Scrooge McDuck is quite a character. Created in 1947 by Carl Barks for The Walt Disney Company, the elderly Scottish patriarch of the Duck family was originally intended to be used only once but quickly became one of the most popular characters in Disney comics. Named after Ebenezer Scrooge from the 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is an incredibly wealthy business magnate and self-proclaimed "adventure-capitalist" whose dominant character traits are his wealth, his thrift, and his tendency to seek more wealth through adventure. The maternal uncle of Donald Duck, the maternal grand-uncle of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and a genius when it comes to creating pop culture moments.
What's that last line refer to you ask? Well, Scrooge McDuck pretty much came up with the concept for the film Inception a decade before the Christopher Nolan movie was released - as we explored here - and long before that, within the pages of Carl Banks' Uncle Scrooge comic, the iconic idol/boulder scene for Raiders Of The Lost Ark was depicted close to 30 years before George Lucas and Steven Spielberg brought it to the screen!
In 1980, George Lucas wrote the introduction to Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times, a collection of Carl Banks' comics from across the years. In that introduction Lucas mentioned how influential he found the comics to be.
Principal photography had already begun for Raiders Of The Lost Ark, although the film would not be released until the following year, but it's not hard to see how Indiana Jones' globe-trotting adventures for "fortune and glory" and lost artifacts are quite similar to Uncle Scrooge's similar trips in the pages of the funnies, and later in show's like Duck Tales. However, not many people would suspect that the iconic boulder scene at the start of Raiders was directly inspired by one particular issue of Uncle Scrooge comic...
Issue #7 of Uncle Scrooge from September 1954 featured a comic strip titled "The Seven Cities of Cibola" in which the Beagle Boys remove an idol that is on a pedestal, just like Indiana Jones does in Raiders Of The Lost Ark...
...and in doing so both Indy and the Beagle Boys set-off a trap which releases a giant boulder rolling down upon them...
In the 2003 DVD extra Making The Trilogy George Lucas reveals that Steven Spielberg had suggested Indy be chased by a boulder and, perhaps jogged into memory by the recent invitation to write the introduction to that collected comic release Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times, Lucas admitted that he did indeed lift the scene with the idol and triggering of the traps, and connected it with the boulder, as a conscious homage to Carl Banks' work.
Although, clearly, the production values are quite different and it's not at all a shot-for-shot remake, that's a pretty neat homage to Banks' work, and once which I suspect goes unnoticed by the vast majority of people who have watched and enjoyed Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
What will Scrooge McDuck come up with next?
Previously
That Time Scrooge McDuck Came Up With The Story For Inception
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