Scrooge McReDux

Sorry for taking up another blog post with this, but I couldn't work out how to embed pictures into the comments. Here's the closest-to-canonical evidence we've got of what happens after Scrooge McDuck's death:Huey, Dewey and Louie are made sole heirs to the McDuck fortune. It's not clear if, split three ways, his fortune would make them the three richest ducks in the world - fellow Scotsduck Flintheart Gloomgold was the world's second richest duck, but he was so miserly it's not clear if he'd bequeath his money to anyone or simply be buried with it like a pharaoh. The triplets seem pretty tight, but I wonder whether so much filthy lucre would strain their relationships. I'm actually not so cynical that I think they'd spend most of their adult lives in tortuous legal battles... actually, I am. That'd be a classic plot device, á la getting three wishes. (which they actually received in the Ducktales movie) We flash forward to see what happens to the triplets when they're rich beyond their wildest dreams - they begin to squabble over what the money should be spent on. Wily lawyers pour poison in their ears (do ducks have ears?) about each other. Litigation starts. Rapidly they squander the massive fortune and their relationship falls apart. Eventually, on the roof of the courthouse, almost broke, they fall into a massive three-way brawl. It intensifies, they struggle this way and that, then a punch sends Dewey reeling, almost over the edge of the building. The shock snaps them out of their rage. Panting, dirty, the triplets look ruefully at each other.
Huey: 'What are we doing?'
Louie: 'We nearly killed each other!'
Dewey: 'All because we wanted our own way!'
All: 'I wish we never had the stupid money!'
The boys pull off their torn suit jackets and battered top hats and red, green and blue bowties and hurl them over the side of the building. Then they take their remaining money, which they each keep in a carpetbag in bundles of dollar bills, and they begin flinging it over the side of the courthouse. 'Take it!' We don't want it anymore!' Their lawyers burst onto the roof, and see, with horror, what's going on. They try to stop the triplets, but are rebuffed. Rushing to the edge of the roof, they look down to see people in the street jostling, grabbing handfuls of cash. At this point, it is revealed that the lawyers' real concern is not for their clients, but their clients' money - they dash down to the street and join in the melee.
At last, Huey, Dewey and Louie grab their respective carpetbags and shake the last of the money out off the roof. A gust of wind catches the huge flurry of bills and send it riffling back into their faces. 'Ugh!' 'Agh!' 'Get off! We don't want you anymore!' 'We don't want your money!'
Transition to the triplets snoozing in a heap of cushions at Scrooge's Duckburg mansion. Scrooge's loyal butler, Duckworth, (who, despite his name, is an anthropomorphised dog) is trying to wake them by gently brushing their faces. They are kids again. Duckworth has a silver platter of milk and cookies. Louie lashes out: 'I said: "We don't want your money!"' The tray is knocked flying, Duckworth is soaked, hilariously.
He says something mordant and long-suffering like: 'I'll come back later then, young masters.'
The triplets rouse.
Huey: 'What?'
Dewey: 'So we're not rich?'
Louie: 'Then the whole thing was...'
All: 'A dream!'
They start leaping round and cheering, then they embrace. Then Dewey looks confused.
'Hey wait. We all had the same d-' [CUT TO END CREDITS]
Okay, this was drawn by Don Rosa. (the other major Scrooge cartoonist was Carl Barks, but it's Don Rosa who wrote the epic The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck) It's Scrooge's grave. The inscription says 'Fortuna Favet Fortibus' - fortune favours the brave. Those old timers are Donald and Daisy (apparently married), and at the back their are obviously Huey, Dewey and Louie. So, at least Rosa's aged them. Also, it's quite a humble grave, which is either sweet or sad, depending on how you look at it, and what you think old Unca Scrooge would've thought.
I know I'm overthinking this, and clearly overinvesting in thinly-sketched characters owned by a gigantic media conglomerate accused of questionable business practices, but, for me, it's a kind of deliberate trick. I really resent it when a poet or artist tries to manipulate me through their choice of subject matter, especially since the quality of the art is often in inverse proportion to the perceived weightiness of its message.
With something patently idiotic like Scrooge McDuck, I know that neither I nor my audience have any investment in him, aside from perhaps a weak chuckling recognition at the fact that he liked to swim through money. Ho ho. How unlikely. So that provides a weird kind of blank slate to talk about mortality and vulnerability and acquisition and regret, without ascribing any spurious import or cultural value to them. I'm not saying: This is a piece about my granddad, who I loved and was close to me. I'm not saying: This is a piece about historical figure a, who was culturally significant.
And of course, you can write superb, moving, important poems about real people or big events, and that kind of poetry is important and vital and can help us think and feel. But I like the challenge of trying to make people care, just a little, not just about someone who didn't exist, but about a character who did exist, but is firmly ensconced in the portion of our brains marked 'frivolous' and 'not worthy of compassion'. I'm not asserting I particularly succeeded, just that maybe my MO with this kind of poem is 'compassion for pop culture'. Or something.

Huge McFuck

I fully admit that at least eighty percent of my copious, perhaps damning, knowledge of Scrooge McDuck comes from factual crapshoot wikipedia. The great thing about wikipedia is that, unlike a conventional encyclopedia, where a team of academics assemble to decide what society needs to know about and to what degree, on wikipedia it's chucked out to the masses. The upshot is that the length of a person, place or subject's wikipedia entry acts as a rough index as to how much the world at large cares about it.

And daaaamn if the world at large don't care lots about Scrooge McDuck. His wikipedia article is longer than the ones for William Wallace, Robert Burns, or indeed actual ducks.

But who can genuinely say they're surprised? Uncle Scrooge's appeal to modern audiences quickly surpassed Donald's - after all, Scrooge swam in a lake of gold and travelled the world on adventures. What did Donald do? Get pissed off at a fly, or something.

But alas, this sainted canard had a flaw built into him from the start. His creator, Don Rosa, had committed to a birth year - 1867. In the infinite, magical kingdom of Disney, here was a character who, by dint of being born in a specific time, had a built-in expiration date. In a cast of deathless archetypes, Scrooge was mortal.

I'm not sure how canon his death-date of 1967 is. It would mean that the events of popular Scrooge-centric spinoff series Ducktales happened sometime between 1947 and his death - given the fairly static ages of Huey, Duey and Louie and Webigail, probably a span of no more than two years.

What were final days like? Who came to his funeral? Is there an afterlife in the Disney world? And, you know, in the last analysis, is there much difference between calling out into the void after a fictional character like Scrooge McDuck, and calling out after our ancestors, after the countless humans who've become no more than text and hearsay? Do we care whether it's God or grandpa or Yorrick's skull that calls back, just so long as somebody says something, dammit.

The Impossible Deathbed Lament Of Scrooge McDuck

Life
Is like a hurricane
Spend long enough
In its cosy eye
And soon
You come to think the whole world
Turns round you

Behind Killmotor Hill
The sunrise is fresh minted sovereigns
But the last son of Clan McDuck
Lies gasping for water in a golden bed
His grasping fist recalls young Donald, that
Apoplectic Hornblower
Who taught him the politics of rage
Age has Ebenezered his vigor
In its counting house of days

As a youngster, Scrooge rose early
Even then, he carried himself
With a certain avuncular aplomb
His gimp leg gifting him a tick-tocking surliness
His shinebox
Like an unexploded bomb

Lately, he cannot parse fact nuggets
From fool’s gold fables
He views his past
Through an astigmatic haze
A blurry tartan of
Fourth quarter forecasts
Tax havens, FTSE broadcasts
The jangling slang of ancient registers
Diamond money pins stabbed through
Bill folds like pioneers’ flags
Some pharaoh’s curse, a
Flash of bandaged paw,
This shapeshifting necromancer in Borneo
And the unholy rumble of Niagara
As he dangles
By his cane
From a frayed rope ladder

These days
He can no longer sort
The stupid angles of his brain
Nor even tame his bladder

But still
Clearest of all
He recalls
Impossible
Gem-sharp dreams
Where he swims through a gleaming cash lake
In a twelve-story Futurist cinderblock
Chock full of heaped tender
A bright Mammonite cathedral

He can taste the aroma of Rands, Francs and Kroner,
Heft each swan dive like a Faberge egg
Let the sure weight transport him to way back when
A butterfly stroke through a bluff of doubloons could
Cause an imbalance in the Yen

He has drowned his best years in that corpulent silo
Midased his own heart
Then set it to cool behind bulletproof glass
And a laser-web
There was always one more dime to covet
It was never money
It was the love of it

Now that lucent organ burns in the furnace of his chest
A lone piper gurning
Forcing a requiem down silted arteries:
Here’s the tree that never grew
Here’s the duck that never flew
Oblivion unhinges its dull, dull maw

For
Some mysteries are best left unsolved
Uncle Scrooge,
You cannot rewrite history.
There’s no recasting Custer’s busted pride
No tugging the bayonet
From Crazy Horse’s splendid back
And sewing shut the split
How many Bible black afternoons have you squandered
Staring into an open fridge
Wishing it was a time machine?

Step away from the collection plate, old man!
You can’t buy back your misspent youth
This is simple needle’s eye economics
Soon those bold grandnephews
’ll be straddling your cold carcass
Levering each gold tooth
From the final vault of your lockjaw rictus.
Ever the coin-biting pessimist
You missed the long con
This limited flesh was the true wooden nickel
Its obverse engraved by the reaper’s grim sickle

Caches to ashes
Boom to dust
In the golden calf
We antitrust

This is the big crash, McDuck,
The culling of the sacred cash cow
The Money Bin going molten
Billions in bullion
An ocean of faces, dates and franked slogans
Converging in meltdown
The merger
To end all mergers
It’s 1929 all over
Taking you so far into the black
You can’t breathe

And your heart trots out
Its last bland iambs
De dum
de dum
de dum
de dum
end stop

O there’s no asset-stripper
So doughty as Time
But friends,
We know the freedom of liquidity
For the wages of sin is death an a’ that,
But a wage, well, that means dignity.