There was an episode of DuckTales (I know, I know) where the cousin who was able to count anything just by looking at it said how much money, to the penny, Uncle Scrooge had. I don’t remember how much it was though. The money was temporarily being stored in a lake because the Beagle Boys had somehow broken through the defences.
Raygun99
That was no cousin. That was former bean counter (literally, he worked on an assembly line making sure each jar had the proper number of beans), turned Scrooge’s accountant, Fenton Crackshell. When told to convert things into liquid assets, Crackshell dumped Scrooge’s money in a lake. Crackshell went on to become the hero, GizmoDuck. The armor, made by Gyro Gearloose, was activated by the phrase “Blathering blatherskite!” and deactivated by M’ma Crackshell’s television remote control.
Wasn’t that also the movie?
I don’t think the checkerboard thing was ever part of the Canon – that is, it wasn’t in the comics by Carl Barks. Barks aimed at children and their enjoyment, he wouldn’t have inserted a math lesson.
There was a Barks’ story (I did a quick look, but I couldn’t find it, so I’m going from memory) where the pig-villain sues Scrooge for some fantasy-amount of money, and the judge rules in the pig’s favor. Scrooge then asks, “How much is that?” and is told that it’s seven times the amount of money there is in the whole world. Scrooge’s response: “Nobody can accuse that judge of being a piker!”
No idea the author, but I can vividly recall reading that particular story - I was a huge fan of the Donald Duck comics as a kid, and I thought the checkerboard story was really cool, and they explained it on the last page of the story with what I believe was a drawing of pennies stacked to the heavens on a checkerboard.
Thanks to all of those who helped this math-impaired Duck fan calculate what even Scrooge couldn’t afford.
What I learned about economics from Scrooge McDuck:
If you keep all your money in a big bin, so you can dive in it like a porpoise, burrow through it like a gopher and toss it up and let it hit you on the head, and a tornado comes along and empties out the bin and scatters your money all over the landscape, you’ll eventually get it back, if you tend to your livestock and crops.
What happened was, all the farmers who found Scrooge’s money said “Tuh HECK with WORK,” ran around to spend this cash on wine, women, and song, and in so doing neglected their own pantries. This led to them having to buy food from Scrooge, who charged them megainflated prices, like $10 million dollars per egg. Apparently Scrooge wound up being the only vendor of food on the entire planet. The poor beleaguered farmers had no choice but to give up their fortunes so they wouldn’t starve.
I know. I just didn’t want to admit that he didn’t read his own stories. :o
Sort of like this thread, with the same bits of info being given over and over and over again.
Not sure what you mean by this. Barks was a humorist and used exaggeration and hyperbole to great effect from story to story. There was no need to be consistent about an imaginary amount of money, and the McDuck earth was whatever it needed to be for any story. But you can find any number of bits that were used over and over, from the depth gauge after the second issue to the Number One Dime to the three cubic acres of money.
That just makes it more fun for the funs, as witnessed by the zillion reinterpretations of the contradictions in the Sherlock Holmes stories.