• Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

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

    • snor10@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago

      They’re not!? Colour me surprised!

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

      • Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        11 months ago

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

        • Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

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

          • DroneRights [it/its]@lemm.ee
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            11 months ago

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

      • samus12345@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

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

        • snor10@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

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

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

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

      • snooggums@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

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

        • samus12345@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

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

    • FedFer@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      11 months ago

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

    • bane_killgrind@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

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

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

      Edit I screwed up my math someone correct me

      • vortic@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        That’s off by a bit:

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

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

        For Musk:

        $225.5B current NW

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

  • tweeks@feddit.nl
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    11 months ago

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