThemAll in time before the Sins will remerge into a single monster and destroy the world. |
| 371 | * SexySecretary: A Brazilian story has two female duck characters, Simone (Carla in French) and Olga, who are Scrooge's attractive secretaries. One is a seductive criminal, the other is a judo-karate champ. Donald and Fethry fall for them. |
| 372 | * ShadesOfConflict: Frequently it enters BlackAndWhiteMorality, with clear cut (and {{Card Carrying|Villain}}) villains. But many times Scrooge andor Donald are firmly into gray territories (Scrooge against his billionaire rivals is usually either GreyAndGrayMorality or BlackAndGrayMorality). |
| 373 | * SharkPool: In one of the Italian stories Donald wins a holiday vacation but is [[MistakenIdentity mistaken by an international thief for one of her rivals]] because he keeps throwing his name around (which just so happens to also be the name of a lemonade brand that Donald likes), who threatens to throw him into a pool filled with sharks. |
| 374 | * ShoeShineMister: Scrooge famously won his Number One Dime shining shoes. |
| 375 | * ShoutOut: |
| 376 | ** Don Rosa did this '''a lot''': |
| 377 | *** Rosa never wrote any Mickey Mouse stories, but that didn't keep him from littering various Hidden Mickeys within his stories. |
| 378 | *** The afterwords for each chapter in ''ComicBook/TheLifeAndTimesOfScroogeMcDuck'' actually list all the {{Shout Out}}s. ''Film/CitizenKane'' was a popular one. |
| 379 | *** When Donald drives his car -- with Scrooge and the boys along -- off a cliff, Scrooge's only reaction is to comment, [[Creator/WCFields "The resale value on this car is going to be nil."]] |
| 380 | *** While searching for a special type of crocodile in Africa, Donald and the boys end up renting an old boat named [[Film/TheAfricanQueen "African Queen"]], and then Donald has to wade through swamps and pull the boat along. |
| 381 | *** In "Back to Xanadu", when the Ducks are about to meet the High Lama of Tralla-La, Donald jokes if he's called [[DooWopProgression "Rama Lama Ding Dong"]]. His name is "Tsam Tjaffe", like the actor who played the High Lama in ''Film/LostHorizon''. |
| 382 | *** When one of Scrooge's adventures is to find the location of the ancient city of [[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydia Lydia]], Donald can't resist starting to sing [[Creator/MarxBrothers "Lydia the Tattooed Lady"]]. |
| 383 | ** ''Film/MontyPythonAndTheHolyGrail'' gets quoted at least twice. |
| 384 | ** Arpin Lusene is an obvious nod to ''Literature/ArseneLupin''. |
| 385 | ** Another one from Arpin: at one point, he refers to Scrooge as "Ze chipskate! Ze '''picsou'''!'. Now, "picsou" ''is not'' a French word for "cheapskate". It is, however, Scrooge's name in the French version of his stories (Balthazar [[PunnyName Picsou]]). |
| 386 | ** Italian authors have got a penchant for reference jokes in later years. References to things like ''Series/HowIMetYourMother'' or ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' are a common sight nowadays. |
| 387 | * SimpleYetOpulent: Scrooge does have expensive things, like his limo and mansion, but he's not flashy about it. |
| 388 | * SlidingScaleOfContinuity: The comics by Carl Barks and many other writers are Level 1 (Negative Continuity). Creator/DonRosa's stories, however, are Level 2 (Status Quo). |
| 389 | * SnapBack: Notorious for this. No matter how extreme the events in a story, they're nearly always somehow undone at the end and never referred to in any later tale. The protagonists may be run out of town, Duckburg may be the victim of a natural disaster, but all of the events have been magically undone. The most obvious example is Uncle Scrooge's money bin, which is completely destroyed multiple times (or in one case, forced to move elsewhere due to the city planning construction that would have to go through it, only to of course be back in its typical spot next story). Some things seem to be unalterable, though -- while Scrooge may lose his money bin, the Beagle Boys never seem to be able to steal his money (except, ironically, in their very first appearance). |
| 390 | * SongsInTheKeyOfLock: My Bonnie lies over the ocean... |
| 391 | * SpinoffBabies: ''Paperino Paperotto'', an Itaian comic book series starring the life and childhood of Donald Duck and his friends in stories. Thus series soon got a Danish version, written and drawn by Kari Korhonen, too. Young Donald, lives in Quacktown, a country village on the outskirts of Duckburg located where there is the farm of Grandma Duck with the little goat Billy. This representation of childhood Donald is easily compatible with versions of other authors, in accordance with the genealogy of Don Rosa. The series is mainly created to have infant heroes who aren't depended on the adults of the series like Huey, Dewey and Louie are. |
| 392 | ** Another unrelated comic series is titled ''Young Donald Duck'' which was created by Francesco Artibani and focus the lives of Donald and his friends as teenagers going to middle school. |
| 393 | * SpringtimeForHitler: The billionaire's club in Duckburg holds a contest awarding chess sets made of diamond, gold, or silver to the three most succesful businessmen of the year, and [[ConsolationPrize a worthless wooden pawn]] to the worst one. For some reason Scrooge actually ''wants'' the consolation prize, and gets Donald to replace him as head of his business empire in the hopes that he'll ruin his profits for the year while Scrooge goes off on a holiday. Near the deadline he is livid to find out that Donald has actually been acting responsibly and his profits have shot through the roof. Then it's subverted when a stock market crash in the last minute makes Scrooge the biggest loser in the contest in one swoop. Oh, and the reason why he wanted the wooden piece was because it would have completed an invaluable chess set that Scrooge already owned and kept hidden in a vault. |
| 394 | * StatusQuoIsGod: The comics typically use a mix of this and NegativeContinuity, due to the numerous different writers who have written these stories with little to no regard for each other. In general, each story can be read entirely in isolation from every other one, meaning that none can permanently change the status quo. Some in-universe reasons are provided; for instance, since Scrooge is already the richest duck in the world, any treasures he finds will usually be a drop in the bucket, while even disastrous losses won't meaningfully affect his resources in future stories. |
| 395 | %%* TheStinger: An extra page for ''The Quest for Sampo''. |
| 396 | * StockMoneyBag: Uncle Scrooge typically stores his money in big brown canvas sacks prominently marked with dollar signs. His Money Bin, in particular, often has large mounds of these bags lying around his office and the actual wealth storage area. |
| 397 | * SuicidalLemmings: In Creator/CarlBarks "The Lemming With the Locket" (which was adapted in the ''WesternAnimation/DuckTales1987'' episode "Scrooge's Pet"), the boys get Uncle Scrooge a pet lemming, who runs off to Norway to migrate while carrying Scrooge's locket (which has the new combination to the money bin) with him. |
| 398 | * SupremeChef: In some stories, Donald's cooking skills are only surpassed by ''Grandma Duck''. In an Egyptian issue (#592, 4th June 2015) celebrating his 81st birthday, it is explicitly stated among 24 other character traits that describe him. |
| 399 | * TamperingWithFoodAndDrink: In the Carl Barks-penned ''Scrooge [=McDuck=]'' story "Back to the Klondike", saloon owner Glittering Goldie manages to steal Scrooge's Goose Egg gold nugget after putting a drug in his coffee and dumping him outside of town after going through his pockets. He immediately went back and [[OneManArmy roughed up everyone in the place]] before retrieving his record-size nugget, getting an I.O.U. out of Goldie for losing the rest of his gold in a card game, and kidnapping her to work on his claim in the mountains. |
| 400 | * TeachHimAnger: One story features WesternAnimation/DonaldDuck earning a living by teaching people anger. His Uncle Scrooge hires him to teach an actor to be angry so the actor can better perform his role in a soap-opera Scrooge is sponsoring. Scrooge says he's already spent so much money promoting the actor that hiring a replacement is out of question. Donald's lessons turned out to be a case of GoneHorriblyRight because the actor became angry enough to demand his payment to be tripled. |
| 401 | %%* ThisIsReality |
| 402 | * ThrowTheDogABone: Some stories feature Donald getting one over Scrooge: |
| 403 | ** In one story, Donald accidentally has a ton of bunny costumes produced for Scrooge and he bets he can sell them all. Just when Donald loses hope of winning, the man who liked his bunny song earlier comes along and reveals he's a music producer, who wants to produce his song. What's more, he thinks the bunny costumes are perfect for advertising. The song becomes a bit and the bunny costumes are all sold, with Scrooge forced to wear one. |
| 404 | ** In "Filthy Rich", Scrooge drags Donald along to a rich country to sell some dirt to a wealthy business man, but then the guy admits that he really wants seeds of the Duckberg Zucchini, which Donald had throughout the entire tale. And so Donald leaves in a car hauling tons of gold boasting to Scrooge, who is just pushing a wheelbarrow full of gold. |
| 405 | * TightropeWalking: A variation of this trope happens when Daisy Duck is on a building site and walks out onto a bouncy, springboard-like plank to retrieve a hammer left near one edge where it could fall on someone. She points out that (in this story) she's a ballet teacher and such perfect balance is nothing special for her. |
| 406 | * TimeDilationField: The "Reginella" arc, by Giorgio Cavazzano, features Queen Reginella's planet where a second is worth a day on Earth. It makes its inhabitants getting old in a few minutes when they venture onto Earth. |
| 407 | * TimeStandsStill: ''On Stolen Time'' by Rosa, where the Beagle Boys use a stopwatch created by Gyro Gearloose for this effect. |
| 408 | * {{Transflormation}}: In one story, Donald tricks Fethry into thinking that, if you swallow cherry pits, you will sprout branches and eventually turn into a tree yourself. He sneaks a few twigs into his ears and hair during a conversation to make Fethry think that he's starting to transform, runs off, and dresses a sapling in his sailor suit to make his cousin think he fully transformed. Fethry buys it and, having swallowed a few pits himself, heads off to the botanical garden to find a nice spot to root himself and patiently waits out his transformation. Eventually the trick is revealed, [[EveryoneLaughsEnding everyone has a laugh as the story closes]]... and in the very last panel, [[RealAfterAll a fresh twig pops out of Donald's ear]]. |
| 409 | * TreasureRoom: |
| 410 | ** Scrooge's Money Bin and Flintheart's Money Bin both qualify. In many Barks stories, such as ''No Such Varmint'', Scrooge would also be shown to have his office filled with money, to the point that it often came up to his waist. |
| 411 | ** There are tons of other examples as well since Scrooge moonlights as an AdventurerArchaeologist. He's discovered massive treasure hoards such as the Seven Cities of Cibola, the Aztec gold, the collective Mesoamerican riches hidden in Panama, the treasure of the Knight Templars, and the Amazonian CityOfGold. A noticeable one that the Ducks missed is the treasure collected by the Mongol hordes in Xanadu, which lies underneath [[spoiler:Tralla La]]. |
| 412 | * {{Tsundere}}: Daisy Duck is one of the more iconic western examples, type A towards Donald. Considering it's Donald, most people consider her mood swings justified. |
| 413 | * TwistEnding: The last page of Don Rosa's ''Return to Xanadu'' reveals that the treasure Scrooge spent the story looking for was at the bottom of the lake of Xanadu the entire time, which is where one of Scrooge's own treasures, The Crown of Genghis Khan, then ends up. |
| 414 | * VictorStealsInsignia: One ''Uncle Scrooge'' comic has a GentlemanThief steal the Beagle Boys' prison numbers as souvenirs while he's robbing Scrooge, prompting Scrooge and the Beagle Boys to pull an EnemyMine. |
| 415 | * VileVulture: In the Paperinik series, there is a vulture supervillain named Inquinator. His M.O. mainly revolves around garbage, which alludes to vultures' diet of feeding off wasted bodies. Though he makes a HeelFaceTurn in the comic "Paperinik e il ritorno di Inquinator" ("Duck Avenger and the return of Inquinator"), [[HeelFaceRevolvingDoor he goes back to being a villain again]] in the comic series [[ComicBook/{{Ultraheroes}} Ultraheroes]]. |
| 416 | * VillainousLegacy: In "Return to Xanadu", the Ducks re-enter Tralla La through a hitherto unexplored entrance built centuries earlier by the Mongol Khan, Kublai. They later realize that they accidentally activated a self-destruct mechanism which will cause the entire valley to flood right up to the highest mountaintop, drowning all the villagers. They only barely manage to save the day: Donald is seconds away from drowning himself when he manages to saw through the iron lock. |
| 417 | * VillainProtagonist: There are some stories that feature the Beagle Boys, Magica [=DeSpell=], or any of the Ducks' other enemies as the main characters as they try to figure out new schemes to defeat the Ducks. [[DependingOnTheWriter Some writers]] may even treat Scrooge himself as a villain whenever they have him play the CorruptCorporateExecutive part straight. |
| 418 | * VillainTeamUp: ''A Little Something Special'' features Magica, the Beagle Boys, and Glomgold teaming up against Scrooge. |
| 419 | * WackyRacing: The italian 4-part story "La Grande Corsa" (The Big Race) has a [[TimeMaster time controlling]] midget steals Scrooge's dime and makes him participate in a rally (in the Duckburg from past, present and future) against his opponents, and with the help of his friends and family, in order to take it back. |
| 420 | * WealthsInAName: |
| 421 | ** Scrooge [=McDuck=]'s name plays on the character of Scrooge in ''Literature/AChristmasCarol'', i.e. a rich miser. |
| 422 | ** One of Scrooge's recurring nemeses is Flintheart Glomgold, a greedy miser. Gold, of course, is a precious metal, and "glom" is a slang term for "hoard" or "seize." |
| 423 | ** No less than ''four'' separate other business rivals of Scrooge are called "Gotrocks" [[note]]("Mr. Gotrocks" is common American slang for someone who has a lot of money and goes around flaunting it; a "rock" being an old slang term for a large diamond)[[/note]]. |
| 424 | * WhamShot: The ending of "Back to Xanadu" by Don Rosa. The Ducks spend the whole story searching for the lost Mongol treasure, discover that Tralla La is the mythical Xanadu, but end up losing the crown of Kublai Khan that Scrooge had obtained in a previous story after [[NiceJobBreakingItHero narrowly saving the city from a disaster that the Ducks themselves created]]. The chief is then given the crown by a villager and curses the Mongol legacy before throwing it in the giant whirlpool beneath the city, which is shown to contain the ''entire'' treasure of the Golden Horde. |
| 425 | * WhatIf: |
| 426 | ** The Brazilian story "The Wedding of Donald Duck" (localized in the US as "A 'What-If' Love Story of Imaginary Proportions!") has Donald and Daisy get married; then they have kids. The entire story at the end is revealed to be AllJustADream. |
| 427 | ** The Italy story ''Paperinik in: i destini di un supereroe'' show could have happened if you change some elements in the original story where Paperinik is born. [[{{Gamebooks}} In the story the reader can also determine PK's destiny by selecting the flow that the story should follow]]. |
| 428 | * WholeEpisodeFlashback: ''W.H.A.D.A.L.O.T.T.A.J.A.R.G.O.N.'' deals with how the triplets first entered the Junior Woodchucks and ''Gyro's First Invention'' deals with Gyro's first ever job with Scrooge and how Lil Helper came to be. |
| 429 | * WholePlotReference: Some select stories homage other works in their entirety. For instance, one Italian one was based on ''Literature/Fahrenheit451'', just with the Ducks living in a dystopia where all music is forbidden. There's also a Danish one based on ''Film/TheShining'', though obviously with less ax-murder. |
| 430 | * WhoWantsToLiveForever: In the Tony Strobl and Carl Barks story, "King Scrooge the First", the reason the immortal King Khan Khan wants to find the lost treasure of Sagbad so badly is because it contains the antidote to the immortality potion he took when he raided the city centuries ago. He has grown tired of endlessly outliving everything and everyone dear to him, and after getting his hands on it, gladly eats it and wanders into the desert to join the dust that is all that is left of his civilization. |
| 431 | * WinHerAPrize: One of the stock themes. It's always about Donald attempting to make Daisy impressed and/or favourable, and the super lucky Gladstone is often included as a depressingly successful, sometimes highly unsportsmanlike, rival. |
| 432 | * WokenUpAtAnUngodlyHour: In the story "The Last Of The Blackducks", Donald's MeanBoss is woken up in the early morning by his brother, who tells him that Donald hadn't come to work. The boss grumbles about his brother disturbing him at such an early hour (highlighting his unsympathetic and selfish nature, seeing as he expects Donald to be at work at that time.) |
| 433 | * WorseWithContext: In the story "Gyro's First Invention", Donald and Scrooge explain the events of "Christmas for Shacktown" to Gyro and how it will take 272 years, 11 months, three weeks, and four days to get all of Scrooge's money out of the hole it's trapped in (all umpteen fantasticatillion, three multiplujillion, nine obsquatumatillion, six hundred and twenty-three dollars and sixteen cents of it), culminating with this exchange: |
| 434 | -->'''Gyro:''' ''(smiling)'' No, Mr. [=McDuck=]! You miscalculated! It'll take six months... |
| 435 | -->'''Scrooge:''' ''(cheering up)'' Really! '''Not''' 272 years? Oh, joy! Oh, rapture! |
| 436 | -->'''Gyro:''' No, no! You had the '''years''' correct! Just a tad off on the '''months!''' |
| 437 | * WorthlessTreasureTwist: One story has Donald and Scrooge stumbling upon a man's will recorded on an old phonograph cylinder that points to a treasure, which turns out to be more phonograph cylinders. It's subverted when it turns out the cylinders are made of solid gold. |
| 438 | * WorthlessYellowRocks: |
| 439 | ** Played with at the conclusion of Carl Barks' ''Twenty-Four Carat Moon''. Scrooge ends up getting to the second moon, which as the story's title suggest is made out of solid gold before any other Earthling, only to find an alien who claims to have arrived there some time ago, making the golden moon his. The alien agrees to trade the moon to earth for some dirt, which Scrooge naturally agrees to. However, the alien places the dirt in a machine he has, which turns it into an entirely new planet, with continents and oceans, that is capable of supporting life! The alien then flies off on the planet, completely satisfied, as he had come to place less value on the gold than he originally did when he came to the moon. This leaves Scrooge with possession of a moon made entirely out of gold, which is more than likely more than he's ever had previously, yet wondering whether or not he really got the better end of the deal. |
| 440 | ** Also occurs in ''A Financial Fable''. Scrooge's money is carried off by a cyclone, causing it to land all around the country, where various other characters pick it up. Scrooge, unusually, isn't worried by this and assures Huey, Dewey, and Louie that he will be able to get the money back just by continuing to work on his farm. While characters like Donald and Gladstone are happy at their newfound wealth at first, they quickly realize the problem with everyone in the country being handed a fortune: No one wants to work anymore and there is then no one around to do mundane tasks, such as supply gas or cook food for people who wish to spend their new money. Everyone has instead taken their money and "gone to see the world", only to find that there is nowhere to go, since bus drivers have also gone to do the same. Scrooge is eventually proven right when he and the triplets end up as the only people who continued to work and therefore as the only people with food to provide, for which Scrooge charges outlandish prices, such as $2 million for cabbages. |
| 441 | ** Another example in ''Return to Xanadu''. There is no precious metals (or really metals at all) in Xanadu, except for one secret room containing a great wealth of metal brought there by a stranger long ago. Scrooge gets giddy, thinking this is the treasures of the Golden Horde. His reaction when he realizes it's [[spoiler:his own bottle caps]] is priceless. As HD&L point out, this is actually far better since gold would be too soft to make tools out of. |
| 442 | * WorthyOpponent: Scrooge and Arpin Lusene see each other as this in their encounters. |
| 443 | |
| 444 | [[/folder]] |
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