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This video is a 1975 interview with Carl Barks, the creator of numerous Disney comic book characters, focusing on his career, creative process, and the development of iconic ducks like Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck. The interviewer explores Barks' influences, his work at the Disney studio, and the evolution of his distinctive storytelling style.
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Whose idea was it to create the—what's that? Whose idea was it to create? Oh, that was uh, came out of the animation department. I think somebody over there, Joe Sabo, or someone in the animation department, and in-betweener, just sent over a little note to the story department saying, "Why not have Donald have some nephews?" At that time, they used to send out little resumés from this story department to the animation department asking for any kind of suggestions, any kind of ideas, or new stories. Or in case there was a story in the works over at the story department, we would send an outline of that story to the animation department and ask anybody who could think of any kind of a situation that would be interesting or helpful to that story to turn it in. That's how I turned in that barber chair gag; it was on that same sort of thing. So that's how the nephews got invented. And then a guy named Dana Cody, who was working in the story department, he thought of the names for them: Huey, Dewey, and Louie—names that would rhyme and had a phonetic quality.
There's a reversal in roles between Donald and the nephews. In other words, Donald is supposed to be kind of a parental figure, but actually the nephews are the real parental figures, and Donald has to be taken care of a lot of the time. Uh, how did you come up with that and why did you do it? Well, I think from the very start Donald was the hapless comedian. Uh, anything that bad things that happened would have to happen to him. I couldn't have the little kids get squashed or kicked around, and uh, the kids can get themselves in some pretty bad messes through—oh, some—something they do wrong, and then Donald has a chance to rescue them. So I use that angle once in a while, but mostly it was Donald who was the guy who was going to get clobbered, and the kids who are going to rescue him. It worked out better, and it seemed as if it was appealing to more people that way, because the readers were kids themselves. They like to feel a little bit superior to that uncle who was strutting around.
That brings up another point. I think that one of the things that puts over stories in comic strips or anything is: can you make the reader feel superior to those characters? Like Donald—you feel superior to him. The reader automatically does because Donald is so bungling, and uh, when he goes strutting around, you just know way ahead of him that he's going to just get clobbered good. And when the kids get on some binge in which they get into a hell of a problem, you feel superior to them because you know that they're going to have to think that solution out by very laborious methods. And the only one of my characters that you couldn't feel superior to was Gladstone. He just was so darn lucky that the reader just hated him because he had to look up to Gladstone because of that one talent he had.
Now, in newspaper strips, you follow that Gasoline Alley. If you noticed how many of those characters are submorons: the old guy with a donkey cart, and a guy with a funny cap, and the girl chambermaid—all of them. They're just submorons. The reader automatically feels superior to those characters. It gives the reader a good feeling. I think that that's one of the tricks of writing. I never thought about it until I was analyzing that Gasoline Alley one time, trying to think, "Well, why do I pick that thing up day after day and read it? I don't like those characters; I just despise them, yet I keep on reading about them."
What about Gyro? How did he come about? Well, I think that every cartoonist that ever ran anything in comic strips and newspapers always had a crazy inventor at some time in their strips. So I was in need of a crazy inventor, so I just deliberately invented Gyro as a crazy inventor, but I had only figured on using him once in a great while. So I just made him a big, awkward-looking chicken. If I'd known I was going to have to do a book of Gyro stories and so on, I would have made him about the same size as Donald and Uncle Scrooge so that he could have been handled much easier. That he was this big, tall, gawky chicken and very difficult to work him in the same panels with the Ducks all the time.
Uh, don't you like to make uh, pictures of inventions yourself, like Rube Goldberg machines? Did that—did any of that—I liked it; didn't mind it at all. I'm kind of an inventor at heart. I can think of all kinds of crazy inventions. I would go broke if I ever tried to patent all the crazy things I think of. You want to give us any examples? Oh, no, no. Okay. I still think I've got some good ones. All right. You created Duckburg, and one of the things about Duckburg was the fact that it had a history. Well, that came out of the fact that it gave me a little material to write about, and the founder would naturally have to be a member of the Feathered family. He was a—and then it gets back to the phonetics again: Cornelius Coot rhymes nicely. Wouldn't say George Poe; it wouldn't sound very good. And um, the old mayor, naturally, he was just always pushing anything that he could about Cornelius Coot, and the um, building up of the glamour of Duckburg because it sort of reflected back onto him. He got a little good out of it, a little exposure by always being out promoting statues for the founder of Duckburg and so on, and the contest that Uncle Scrooge and the maharajah got into. Of course, it became more and more ridiculous as time went on, and I don't blame this woman for writing a letter afterward saying that she thought that it was a gross misuse of money to build these enormous statues all crusted with diamonds when there were so many things that could have been done with that money, like building hospitals and schools and better jails—all that sort of thing. And I uh, wrote back to the office, I think I did, telling them that the woman missed the point entirely—that all that money that had been spent on those statues had just been spent for labor and materials. All that money had gone into circulation much better than if it had continued lying in the maharajah's money bin or in Uncle Scrooge's money bin. All that money had created a tremendous amount of work—work for jewelers and work for goldsmiths and the concrete men and the hydraulics experts. Everybody had a job out of that, so that that money hadn't been wasted any more than if it had been used in the building of hospitals.
Can you tell us how you came up with the Uncle Scrooge one-shot story? Well, they uh, wrote a letter from the office and asked if I would do a Scrooge comic book, 32 pages, Scrooge. And I just thought, well, what little I had used Scrooge up to that time—he didn't have any foundation; that is, nobody knew where he came from, although he had been Donald's uncle all these years. But what was his background? So I thought, well, I'll just work in a little bit about his background, where he came from, and how he accumulated his wealth, and how he's out to protect it. I had already invented the Beagle Boys at that time, and so I just turned loose on everything I could think of that would help to develop Scrooge's character.
Some of the characters or situations or whatever just came to you as a kind of splash or inspiration, like the Lost in the Andes story, right? You remember how those came about? That was uh, a story that did, like you say, come as a sort of a flash. I'd been struggling for days trying to think of something that I could use for a long story plot, and uh, there was a whole bunch of company in the house at the time, and I never had time to really sit down and think of anything. And finally, I just got to the point where I just ignored the company, and I just sat by myself out on the lawn in the swing, and did some serious thinking. And all of a sudden, while I was thinking, I got to thinking of the Everglades, and what could Donald do in the Everglades, and what sort of creatures besides alligators would he find out in the Everglades, and and uh, just like that comes the thought of all these weird little people, like little gnomes that lived out in there. And as soon as I thought of them, my ideas of how to use them just kept popping into my head. So I just sat there and let the thoughts just pour all over me, and I remembered as many as I could. When I had gotten enough that I knew I had a story, why, I joined the party and hoisted a few drinks. Next day I was hard at it writing the Lost in the Andes story.
Did you often start off with the idea of a locale as a story idea and build it around that? Yeah, the locale started me on more stories than anything else. Like, as I say about the Lost in the Andes, I'd thought of the Everglades, and uh, I told Don before that often when I would be struggling for a story I would think, "What locale do I want to draw? Do I want to draw a forest, or do I want to draw the sea with sailboats, or would it be down in the mines, caves, or something?" So, as soon as I think of a locale I would enjoy drawing, it seemed that I could much easier think of a reason for putting those characters in that locale. What would they be doing there? And then uh, once I got an idea of why they were there pretty quick, I would have a big situation gag going in my head. And when I got that going, I liked—in King Solomon's Mines, get him down in the mines, and then figure out what menaces have they got around him in the King Solomon's Mines. They've got a gang of Arabs that are trying to get in there too, and how did they get there? And that brings in the play of the nephews and how they help. All those things you just build backward from the big climactic situation, and pretty soon you've got the steps of a story.
What about the creation of locales that didn't exist, like the Land of the Ylla, and the Farmes, or Plain Awful—those kinds of uh—how did those stories evolve? Well, when you've got a mysterious place, do you develop a something that's just out of whole cloth, like that? It's a mysterious place down under the earth. We don't know what's down under the crust. Scientists tell us it's a big molten core and all that, but Uncle Scrooge thought that there was a hole down under there, and he was going to be darn sure that he knew where that hole was. So, once I got down to this mysterious hole, why, I peopled it with imaginary little characters. And in other places, I—The Square Egg story—The Square Egg story. Well, that business of the fog—there was this guy who had gotten lost in this impenetrable fog. Nobody ever knew what was over beyond that. I just used my imagination and got this place that I could go wild on. Anything like that—there's nobody to prove that I could be crazy about it. It was something that could exist; nobody would ever have known it. So on the imaginary things, I went much wilder than I do on stories in which they are around familiar locales such as Egypt or Africa.
Why do you think it is that that The Square Egg story is the one that is usually mentioned as the one people remember the most? Well, when you analyze the structure of the story, you see that it was built on little short sequence gags. Almost every page had a gag, or maybe two gags, which the characters move through—um, a little bit of action to a short climax, and then switched to another little action, another climax. It just stepped up and up. All of these little situations had to deal with moving them along the main story plot. You mentioned to me once that you started out with that story, but you didn't know how to end it, and you had a heck of a time trying to figure out how to end it. Well, whenever I come to a story, I had a heck of a time ending it. I can remember quite a number of them. I would have to go back into it and change something back inside the story to give me a step toward an ending. I would have to put some new business in if the story just didn't end properly. Why? It had something wrong with the steps that build up toward that end.
Where did you get the idea of a square egg from? Oh, having square eggs has been a joke for more years than I've been on earth. I remember hearing people talk about getting chickens that would lay square eggs and so on from the time I was a little child. What about Bombie, the zombie? Well, that was a story that came from reading about voodoo, I guess, and zombies and so on. And one of—guys writing stories year after year like I was—you just got to be searching all the time for any subject that will make a story. So I, whenever I thought of something like a zombie or voodoo and so on, I would try to make a story out of it because it was interesting to a lot of people. And so I came up with Bombie, the zombie.
You made that character really sympathetic, though he never said a word and never really changed his expression. Well, uh, I was not writing for the horror comics, so I wasn't going to make him a ferocious, murderous sort of person. So I made him just a harmless old zombie who wandered around. He had just this one job that he had to do. He'd been animated for 50 years. All of those things developed as I was writing along on the story. Of course, it took several days to develop all those gag situations, and the ridiculous thing that this old guy had started out 50 years before—that this little voodoo doll—to give it to Uncle Scrooge. And he never deviated from his course; he'd been at it all those years.
Do you know what you started out with first in that story? Did you start out with the character of the zombie or with a situation? I think it started out with Donald getting a voodoo curse. I think that's the first thing. And then—then I figured, "Well, how does he get the curse? He has to get a hold of a voodoo doll and get—he's got to squeeze a voodoo doll and get one of those poison needles in him." So, how would he get it? And just how I began developing, and so I brought in old Bombie, the zombie, to give him the doll. And old Bombie turned out to be such an interesting character. I worked a lot of stuff in there for him, like his winning the uh, the television—television or radio program for intelligence in the Trick or Treat story.
You actually adapted um, I guess an animated cartoon, or a story from an animated cartoon. They sent me photostats of the storyboard. Were there particular problems in doing that? No, no terrible big problem. You added a lot to that. Well, I did, and it got cut out. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Um, what about a story like The Golden Helmet? How did that one come about? Well, that too came about from thinking of a situation in a locale—coast of Labrador, I believe. I was looking at one of the Prince Valiant strips in which Prince Valiant had come to the coast of Labrador, and I was very much taken with one of the scenes where the—all the—I guess the Viking ship was coming into the coast there, and it's all a very dramatic drawing. And I was so inspired to work with that Labrador coastline that I just tried to think of something that would happen to Donald to bring him up there. And and uh, there it was—was the fact that Leif Ericson or some of those Norsemen had landed there hundreds of years ago, and they might have left some symbol of their occupancy of that country—right there—some little thing that would have given them title to it. And so I thought of a golden helmet and of a long-descended relative of this Eric the Red or whoever he was wanting to find this one symbol which could give him the ownership of North America. Of course, it's stretching the law quite a bit, but it was a situation that just developed out of wanting to draw the coast of Labrador.
Yeah, most of the stories we've been talking about are—are fall into periods, like um, The Square Egg story and the creation of Gladstone and Scrooge, and then about a year or two later the creation of the Beagle Boys and Gyro. Uh, seems that there are sort of bursts of creativity where you're suddenly creating a lot of new characters and doing even better stories than you usually do. And do you have any sense of like a situation or how you were feeling or any such thing during these periods? I think that once I had developed a set of characters—like when
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I developed Scrooge and Gladstone; there were quite a few stories that I could use them in very readily without having to struggle too hard. So I would use them quite extensively. Then, when they began to be a little hard to write about, why, I'd go ahead and invent some more—a whole new stock for this stable.
What about "Old California"? That's a story that you've—on occasion when you've been forced to ask what your sentimental favorite is, you've said, "Well, it's probably 'Old California.'" Why is that? Well, I was able to present a little love story in that, and also got in a great deal of nostalgia and a little history, and uh, a little bit of villainy. And uh, that was the first pig bad guy, right? Don Karnage. Yeah, I was able to get some crazy names. You seem to really like uh, old relics and ghost towns and earlier—earlier ages. And what is there that you like about this kind of thing? Well, I don't know how come, but I wrote so many stories about the far away and the long ago. It just seemed as if uh, that was a subject in which I couldn't get into much trouble with—that is, uh, I could do nearly anything with my characters in those kinds of situations, and it would be excusable.
I've always wondered if you had a particular love for um, the Old West or an earlier time where people weren't as constricted by the city and by civilization. Oh, yes, I have a love for the Old West, the wide-open spaces—all that stuff. I can remember when I myself was a young kid with plenty of room to roam around in, with a gun to shoot and horses to ride—all those things that were part of the formation of my character, I guess. I remember those things and the niceness of having all kinds of room around you.
Did you have any problems with censorship? Well, there—it's all pretty well known that I had censorship on that Klondike story and "Trick or Treat" story and "The Million-Dollar Christmas" story—story of Donald's foot race with Daisy or some girl—in the story of the golden apples. Yeah, that—there wasn't much in the way of small censorship, but then I was so careful with my own censorship that I didn't run into that problem much. It was just on the big things, like the Klondike story, that I got slapped with much censorship.
You say that you censored yourself. Could you tell us a little bit about what kinds of things you thought you should leave out, the things you might have wanted to put in? Well, I knew that I couldn't put in much in the way of violence. It had to be comical violence; it didn't seem to hurt anybody. And uh, was this always true, or did it have anything to do with a Comics Code in the 50s? I don't know about the Comics Code—with the—that kind of differentiation was ever made on violence or not—but I knew that I was not to glorify crime, stealing, and so on, although I could have the Beagle Boys always stealing and so on. And but I did try to do it in a very comical way so that it actually was not a crime that a child could imitate. It had to be, in my opinion, a crime that uh, was just in a world of fantasy. Kids could read about it, but they could not in any way ever imitate it.
Disney's often noted for uh, not having any sexuality or anything—being very puritanical or pure. Did you—I know in some of the unpublished work that Goldie is much different than you'd expect from a comic book character. Did you ever want to put more of that kind of stuff in your stories? Oh, I've thought at times it could have gone a little bit more toward the teenage type of sexual interest, you know—kissing and hand-holding and that sort of thing—but I never thought of the comic books, especially of the Ducks, as being sexy. It just seemed to me like their interest was in other things rather than in sex.
What about the problem of death? Sex and death go together so well. Uh, the characters had to be in danger of death in order to create suspense in a story. They had to be in real danger, and when you figure that the very ultimate in danger is death—the fear of death itself—we just about had to use it. So, all of the times these ducks got in bad situations, they did have that opportunity of dying in case they got clobbered. So uh, it made it more true to life to have them up against these impossible situations which they could lose their lives if they didn't win. Mhm. And the vacation parade sequence where they buried themselves while the forest fire went over—you bet they were in danger. It made the story memorable.
Yeah, well, there does seem to be a kind of strain of pessimism and cynicism also in your stories. They're very funny, but there's uh, a kind of darkness at times. You want to—I read some of my stories here recently, and I thought, "How in the hell did I get away with that?" I had them—just a real raw cynicism in some of them. There was one that was reprinted here not long ago that was so cynical. I thought that the Cornelius Coot story, I believe it was—yeah, that—oh, man, that was one of—
Cynicism? Is that how you felt at the time about politicians or politics? Oh, it was—you know, there are bad politicians and there are good ones. I was just poking fun at the bad ones at that time. Sure. What about the mystery stories, like "The Ghost of the Grotto" and "The Old Castle's Secret," where there's um, an element of the sort of horror story? Well, there was a little bit of the horror story element in those—certainly an old skeleton walled up in the walls of an old castle. Yeah, that's almost in the EC Comics field, but those things are interesting, and I managed to uh, put it over, I think, without having much morbidity about it. Mhm. The crazy uh, family tree that he had over there in the castle—all those old knights—these ancestors with their queer names—
Carl, do you have any idea of why people like your comics? Well, they seem to be interested because what I was writing about was a very real world. The characters were involved in things that they themselves get involved in. The people that write the letters have had situations just like old Donald has had. It's so close to real life. My villains always had a slight good streak in them—even the Beagle Boys once in a while show some sign of humanity—and my—uh—my good guys, they all had bad streaks. Donald could be a selfish and arrogant little cot. Yeah, it was the fact that—my characters were like human characters. They weren't just one-dimensional; they had a whole lot to them. The fact that they were ducks rather than people—what did that have to do, do you think, with humanizing them? How were you able to do that? Well, I never thought of them as ducks. For me, they were humans from the start. Yeah, I never thought of them as being ducks that lived in a world of animal people—dog faces and so on. I just thought of them as being humans; they just happened to be humans that look like ducks. I guess that's the only explanation I can think of for my attitude toward them.
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There's—there's one story in—uh—that's—that's uh, not typical of any of your other stories in which uh, Donald and the kids uh, confront human beings rather than other animals as they usually do. Did you have any particular problems in working that out? It never occurred again, I don't think. If you're thinking of the story of Dangerous Disguise, yes. Well, that was uh, a situation which I somehow couldn't visualize all these master spies—for all the different nations—as being dog faces or pig faces. Somehow, I visualized them as looking like they do in the movies—these suave-looking characters and the beautiful girl spies and so on. They—to me, somehow—they just had to look like human beings. I couldn't—just couldn't see them any other way. So I went ahead and drew them like that, and I got called up on the carpet for it. But—why—why did they dislike it? Oh, they said that Donald and the Ducks just didn't look right working alongside of human beings. And when I look back at the old Mickey strips and the others, I realized that always the other characters that were working with Mickey or the ducks were always dog faces or pig faces. They never—never were humans.
You mentioned once that you always wanted to do a strip with humans—an adventure strip or a romance strip. Can you tell us something about that? Well, my—my first love would have been to have drawn stuff for human characters—almost like Prince Valiant, you might say. That, of course, I could never have drawn that well, but that would have been the kind of thing I would have gone into and probably gone broke. I couldn't have sold my stuff because I just uh, was a comedian, I guess—writer of comedy. And whether I would have found a way of drawing human characters in a situation like I did with the Ducks—of being comedians solving serious problems—now, I might have been able to have invented a set of characters that would fit like that—be human characters—but I didn't have the time to work it out, and so I just stayed in the old duck rut. And—uh—that happened.
Did you feel that uh—well, from what I gather from what you're saying—that you yourself would rank something like Prince Valiant as a—as more artistic or something than the kind of thing you did? Well, Prince Valiant was beautifully illustrated, and each panel was a work of art. I don't think I could have ever come up with that because I didn't have the artistic background—the learning, you might say—to draw that well. I would have had to have worked on something much simpler. I probably would have gotten into the field of Western stories, like the old Gunfighters and so on, where the backgrounds could have been about simple things that I understood and knew about.
In other words, you think how Foster could have done what you did? Well, I don't think that he would have worked very well with the ducks. That would have been a field that he wouldn't have fitted into at all. He was more of an artist and a serious thinker. Why do you like adventure and romance strips more than what you—what you did? Why do you—why—why do they appeal to you more? Well, because they're different. After working on ducks for all those years, I'm just a little tired of that type of reading. I like to read something that is different. But you said you wanted to do it more than those. Was—was that true? The beginning—that I wanted to do that type of thing more? Well, after working at this Disney studio and all those funny animals and seeing Bugs Bunny and so on, I would have liked to have gotten out of the funny animals field. And I like to draw humans; I like to draw faces. You'd rather—yeah, you'd rather do that. Yeah. I found, from the beginning—yeah, I would have liked to have done that in the beginning.
Do you think you could have made some kind of more serious statement in that—in that medium than in the—oh, and undoubtedly I could have uh, made more serious statements and gotten into philosophy and psychology—all those kinds of things—much more. But is that what you really wanted to do? No, no. But I would have gotten into it accidentally. But—well, you did anyway, of course. But uh—but uh, the human characters—I would have loved to have worked on them because I felt that I could take a look at a town like Duckburg—people with humans. I could have drawn a thousand different faces. So many of our artists that draw the characters—their girls all look alike, their heroes all have the same profile, the same chin—everything. It's almost as if they stamp their stuff out with a rubber stamp, and they have a certain set of frozen smiles and ears and sidelong glances—all of that stuff. It's—you look at their strip one week and look at it again the next week, and it's just like it was all done with no imagination or no new interest at all. I would have drawn a thousand faces. That I see—I would have had every expression related directly to what was being said. I have read that in my fan letters that my—always seemed to be thinking exactly what they were saying—their expressions were always fitted right to that balloon of dialogue.
Well, that's a really interesting issue that we were talking about earlier—the relationship of the text to the image and how, in a way, the image entices the child to want to read the words and see what's going on. Was that—was that something you were consciously trying to do? Well, I tried to make the drawing fit the dialogue. The fact that I did my dialogue first always helped that along. Oh, you started—you started with that—with a script first—a written script or dialogue? I start with a written script, and of course the dialogue is the key—that is the thing that hung it all together.
Um, which do you think uh, is more important—the image or the text—or do you—do you think that one is more important than the other? Oh, uh, when you first open a comic book, the image is the thing. If you're—if you're attracted to the image, then you're interested enough to read the script. Therefore, the script would be secondary. What about—what about gagging? Do—do you think the same relationship holds there? Uh, in gagging, the visual gag is more important than the dialogue gag. In a dialogue gag, you've got to depend on people's ability to read and to understand what uh, whole little idioms you're using, and it's got to also figure on it being translated into foreign countries. So, if you're leaning heavily on dialogue gags, why, it's a pretty flimsy prop.
Some of the most spectacular things in your comics were the splash panels, um, and it's very rare in funny animal comics to see anything like that. What uh—can you tell us how you work those up, and how long some of them took you to draw—like the huge steam shovel battle and the uh, the money-dam exploding and uh, so on? Well, the—the big splash panel, naturally, was uh, at the height of some situation—the climax of some situation—maybe not of the whole story, but of a buildup of sequences—like where the two steam shovels are—one's coming down the street this way, and the other's coming the other way, and what happens when they meet. And I thought it was worthwhile to put it in a big panel where I could show all that machinery slashing at each other. You're trying to crowd that into too small a panel, and you lose too much detail. And the—in those splash panels, there was a lot of detail—a lot of coins or a lot of machinery or a lot of people or something that required lots of room in order to put it over. So the splash panel was—it was planned for well in advance, and uh, I just saved up all of these different things so that I had room to draw them finally and one big dramatic situation.
Did you like drawing splash panels more than the smaller panels because you could do more with it? Well, I guess I did like to draw them; otherwise, I wouldn't have put them in because it would take me two or three days to draw one of them. That one of—the Square Egg City—you know, when they—they first come out of the bottom of the fog, and there they see this thing down there—oh, I was laboring for about three days on the drawings of that, and then I got my perspective to force so that the buildings came out diamond-shaped down in the lower part. Were there any particular problems drawing splash panels that you might remember? Well, I'll say the problem was that they were so easy to cut out down at the office. Yeah, that was one of the things—I could put in the splash panel and tell a whole lot in that one panel. And then when it got down to the office, why, they—if they needed to run an ad—they could look back at that—they could look at that page and say, "Well, we could cut out this whole half page here and run something about air rifles or chewing gum."
Do you feel a change in the nature of the stories and the way you developed them when you decided—as we know you did later—simply not to use splash panels? Did that—did that restrict certain things you could do in comics? Nobody told me I couldn't use—I know—you just—but when they cut them out, you decided that—oh, yeah—I got to the point where I thought, "Well, why bother to draw these big splash panels?" Yeah, toward the last there, they were doing so much of this business of cutting out and inserting ads. It seems as if they had a bunch of advertising salesmen back in Dell who were always out selling these pages to the different advertisers. And uh, I would do a story and send it in down here at the office, and maybe the Chase Craig and these guys would have the book all planned to go through with a ten-page story, and then here would come word out of Dell: "Cut a page; we're going to have to run a chewing gum ad." So they have to go and cut a page out of one of my stories. And it got to be so prevalent—so much of it going on—that I, toward the last, had a shaky feeling every time I wrote a story, just wondering where they're going to be able to make a cut. It inhibited my thinking quite a bit.
One time you said—maybe half-joking—that you almost thought you'd put in some extra pages, figuring that—that they—that if they were going to cut something, that'd be these pages rather than something that you really wanted. I believe there was a time or two when I deliberately put in a page of just plain old padding that could be lifted out, and the two sections joined together and made a better story. Yeah, I did that a time or two.
You're talking to Bob Clampett and Ward Kimball about uniformity in animation. They use model sheets so that everyone could draw the characters the same way. And around 1950, you did model sheets for the comic books, and yet, all of a sudden, you were no longer doing, for example, the Donald Duck comic books. Do you have any idea why it was more possible for the animation to retain some kind of uniformity when, in fact, the comic books didn't? The um—the animation, I guess, appears to be—like you say—there's more uniformity in the—how all the guys draw the ducks. It's because the director tells them exactly what they're to draw, and uh, there are certain poses that they cannot or will not put over in animation. They always have to look good. In other words, we were supposed to do that in the comic books too, but I never did. I never followed the rule closely. If I had to show the bottom of Donald's beak, I did it. And as Don was saying earlier, that I managed to make him look fairly good—any pose that I found for the duck—that was just by using an eraser a great deal. I would just keep working on him until he did look respectable in any of those positions. But uh, one thing that apparently they don't like to do in animation or in the newspaper comic strips is the underside of Donald's beak where he's got his head tilted back, and you show the underside of his feet. It looks like a continuation of his neck, and it hides all the rest of his face, and so it is called an "ugly pose" and one that is to be scrupulously avoided. But I used it a time or two. One was on a cover on the magazine. Couple of them. Couple of them. Yeah, that's right—in the uh, Scrooge one—Scrooge one. Yeah, that was the underside of Don's beak, but I did show enough of Donald's face that you can see some expression there. Yeah, sure could. Just a straight-on of the underside of the beak would be very uninteresting. Yeah.
What about this question of if you think it would be possible to make three-dimensional models of your characters that would actually look like they look from panel to panel in your comics? You indicated that you were—you had to fool around with it, right, to make them look the best from any point of view? Well, I just had to draw my characters in any situation in which the story required them to look a certain way. They—I had to work on them until they did look that way—whether they could have been molded into a clay model and still look right in the poses I put them into—I don't know. And whether such a clay model could be manipulated so that you could turn the head and it would still look right or not—that—that is something I never got into, and I never had any desire to make play models of my characters.
One of the things that all of us who followed your stuff uh, notice and always surprises you is that we can tell when—when your stories were done by the way Donald is drawn. Did you talk a little bit about why you changed Donald uh—what—especially the famous change in 49—when—48 and 49—when he suddenly gets a longer beak for a couple of years and then it shrinks rather rapidly? In fact, again, it sort of shrinks during one story in late 49. Well, I was very conscious of criticism from all my readers or friends, I guess, about that time. There was somebody that had come out from the Disney studio, and one of the women that lived up the road was an inker at Disney, and and I think she was the first one that told me that the word is out all around the studio that you draw that beak too long. And so I started shortening the duck's beak, and then I got criticism from a letter—or no, it wouldn't have been a letter at that time; it would have been from some other person, either in the story department at Disney's or in the editorial office—that I was making the beak too short; I was making the duck look too much like Al Taliaferro's duck. And so I would make these changes to try to uh, please someone else—not that I had noticed anything wrong.
And that other change in which I started making the duck quite tall and the nephews quite tall—the head small in relation to the body and standing them up straighter—that too came from trying to uh, get a duck that looked a little bit more like the comic strip duck—the newspaper comic strip duck—because uh, somehow Al Taliaferro always stood that duck up much straighter than I did, and he had a head that was smaller in proportion to his overall height. And uh, another thing that influenced me at that time was the paper—the drawing paper. The company got a whole bunch of it in from Germany that was coated with a kind of soft chalk, and whenever I would make my rough drawing, the pencil would make little crunches. And I've always drawn that duck too tall—always have—and with good paper I would just erase it and redraw him again. And since there was a trench—it is already made there from my pencil from making that tall duck—I would always get my pen line stuck in that crunch and drawing him that way anyway. So I thought, "Heck with this; I'll just draw that duck the way he comes out in the first rough." Nobody likes it; why, they better get me some better paper. So they did. They—they got—a couple of years' time—they got some better paper, still from West Germany, but it was a better grade of paper.
Did you ever try to introduce a moral into the stories? Often it seemed to me there was a moral; it was somewhat subtle. You didn't try to hit anybody over the head with it, but you seem to be making a point in a lot of your stories. Oh, sometimes the moral was undercut too—that comes—that comes in once in a while deliberately. And often it would be something that developed as I was writing on the story. I would notice that maybe I should just play up this angle a little bit. Yeah, I uh, I would put them in once in a while consciously, and other times it just slid in without any effort. Was there anything you were trying to say to your audience in particular—any—any point you're trying to get across? Well, just to stock things like "Crime does not pay" and "Pride goeth before a fall"—just the—
What about a story that just occurred to me, like the ten-dollar bill story, where there's a specific moral stated at the end, where Donald tries to return the ten-dollar bill, and all of these horribly despicable characters come along and and finally he does get it back—by accident—almost—to the rightful owner, and they walk—and Donald and his nephews walk off at the end with halos over their heads. And the moral at the end really seems to be to contradict the fact that if you—if you try to be honest, which is what Donald's trying to do, you're just going to get destroyed. And yet, at the end, they say, "Well, know that it's always better to—you know—to be honest," and so on. And I—that seemed to be one of those radical cases of where the stated moral is somehow in opposition to what the story is actually uh, proves. Well, I stuck that last line on there because I had felt that it needed something like that added to it just to give it strength or to explain that strange ending that I put on there. In real life, Donald would have kept a ten-dollar bill and spent it on himself.
And I'm kind of curious as to what some of your political views are, if you have any. I think that what I was trying to put over—if I did go into political things at any time—was that it's better to just have a free government like we have where everybody can do as they darn well please, rather than to be locked up in a utopia—you have to obey a whole bunch of rulers. But I avoided politics mostly because it's a very uninteresting subject to young kids, and it's a subject that can get you into a lot of hot water. And my own political philosophy is that we've got a pretty good thing the way we've got it now, and we should just leave it darn well alone. We can have Watergates and all kinds of things, but nobody gets hurt, nobody gets destroyed, nobody goes to prison—we just have a lot of fun as we go along. Everybody's robbing everybody else, but—get something you expect.
Wouldn't it be great if uh, oh, a thousand years from now my stories were like Aesop's fables—they just keep right on going—never—never die? That would be an ideal situation. I want to check up on that.
