Ducks on DVD

DuckTales: Volume 1 hit shelves on DVD yesterday, and DVDtoons.com's Randall Cyrenne tossed out a review I felt obliged to share with any Carl Barks fans our there, as he gives a great little historical background analysis of the adventures of Scrooge McDuck.

That digest held “The Mummy’s Ring”, “In Ancient Persia”, “Luck of the North”, and “The Pixilated Parrot”. Those stories saw the ducks traveling the world and encountering various forms of danger. The Persia story was especially exotic, containing a foreign ruler, reincarnation, and mysticism.

My personal first contact with the old Barks stories was through some reprints in Sweden, where you can find massive collections of the compiled series on family bookshelves; the bindings form pictures on these shelves. I'd grown up with DuckTales, but never realized how far back the lineage of the Beagle Boys and many of the plot devices reaches back.

His stories were not only well-crafted yarns--- they were educational too. Barks used National Geographic Magazine for much of his inspiration, and his adventure stories often included subtle lessons in history, geography, and science. The richness of those stories influenced generations of comic book creators, not to mention a few animators.

Great old cartoon, and great old series of comics. Now, I'm just waiting for the Communist reviewers to chime in.