He was extremely poor: that’s who they copied Scrooge from Duck Tales
How was the popular hero created and who influenced the image that millions of viewers loved?
We decided to go back to the roots to find out how the popular hero of DuckTales was created and who influenced the image that millions of viewers loved.
The «father» of Scrooge McDuck, renowned Disney illustrator Carl Barks, originally conceived Donald Duck’s greedy and wealthy relative as a cameo character for a 1947 comic.
However, the image came out so bright and memorable that Scrooge quickly gained popularity and became the main character of comics about the duck family, and then everyone’s favorite animated series.
Coming up with the antagonist for the comic «Christmas on Bear Mountain», Barks looked for inspiration in Christmas stories and found it in Charles Dickens’s story «A Christmas Carol» about Ebenezer Scrooge — one of the most greedy characters in world literature.
According to the plot of the book, he opened a credit office and accumulated a huge fortune. Money turned an ambitious businessman into a greedy loner who despised the poor and hated Christmas
Karl Barks borrowed not only character traits from the hero of Dickens, but also part of the name.
