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Comment by aedron | Hacker News Reader

The most astute observation is that characters on Danish kids TV are often completely, unapologetically flawed. This makes them relatable to kids, and kids enjoy watching them in all their dysfunction.

And I actually disagree with the premise that this contains no lessons or morals. Children are able to see clearly how ridiculous and ill-advised the behavior of these characters is, and so learn to recognize it in themselves and others.

Someone once pointed out that while Mickey Mouse is the mascot of Disney in the U.S. and the main character of the franchise, in Europe it was Donald Duck who became popular. Europeans like the flawed anti-hero, while moralizing America (sorry!) preferred the do-gooder know-it-all Mickey Mouse.

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In Britain, the nihilistic Looney Tunes cartoons like Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry and (above all else) Roadrunner were vastly more popular than anything by Disney.

In fact, I don't think I've even seen a single Mickey Mouse cartoon...

Watched tonnes of Looney Tunes growing up on British TV. Never seen a Mickey cartoon and I've always been curious if there even were any besides a few when Disney first started.

I'll take Bugs Bunny and the Roadrunner v Wile. E. Coyote (supra-genius) over Disney any day of the week.

of course, because those are adult cartoons filled with adult references a cultured person would get, and more or less robbed the 1940s for comedy. It's more about how dynamic 1940s culture was compared to our own, I think.

If you go a bit later, to when they started doing new animation for Looney Tunes tv specials in the 70s and 80s, the cartoons got dumber as well.

I've seen a number of British comedians make similar statements.

American audiences want their comic lead to be the cool guy making witty remarks, British audiences want the lead to be the butt of the jokes.

Stephen Fry said

>You know that scene in Animal House where there’s a fellow playing folk music on the guitar, and John Belushi picks up the guitar and destroys it. And the cinema loves it. [Belushi] just smashes it and then waggles his eyebrows at the camera. Everyone thinks, "God, is he great!" Well, the British comedian would want to play the folk singer. We want to play the failure.

Donald Duck's specific popularity has a lot to do with World War II and the marshall plan -- whereas the USA had TV And Radio, Europe's infrastructure was devastated and the influx of american comic books formed a cheap form of entertainment. One of those happened to be Donald Duck -- which was ALSO popular in the USA at the time and ran in lots of newspapers.

But in the USA, Donald Duck (and comics in general) had growing competition whereas in europe he had time to become a nostalgic tradition.

I'll punt as to the accuracy of your "moralizing America" sneer, but remember that Disney chose their mascot--not the American public.

Additionally, my understanding is that Donald Duck had at least a few American fans. Though their numbers are probably limited to the few Americans who enjoy Looney Tunes, Homer Simpson, and the stereotypical sitcom dad (among other characters).

TIL that Donald Duck isn't very popular in the US.

I grew up with a weekly Disney comic book that was a collection of mostly Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse (detective) stories. Almost always skipped Mickey, he's just way too boring as a character.

But didn't you guys have Duck Tales as well? I thought that was massively popular.

Donald comes off a lot better in comics, where he's not saddled with a comedy voice that renders him almost completely incomprehensible. Duck Tales was, indeed, pretty popular, with four seasons - and it focused almost entirely on the adventures of Uncle Scrooge and Donald's nephews. Who you could actually understand. (It was also largely based on the Carl Barks comics, so a lot of the stories would probably be super familiar to you.)

And yeah. Mickey's a boring goody-two-shoes. The earliest cartoons had him as an anarchic troublemaker but once he became the Disney mascot he got all the fun siphoned out of him and everyone quit giving a shit about him.

Carl Banks, that's the one yes! Thanks for reminding me.

>TIL that Donald Duck isn't very popular in the US.

A large part due to how utterly annoying it is to listen to him "talk".

>But didn't you guys have Duck Tales as well? I thought that was massively popular.

Yes - at least in my childhood/area it was very popular. They also didn't talk like Donald Duck though. That probably has a lot to do with it.

Yes, first time I heard his original voice I felt utterly betrayed.

I don't think it was. It lasted a while, but that had to do with it being the first syndicated afternoon Disney animated cartoon. (Gummi Bears was a saturday morning one first.) It lasted a bit because of that, but around the same time you had the really popular cartoons and shows, like Tiny Toon Adventures, Batman the Animated series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Ducktales was a very well done series, but what appeals to adults doesn't always appeal to kids, and the Ducktales movie bombed so bad it canceled the rest of the movies based on Disney Afternoon shows.

For comparison, the best Disney Afternoon series in the states was Aladdin, which outlasted Ducktales by several years, and spawned several direct to DVD movies.

I didn't like Donald Duck on TV but I loved the comic books.

I collected hundreds of them at flea markets about 40 years ago.

Mickey Mouse in his original incarnations was actually a bit of a miscreant!

I don't know, Chileans sure hated Donald Duck (:P)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Donald_Duck

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