Donald Duck in space with a backpack from "The Duck Who Fell to Earth"

DRL: “The Duck Who Fell to Earth” (1991)

Imagine if Scrooge McDuck, in modern times, decided to compete with Elon Musk’s Space X.

He’d likely put together a rocket to carry people into space from items found at yard sales, garage sales, and thrift stores. With but a single genius scientist, those pieces could be forged together to kickstart a space program whose one major failure would be enough to bring the whole thing crashing down — and it’s completely unrelated to Scrooge’s cheapness.

Uncle Scrooge has a beater plan to take him into space to clean up satellites before they fall to earth

Welcome to “The Duck Who Fell to Earth,” a story whose plot might remind some comics fans from 15 to 20 years ago of the set-up to a popular manga series, “Planetes.” Scrooge wants to send people up into space to catch doomed satellites before they crash to earth. He can part them out and make his money that way.

It’s a very roundabout way of setting up a business, but it’s also a very modern earth-friendly way of recycling rare earth materials rather than letting them burn to a crisp on atmospheric re-entry.

Scrooge has a flair for the dramatic, so it’s into low earth orbit we go!

Needless to say, Donald will be the garbage picker in this situation. You know it’s an important and lucrative job, too, because Scrooge so easily and quickly gives him a dime an hour bump to his pay scale. Donald doesn’t stop his negotiating there, either. He’s learned how to handle Scrooge and hits him up for a promise of additional pay before making a space walk.

Donald Duck negotiates a second pay hike

The easiest way to explain the plot in this story is “What goes up, must come down.” The “up” part turns out to be pretty easy. There’s some science and technobabble to explain things along the way and everything.

It’s the “down” part that threatens everyone’s lives and promises a dangerous and comedic adventure along the way. Donald gets separated from the rest of the plane and has to figure out a way to land back on earth without getting killed by either re-entry’s heat or the ground’s sudden stop. The tools he has to work with are pretty unpredictable, too, inluding a rocket pack and a parachute. And even after his landing, the adventure continues in unexpected ways, which are fun.

Scrooge and his scientist have to do much the same, but inside the plane from the edge of space down. We learn more and more in this book that Scrooge is not a rocket scientist. It’s the points of science he misses in the story that blows everything up. He’s better off being on solid ground and chasing down ancient colonies and lost treasures. To each his own.

A Story In Its Time

Space suit designs by Don Rosa for Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck

I love the spacesuit designs in this book. They feel era-appropriate with rubbery gloves and boots with the big bubble helmet. You get the multi-ring connectors around the neck for the helmet, too. Gone are the flat webbed feet, covered up in moon boots that almost look like something a Smurf might be more prone to wear.

They match neatly with the design of the underwater suits you see in “Treasure Under Glass” in the same volume of the Don Rosa Library, though they keep the webbed feet there for swimming around with.

Plus, heck, I grew up on a diet of 50s science fiction from Isaac Asimov and his compatriots. This story feels like it fits right in with that era. It’s a bit sillier than anything Asimov obviously would have written, since Asimov would have spent too much time trying to explain away the talking ducks, but it still feels right. Still, I think Asimov would have been proud of some of the science in this story…

Don Rosa likes to set his stories in the 1950s, when he was reading Carl Barks’ comics at home. I tried to do the math in my head as I read this story if it would make sense. Sputnik didn’t go up until 1957. Satellites weren’t as omnipresent at any point in the 50s as they would be by the 1980s, let alone today where we’re literally blanketing the sky with satellites that do everything from handing out GPS coordinates to providing internet connections.

It’s why it didn’t surprise me to read in the back of this third edition of the Don Rosa Library that Rosa had these same issues with the story. While he liked the story, he’s frustrated that it didn’t fit in perfectly with his world’s continuity.

I’ll forgive him on this one. We’ve all seen what can happen when we let continuity win over everything else. (“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and all. Thanks, Ralph Waldo Emerson.) It’s OK to tell a tale that might be ever-so-slightlwy “anachronistic” like this. It’s not like he drew the nephews with backward baseball caps and cell phones in their back pockets…

Summary

“The Duck Who Fell to Earth” is an entertaining story. I particularly enjoyed the art and the space uniforms. The science on the way back down to earth is a little questionable, but it’s explained by the characters as it happens. It’s been thought through; it wasn’t just done for the writer’s convenience, so I’ll give him that.

You know what it reminds me of? You know all those action movies where someone is falling and someone falls behind them to save them and manages to miraculously fall faster than the first person to save them? It’s a little of that level of science…

Donald's backpack rocket sputters as he falls to earth

I looked it up — the longest space dive was half of what Donald had to go through in this story, though Donald did get an assist out of left field in end so you can’t really compare the two and —

— I know, I know, I’m overthinking this now. I’m sorry.

The scientist character in the story is a little crazy, which makes sense given the constraints Scrooge put on him to create a rocket ship with an old beat-up mail plane. It pays off on the last page nicely.

Rosa knows how to end his stories on a good gag, and this one is no exception.


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