• Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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    1 year 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

    • snor10@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      They’re not!? Colour me surprised!

      Super popular in Sweden, at least when I grew up.

      • Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year 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
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          1 year 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 [it/its]@lemm.ee
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            1 year 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
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        1 year ago

        I recall them being popular in Germany, too, but yeah, they never took off like that here in the US.

        • snor10@lemm.ee
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          1 year 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.

        • snor10@lemm.ee
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          1 year 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.

          • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            The spines would make a continuous picture and having no gaps where a mark of pride.

            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.

    • FedFer@iusearchlinux.fyi
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      1 year ago

      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?

      • snooggums@kbin.social
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        1 year 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
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          1 year ago

          This despite him being named after Ebeneezer Scrooge for a reason. I guess he was post-ghost visit Scrooge.

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      1 year 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.