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?
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Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 8 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
FedFer@iusearchlinux.fyi 8 months ago
DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe 8 months ago
The Duck Tales show where he’s the good guy did really well tho
snooggums@kbin.social 8 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 8 months ago
This despite him being named after Ebeneezer Scrooge for a reason. I guess he was post-ghost visit Scrooge.
Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Funny thing is, I feel like the new Ducktales series is the closest TV representation of the comics-versions of the characters. They change some things (most crucially they give Huey, Dewey and Louie individual personality traits), but overall it really feels like watching the European comic books come to life. Scrooge is still too much of a good guy, where in the comics he’s often a kind of villain.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 8 months ago
That would sadly explain it. We only recently got out of the Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaire phase and only because we were basically forced to.
snor10@lemm.ee 8 months ago
They’re not!? Colour me surprised!
Super popular in Sweden, at least when I grew up.
Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 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 8 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@lemm.ee 8 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 8 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 8 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.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I can’t think of anyone I grew up with in America in the 80s who read Disney comics at all.
snor10@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Sweden in the 90’s and 00’s kids would collect the Disney pocket books like they where shonen manga.
The spines would make a continuous picture and having no gaps where a mark of pride.
kerf@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Spot on! I looked upon my collection with pride when I visited my parents last time. Even have most of the early ones where only half of the spreads were printed in color
Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Was it also possible to subscribe to the pocket books in Sweden? I had a subscription growing up in Iceland (Donald Duck is huge over there as well)
Gestrid@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
That usually only happens in “complete collections” or something like that in the US. With any medium, I mean. Movies, books, comics, etc… And it doesn’t always happen, either.