Scrooge McDuck

• 1. Introduction

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  Scrooge McDuck is a cartoon duck known for a top hat, pince-nez glasses and an enormous fortune, but he began as a bitter recluse. In his first story, he sat in a huge mansion and grumbled, "Here I sit in this big lonely dump, waiting for Christmas to pass! Bah! That silly season when everybody loves everybody else!" He added, "Everybody hates me, and I hate everybody!" Nobody planned for this grump to last. Yet he grew into the star of his own comic book series, the lead of two animated television series, and a joking shorthand for great wealth around the world. How did a character meant to appear once become the center of a whole fictional universe? Where did his money come from, and what kind of duck earned it? And why does a resident of the imaginary state of Calisota keep turning up far from the comics page?

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• 2. A Reluctant Creation

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  Dell's Four Color Comics #178 reached readers on the 22nd of October 1947 with a story called Christmas on Bear Mountain. Carl Barks wrote and drew it, and he built the bearded, bespectacled old duck as an antagonist for Donald Duck. This first Scrooge leaned on a cane and was reasonably wealthy, though not yet fabulously so.

  The name was a nod to Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser in Charles Dickens' 1843 holiday novella A Christmas Carol. Barks later said, in interviews and correspondence, that two other figures shaped the character. One was Uncle Bim, the rich uncle in Sidney Smith's comic The Gumps. The other was the American industrialist John D. Rockefeller. The look itself may trace back to a Scottish, penny-pinching version of Donald in the 1943 propaganda short The Spirit of '43.

  Barks was not proud of that first draft. He said, "I had made him too old and too weak," and added, "I could not make an old guy like that do the things I wanted him to do." By his own later account, Scrooge was meant to be a one-shot. Then Barks saw that the duck and his fortune could motivate more stories. He spent the next four years experimenting with Scrooge's appearance and personality.

  The second outing, The Old Castle's Secret, first appeared in June 1948. In it, Scrooge recruits his nephews to hunt for a family treasure hidden at Dismal Downs, the McDuck ancestral castle on Rannoch Moor in Scotland. In November 1948, the story Foxy Relations became the first to give him his title and catchphrase, "The Richest Duck in the World." That title raised a question the early stories barely touched, and a sorcerer's curse in 1949 began to answer it.

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• 3. Hints of a Past

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  Foola Zoola, an old African sorcerer and chief of the Voodoo tribe, cursed Scrooge in Voodoo Hoodoo, published in Four Color Comics #238 in August 1949. The sorcerer wanted revenge for the destruction of his village and the loss of his tribe's lands, which Scrooge had taken decades earlier. Scrooge privately admitted to his nephews that he had used an army of "cutthroats" to drive the tribe away so he could plant a rubber plantation. Barks set the event in 1879. Don Rosa later moved it to 1909 so it would fit the personal history he built in The Empire-Builder from Calisota.

  The curse arrived by way of Bombie the Zombie, who searched for Scrooge for decades before reaching Duckburg and mistaking Donald for his target. Barks, with the skepticism common in his stories, explained that the zombie was a living man who had never died but had fallen under a sorcerer's influence. Some scenes parodied Bela Lugosi's White Zombie. Still, this was the first story to focus on Scrooge's past and to touch the darkest sides of his personality.

  A photograph of the last living unicorn, taken by one of Scrooge's pilots in the Indian part of the Himalayas, drives Trail of the Unicorn, first published in February 1950. Scrooge offers a reward to the competing cousins Donald Duck and Gladstone Gander for whoever captures the animal for his private zoo. The story also introduced his private airplane, and Barks went on to establish Scrooge as an experienced aviator.

  In July 1950, The Pixilated Parrot described Scrooge's central office building as holding "three cubic acres of money." That building is a forerunner of his money bin. Two burglars in the story, one named Butch, are considered precursors of the Beagle Boys.

  The Magic Hourglass, from September 1950, arguably shifted the focus of the Duck stories from Donald to Scrooge. Scrooge had given the hourglass to Donald, then learned that it worked as a protective charm for its owner. He chased his nephews across Morocco to get it back, and he had Donald tied up and tickled with a feather to learn where it was hidden. In the end, he found the nephews exhausted and stranded in the desert with no supplies, and he traded a flask of water for the hourglass. He explained that he had meant to offer more, but could not resist having someone at his mercy.

  The story also dropped clues about his origins. Scrooge remembers buying the hourglass in Morocco while serving as a cabin boy in a ship's crew, so he was clearly not born rich. It is also the first story in which he reads and speaks a language other than English, in this case Arabic. Later, Barks and Rosa made him fluent in Dutch, German, Mongolian, Spanish, Mayan, Bengali, Finnish and several Chinese dialects. He picked them up from years of living and traveling abroad. In the same story, Donald remarks that his uncle practically owns Duckburg, a claim a rival named John D. Rockerduck would later dispute.

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• 4. Taking the Lead

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  A Financial Fable, first published in March 1951, shows Scrooge teaching Donald that productivity is the source of wealth, along with the laws of supply and demand. It is also the first story in which Scrooge notices how diligent Huey, Louie and Dewey are, making them more like himself than like Donald. In Barks's stories, Donald works hard now and then but, given the choice, proves lazy. The three younger nephews sided with Scrooge here, and the bond between great-uncle and great-nephews strengthened in later stories. Donald could still prove invaluable. On a trip back to Ancient Egypt to retrieve a pharaoh's papyrus, he warned that nobody would believe the tale unless the papyrus was dug up. He buried it and marked the spot from the Nile River, which left Scrooge privately admiring his nephew.

  Terror of the Beagle Boys, first published in November 1951, introduced readers to the Beagle Boys, though Scrooge already seemed to know them. The Big Bin on Killmotor Hill placed his money bin in the center of Duckburg. By then, Scrooge was familiar to readers in the United States and Europe. The Italian writer Romano Scarpa and other Disney creators began using him in their own stories. Western Publishing, then the publisher of North American Disney comics, started to think of him as a protagonist rather than a supporting player.

  Uncle Scrooge #1 appeared in March 1952, featuring the story Only a Poor Old Man. A year later, in March 1953, came Back to the Klondike. These two stories did the most to define his character, his past and his beliefs. Barks then put most of his longer adventure stories into Uncle Scrooge, while his ten-page stories for Walt Disney's Comics and Stories kept Donald as the comic star. Donald and the nephews became Scrooge's assistants on journeys around the world. Fans came to call the result the Scrooge McDuck Universe. The Uncle Scrooge series first ran from 1952 to 1984, and the most recent revival, from IDW Publishing, ran from 2015 to 2020.

  In 1972, Barks was persuaded to write more stories for Disney. His Junior Woodchuck tales often cast Scrooge as the villain, much as in his earliest days. Under Barks, Scrooge was always malleable, taking on whatever persona the plot required. Scarpa added Brigitta MacBridge, Scrooge's self-styled fiancee, and Gideon McDuck, a newspaper editor who is Scrooge's brother. Both appeared mostly in European comics, as did Rockerduck, whom Barks had created for a single story, and Donald's cousin Fethry Duck, who sometimes reports for Scrooge's newspaper.

  Don Rosa arrived in 1986 with The Son of the Sun, released by Gladstone Publishing and nominated for a Harvey Award. Rosa has called Scrooge his favorite Disney character. In a 1992 interview with the Norwegian paper Aftenposten, he said that Scrooge once owed his existence to Donald, and that today the debt runs the other way. Other artists who have drawn Scrooge include Michael Peraza, Marco Rota, William Van Horn and Evert Geradts. Daan Jippes, who can closely mimic Barks's art, repenciled Barks's 1970s Junior Woodchuck stories and his final Uncle Scrooge stories from the 1990s to the early 2000s. Rosa's most ambitious project would give Scrooge the full biography that Barks had only hinted at.

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• 5. A Life Written Backward

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  Don Rosa treated Scrooge as a historical figure whose Disney adventures happened in the fifties and sixties and ended with his undepicted death in 1967, the year Barks retired. He counted only Barks's stories as canon and built a timeline and family tree from them. The result, The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, runs twelve chapters and won an Eisner Award in 1995. Later editions added more chapters. Under Rosa, Scrooge became more ethical. He never cheats, though he ruthlessly exploits loopholes. He owes his fortune to hard work, and every coin in his money bin is a souvenir of a specific circumstance.

  In Rosa's account, Scrooge was born in Scotland in 1867 and earned his Number One Dime, also called his First Coin, exactly ten years later. Barks had been vaguer. His 1955 one-pager Watt an Occasion, in Uncle Scrooge #12, puts Scrooge at 75 years of age. In That's No Fable!, Barks has Scrooge drink water from the Fountain of Youth. Bodily contact with the water was needed to make anyone young again, so drinking it only energized him and cured his rheumatism. Rosa's unofficial timeline has Scrooge die in 1967 at the age of 100. The 2017 DuckTales explained his longevity differently. He was trapped in ice for five years and stuck in a "timeless demon dimension" called Demogorgana for an unknown time. An episode titled "The Other Bin of Scrooge McDuck!" repeats Rosa's 1867 birth year, which makes him 154 as of 2021.

  The story begins in Glasgow, where the boy polishes boots for a living. In 1877, a ditch-digger pays him with an 1875 US dime, which is useless as currency in nineteenth-century Glasgow. Scrooge does not notice what he has been given until the man is gone. Enraged, he vows never to be taken advantage of again and to be "sharper than the sharpies, smarter than the smarties and tougher than the toughies." At the age of 13, he signs on to a Clyde cattle ship bound for the United States to make his fortune.

  In 1898, after many adventures, he reaches the Klondike and finds a golden rock the size of a goose egg. By the following year, he has made his first $1,000,000 and bought the deed for Killmule Hill from Casey Coot. Casey is the son of Clinton Coot and the grandson of Cornelius Coot, the founder of Duckburg. Scrooge settles in Duckburg in 1902. There he faces the Beagle Boys and President Theodore Roosevelt with his Rough Riders at the same time. Afterward, he tears down the rest of old Fort Duckburg and builds his famous Money Bin on the site.

  The series sends Scrooge across history. Roosevelt appears in The Buckaroo of the Badlands, The Invader of Fort Duckburg and The Sharpie of the Culebra Cut. Scrooge and Roosevelt meet at least three times, in the Dakotas in 1883, in Duckburg in 1902 and in Panama in 1906. Annie Oakley, Buffalo Bill and the Apache leader Geronimo turn up in The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff. Czar Nicholas II of Russia and John Jacob Astor IV appear in The Empire-Builder from Calisota. The philologist Elias Lonnrot features in The Quest for Kalevala.

  In the following years, Scrooge travels the world to increase his fortune while his family stays behind to run the Money Bin. When he finally returns to Duckburg, he is the richest duck in the world, rivaled by Flintheart Glomgold, John D. Rockerduck and, less prominently, the maharaja of the fictional country of Howdoyoustan. His experiences have turned him into a hostile miser, and his family leaves in disgust. About twelve years later, he closes down his empire. Five years after that, he returns to public life and restarts his business in the comic's final chapter.

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• 6. A Code of Honor

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  "Always another rainbow" was how Carl Barks described what drives Scrooge, and the phrase later became the title of one of Barks's better-known paintings. Stretches without adventure depress the duck, and some stories show the toll on his health. His other motto is "Work smarter, not harder."

  As a businessman, Scrooge often resorts to aggressive tactics and deception. Stories by the Italian writer Guido Martina, and occasionally others, stress his cynicism about morality in business. Some have noted that this was not part of Barks's original profile of the character. It has since been accepted as one valid reading of him. Scrooge also keeps a personal code of honesty that gives him a measure of self-control. He can be seen weighing a ruthless pursuit of his goal against methods he thinks more honest, and at times he gives up the goal to stay within his limits. Fans value this tension, because it lets him be the hero or the villain of his own stories, as Donald can be. It also separates him from Flintheart Glomgold, who has no such limits. In DuckTales, Scrooge tells Glomgold, "You're a cheater, and cheaters never prosper!"

  Like Donald, Scrooge has a temper and rarely hesitates to use cartoon violence on people who provoke him. The targets are often Donald, but also bill collectors, tax collectors and door-to-door salesmen. He opposes lethal force, however. He has even saved enemies who threatened his life but were in danger of losing their own, explaining that he does it to spare himself guilt. He believes that only in fairy tales do bad people turn good, and he says he is too old for fairy tales. He also holds that a promise, once given, must never be broken.

  Barks gave Scrooge ethics that fit the era in which he supposedly made his fortune. His competition was the robber barons and industrialists of the 1890s to the 1920s. Scrooge proudly declares, "I made it by being tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties! And I made it square!" Barks explained his own view in an interview. "I feel that everybody should be able to rise as high as they can or want to, provided they don't kill anybody or actually oppress other people on the way up." He also said, "I've always looked at the ducks as caricatured human beings."

  European comics have produced their own versions of Scrooge. The Italian comics, hugely popular across most of Western continental Europe from the 1960s to the 1990s, often make him an anti-hero who drags his long-suffering nephews into treasure hunts and shady deals. Donald joins only when reminded of the debts and back-rent he owes, threatened with a sword or blunderbuss, or promised a share of the loot. Scrooge then hides a small loophole in the terms and uses it at the end of the adventure to keep everything. Another running joke has Scrooge endlessly retelling his Klondike prospecting days to bored listeners. In the Dutch and Italian versions, he also makes Donald and the nephews polish his coins one by one, and he decides that even 5 cents an hour is too much to pay.

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• 7. Voice and Screen

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  As early as 1953, Disney Studios had a cartoon simply titled Scrooge McDuck in development under Al Bertino and David Detiege. In it, Scrooge trades Huey, Dewey and Louie a nickel for their valuable antique penny. When the boys realize they have been cheated, they team up with Donald to get it back. Higher-ups judged Scrooge too greedy, and the cartoon was cancelled. In the fifties, the animators generally saw him only as a duck version of Ebenezer Scrooge, a very unsympathetic figure. They shelved the idea of a feature because a duck who gets excited about money was simply not funny enough.

  Late in 1954, the studio asked Barks whether he could write a script for a seven-minute Scrooge cartoon. He delivered a detailed nine-page script about a happy-go-lucky Donald working for a troubled Scrooge, who tries to protect his money from a hungry rat. Barks also sent sketches, including a money-sorting machine he had already drawn on the cover of an Uncle Scrooge issue. The studio never used the script, because it soon decided to concentrate on television. In 1957, Bertino pitched a Disneyland episode called "Donald's Uncle Scrooge," in which Walt Disney would introduce Scrooge as "one of our biggest shareholders." By 1958, a new cartoon story by Nick George had Scrooge teaching Donald thrift with the line "spare and save is better than to spend and crave!" It was shelved as well.

  Scrooge's voice was first heard on the 1960 record album Donald Duck and His Friends, where Dallas McKennon played him. A short dramatization called "Uncle Scrooge's Rocket to the Moon" has him build a rocket to send his money to the moon, away from the Beagle Boys. A 1961 reissue as a 45 rpm single was titled "Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge's Money Rocket." His animated debut finally came in the 1967 theatrical short Scrooge McDuck and Money, in which he teaches his nephews basic financial tips. Bill Thompson voiced him. Thompson had played Jock the Scottish Terrier in Lady and the Tramp, and according to Alan Young, he had some Scottish ancestry. Scrooge made no further animated appearances before Thompson's death in 1971.

  Alan Young belonged to a Dickens society when Disneyland Records asked him in 1974 to help adapt A Christmas Carol for Disney characters. His parents were Scottish, and he had lived in Scotland for a few years as an infant. He voiced Scrooge on that record, along with Mickey Mouse and Merlin from The Sword in the Stone. When Disney turned the record into the 1983 short Mickey's Christmas Carol, Young returned. Will Ryan, a fan of Barks's comics, voiced Scrooge in the 1987 special Sport Goofy in Soccermania and in the short DuckTales pilot. He ultimately lost the part to Young, who remained Disney's official voice until his death in 2016. Young's last performance as Scrooge was in the 2016 Mickey Mouse short "No."

  DuckTales premiered over two hours on the 18th of September 1987, and regular episodes began three days later. Donald has joined the United States Navy, so Scrooge becomes the legal guardian of Huey, Dewey and Louie. His aggression is played down. In an early episode, he credits the nephews and Webby, his housekeeper's granddaughter, for his improved mood, saying "for the first time since I left Scotland, I have a family." He still insists on earning money "square," and he declares that "Scrooge McDuck's word is as good as gold." In one episode, a love spell leads him to give up his wealth for a goddess. The spell breaks only when he realizes that he would lose his nephews as well. He credits his surprising strength to "lifting money bags."

  After Young's death, John Kassir took over for the Mickey Mouse shorts, starting with "Duck the Halls" in 2016. The Scottish actor Enn Reitel voiced Scrooge for the English dub of Kingdom Hearts III, the game Disney Dreamlight Valley and Disney Parks. For the 2017 reboot of DuckTales, executive producer Matt Youngberg said, "We really wanted to find somebody who was legitimately Scottish." That search led to David Tennant, who has since returned to the role in Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers and Chibiverse.

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• 8. Fortune and Fame

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  In Barks's story The Second Richest Duck, as a Time article noted, Scrooge is worth "one multiplujillion, nine obsquatumatillion, six hundred twenty-three dollars and sixty-two cents." Rosa's Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck offers "five multiplujillion, nine impossibidillion, seven fantastica trillion dollars and sixteen cents." In the DuckTales episode "Liquid Assets," the accountant Fenton Crackshell reports that the bin holds "607 tillion 386 zillion 947 trillion 522 billion dollars and 36 cents." In "Duck in the Iron Mask," Scrooge claims 72 quadrillion dollars. A thought bubble in the 1949 story "Letter to Santa" asks, "What's the use of having 'eleven octillion dollars' if I don't make a big noise about it?" In the first episode of the 2017 reboot, he says he runs "a multi-trillion-dollar business."

  The Magic Hourglass supplies another yardstick. Scrooge says he is losing one billion dollars each minute and will be bankrupt within 600 years. The line parodies one from Orson Welles in Citizen Kane. Taken literally, it implies a net worth of $315.36 quadrillion. Forbes magazine has tried to price him in real terms. In 2007, it put him at $28.8 billion, and by 2011 the figure had climbed to $44.1 billion because of rising gold prices. On its Fictional 15 list of the richest fictional characters, he ranked fourth in 2002 with $8.2 billion. He was first in 2007, and again in 2011 and 2013, when his estimate reached $65.4 billion. In August 2017, the YouTube channel Film Theory estimated his gold coins from four sources. The lowest figure was $52,348,493,767.50, and the highest, based on "three cubic acres," was $333,927,633,863,527.10.

  Most of the money sits in the Money Bin, a huge cubic building decorated with a dollar sign and overlooking Duckburg. In the short Scrooge McDuck and Money, he calls it "just petty cash." His motto on inheritance is "Money goes to the bin, not next of kin." He loves diving and swimming in his coins without injury. In the 2017 reboot, the bin stands on an island in Audubon Bay, reached by a small bridge to downtown Duckburg. He is also the richest member of the Billionaires Club of Duckburg, a society of the world's most successful businessmen that includes Glomgold and Rockerduck.

  In 1972, the company Grupo Ronda S.A acquired the license to use Scrooge for its board game Tio Rico Mc. Pato. It is now one of the most popular board games in Colombia and a direct rival of Monopoly in the region. In 2007, Glasgow City Council added Scrooge to its list of Famous Glaswegians, alongside Billy Connolly and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. In 2008, The Weekly Standard parodied the financial bailout by publishing a memo in which Scrooge applies to the TARP program. An extortionist who targeted the German department store chain Karstadt from 1992 until his capture in 1994 used the alias "Dagobert," the German first name for Scrooge. The Dutch name Dagobert Duck gave rise to Dagobertducktaks, a tax for the wealthy, which a Van Dale poll chose as Dutch word of the year 2014. That same year, the composer Tuomas Holopainen of Nightwish released a concept album, Music Inspired by the Life and Times of Scrooge, with cover art by Don Rosa.

  Television viewers have seen the coin-diving image echoed elsewhere. In the Family Guy episode "Lottery Fever," Peter injures himself trying to dive into a pile of coins. In the 2013 Breaking Bad episode "Buried," Patrick Kuby tells Huell Babineaux, "we are here to do a job, not channel Scrooge McDuck." In the Clarence episode "Clarence's Millions," Clarence dreams of swimming in money until a money monster chases him. In video games, Scrooge is the accidental creator of the Cogs in Toontown Online. In Kingdom Hearts II he appears trying to recreate his favorite ice cream flavor, sea-salt. By Kingdom Hearts III, he is managing a bistro in Twilight Town with help from Remy from Ratatouille.

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