Tralla La: Economics 101, captivatingly told (Disney for Em! w/o)
Written: Oct 15 '01 (Updated Oct 15 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Humorous, very educational.
Cons: It's not 500 pages long.
The Bottom Line: A great lesson in economics and wealth-versus-happiness, along with some great one-liners. Cartoon comics at its best.
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| tomgray's Full Review: Uncle Scrooge Comes Home |
You are reading a contribution to the Disney ~*~ When You Wish Upon A Star Write-Off!
Emily Rose, the young daughter (15 months old) of fellow Epinion member ImAmes (http://imames.epinions.com/user-imames) is battling retinoblastoma (a form of cancer which is found in the eye).
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Reviewer's note: Individual comic book titles are not listed in the Epinions data base. Therefore, I am posting this review under the one Uncle-Scrooge-related title that is in the data base.
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Tralla La is a comic book, Uncle Scrooge #6 to be exact, but it's more than that. It's arguably the best story of Carl Barks, one of comics' greatest writers and illustrators, and I'm delighted to be able to introduce it to you and to Epinions as part of the When You Wish Upon a Star write-off.
Barks worked from 1942 to 1967 as an author and illustrator of Disney comics, beginning with parts of Donald Duck #9 and continuing on through many issues of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories and Uncle Scrooge, the life and times of "the world's richest duck." These comics were and are extremely popular, and have been enjoyed by millions of people over the years.
Barks's Uncle Scrooge comics are wonderful fare for children, but as with any outstanding works of art for kids, can be fully enjoyed by adults as well:
* They are educational, many involving characters or locales from famous works of literature (for example, The Golden Fleecing, in which Scrooge McDuck and his nephew Donald, along with Donald's nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, retrace the path of Jason and the Argo of Greek myth in search of the fabled golden fleece).
* They spark the imagination and let youngsters know there is a big, wide world out there, both in reality and in the limitless expanse of the imagination. From Colchis (the land of the golden fleece) to outer space, where a solid gold moon is discovered lurking behind our regular moon (in The 24-Karat Moon), to Atlantis (Secret of Atlantis), Scrooge and his nephews stretch readers' minds with incomparably entertaining voyages.
* They are thought-provoking and philosophical. The underlying theme of most issues of Scrooge, naturally enough, is wealth. Is there a down side to being fabulously, incomprehensibly rich? You bet--Scrooge is preoccupied with safeguarding his wealth and worrying about it as often as he is able to enjoy the quest to enlarge it still further. How does Donald avoid being envious of his uncle? Mostly by being happy-go-lucky and making the case to his nephews that the pleasures riches bring are not worth the headaches.
Tralla La combines all of these attractions, sending Scrooge and his nephews to a mystical kingdom somewhere in Central Asia that is loosely based on the "Shangri-la" of myth and Frank Capra's classic movie Lost Horizon.
It all begins when Scrooge, beset by pleas from gold-diggers of all sorts ( . . . Sellers and traders and beggars and bums! All wanting money! Money! Money!), finds his mental and physical health deteriorating:
Scrooge: My medicine! My nerve medicine! I've got to take some right now or I'll crack up! It's like this all day every day! . . . Oh, how I envy that carefree squirrel, sleeping on that peaceful bough!
[Later] Office Manager, on the telephone, watching Scrooge bound by with cries of "Cherk! Chic! Cherk!" : Hello, operator! . . . Get me Donald Duck! Emergency! . . . Come down and help catch your Uncle Scrooge! He's running away into the park, chattering like a squirrel!
Donald talks Scrooge out of his tree and into the hospital, where his doctor turns out to know about a mysterious country with one appealing characteristic: It's called Tralla La, and nobody has ever seen it, but it is said to be a place without money! According to legends it has no gold or jewels or wealth of any kind!
Within a few days, the ducks are on their way to Central Asia. Tralla La is elusive at first . . .
Native: My grandfather once said that his grandfather's grandfather saw a traveler that had seen the valley!
Scrooge (steaming): Must have been big news at the time of Marco Polo!
. . . but eventually yields to the sleuthing abilities of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and turns out to be everything it is cracked up to be . . . at least, initially:
Native (smiling inscrutably): We Tralla Lallians have never known greed! Friendship is the thing we value most!
Unfortunately, Scrooge, who is settling in for a nice, long, restful vacation, has brought a six-pack of his nerve tonic with him. A shiny bottle cap he discards catches the eye of a Tralla Lallian, and soon becomes the object of envy for its "beauty" and rarity:
Native #1: I'll give you a sheep for it!
Native #2: I'll give you two sheep!
Wife: Wise up, husband! It is the only bottle cap in Tralla La! It is worth many sheep!
When it is discovered that Scrooge still has five bottle caps remaining, he is suddenly the richest duck in Tralla La, and his troubles start all over again:
Natives: If this rich old miser doesn't give his bottle caps to -- uh -- people like me, he's an old meanie! Raise his taxes! Stingy! Stingy! . . .
Scrooge: There! Take that bottle cap for free -- whoever is tough enough to get it!
Natives (fighting): Biff! Bop! Bam! Sock! . . .
Donald (leaning out window to yell at natives below): Ye cats! Why are you people so greedy for bottle caps? Why aren't you greedy for good things -- like sheep?
Natives: Phooey! Sheep are common! Anybody can own sheep! Bottle caps are rare!
Scrooge thinks it over, and comes up with a plan -- he'll send Donald out of the valley to contact his company, and order his fleet of planes to drop a billion bottle caps on Tralla La, so that they become worthless.
What follows is a wonderful fable of runaway inflation, as the Tralla Lallians, at first delighted to find they have all become unimaginably wealthy, soon realize that their new-found bottle cap riches are a glut on the market:
Native #1: How come you don't ask to trade your sheep for my bottle caps?
Native #2: Because I already have more bottle caps than sheep! That's why!
And that was only the first million. The natives soon complain that the raining bottle caps are knocking over their crops and covering their fields, making it impossible for their livestock to eat. Donald, returned from outside, reminds Scrooge of the awful truth: You ordered a billion! Remember? . . . Planes will be flying in here and unloading a million bottle caps every hour, day and night, for the next six weeks!
All ends happily, as always in cartoon comics, but not without a few additional clever plot twists. Tralla La is a witty, enjoyable, and painless way for children to learn some basic economics, as well as a larger lesson about the limits to the value of money in and of itself. One of Barks's finest creations, it is cartoon comics at its very best.
Recommended reading/viewing: Barks wrote a total of nearly 70 issues of Uncle Scrooge, many of very high quality, and the duck stories in hundreds of issues of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. Many have been reprinted and should be available from comics dealers for modest prices. Several indexes of his work are available on the Web.
Lost Horizon (1937), the story of survivors from a plane crash in Asia stumbling onto a lost kingdom where there are no worries or conflicts and people live for hundreds of years, is slow-moving and overly romantic, but any movie that stars Ronald Colman is worth watching. (Sad to say, it turns out that Paradise is nice, but boring.)
[Update later on 10/15/01: I see that AdaDavis, a skilled reviewer, has posted a review of James Hilton's Lost Horizon, the book which is the basis of Capra's movie, and which I had completely forgotten. Dang. Well, the book is also recommended--as Ada says, it is a dated but still enjoyable classic.]
And finally, The Gods Must Be Crazy (1981) is an original, off-beat South African film that incorporates some of the same themes in the quiet, amusing story of a Bushman (native) who finds a Coke bottle tossed from an airplane. Charming and recommended.
Thanks for reading, and blessings to Emily.
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Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
tomgray
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Member: Tom Gray
Location: Norwich, Vermont
Reviews written: 160
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