Unexpected nostalgia

You might know that Donald Duck is big business in Norway. There's the hugely successful weekly comic release Donald Duck & Co. (which I and absolutely all my friends used to read slavishly as kids), and lately I've noticed another magazine in the shelves, the bimonthly Donald Ekstra. The former I stopped reading when I reached the age of twelve or so, and the latter I've now began reading at the age of twenty-five. Hah.

It's partly a nostalgia thing - Donald Ekstra reprints the best Duckverse stories I remember from my childhood: Those by Don Rosa. And even when the stories are unfamiliar they're likely to hit me right in the nostalgia as well. Like 'The Three Caballeros Ride Again' - I can't remember having read it when it was new but I sure as hell remember The Three Caballeros (Donald, the Brazilian parrot José Carioca and the Mexican rooster Panchito) from the 1940 Disney films.

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I've spent the day rewatching the movies (Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros and Blame It on the Samba). They're just as surreal as I remember them. Whoever joked about them representing Donald Duck's "lost weekend" were right. There's partying, women, and, uh, substance abuse perhaps? (That last one made a lasting impression on me as a child for some reason.)

Rewatching them as an adult I understand more about the politics that went into them (trying to improve relations with South America), but I'm still impressed with 1940s Disney going overseas to hire talent - even the voice actors are Brazilian and Mexican, instead of North Americans doing bad accents.

Huh, to think I'd mostly forgotten about all this!