tilly_stratford: (Default)
tilly_stratford ([personal profile] tilly_stratford) wrote2012-11-28 12:00 am

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!

[identity profile] harbek.livejournal.com 2012-12-03 06:11 pm (UTC)(link)
This is very random and off-topic, but: http://paul-mcgann.ucoz.ru/_ph/32/490543289.jpg I've finally found it!

...Anyway, to be on-topic, Don Rosa's stories were always my favourite too. Is Donald Ekstra worth buying?
ext_130425: Will Eisner's The Spirit (HB: Steampunk Bush)

[identity profile] tilly-stratford.livejournal.com 2012-12-04 05:31 pm (UTC)(link)
Ah, you found it! Wonderful :D

Is Donald Ekstra worth buying?

I think so, for the Don Rosa stories anyway (particularly since I don't plan to start collecting the Hall of Fame volumes - Donald Ekstra even reprints the appropriate written introductions by Don Rosa from the HoF volumes). To bad the non-Rosa stories are nearly always cheap, boring filler comics.