THEBOTTLECAPSSTORY

It is quite normal that a professional writer looks to other writers' production in order to obtain basic ideas that he can use in his own work. Carl Barks got ideas for some of his Disney comic book stories from diverse sources, one of which was Literature (see examples HERE). Barks took ideas from diverse books to incorporate into the plotlines for his stories, but it is important to emphasize that the resulting stories were definitely his own. One of the stories was published in 1954 and issued untitled, but it is mostly known and referred to as U$06 'Tralla La'. This is the story.

THE TRIGGER

The initial idea for Barks' story was a desire to show a billion of something (in this case it ended up being bottle caps)*. This was combined with the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton describing a mystical, harmonious and Eden-like valley called Shangri-La in the Himalayas, a dreamland where people were content and aging very slowly.
In the novel Hilton describes the fate of Hugh Conway, a veteran member of the British diplomatic service, who finds inner peace, love, and a sense of purpose among the inhabitants of Shangri-La. But in the end Conway, reluctantly, has to leave for the real world. The fictional place has since become synonymous with any earthly paradise, a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world.
Barks decided to place his ducks in the fictitious valley of Tralla La in the same unwelcoming mountains of the Himalayas, where they could live and be happy, until their actions forced them to leave the ideal place.

* The word Billion can be quite confusing to understand depending on your linguistic background. In American-English (i.e. the USA and Canada) the word stands for 1,000,000,000 or 10⁹, but the corresponding word in British-English is Milliard.
If you wish to express a Billion in British-English you wind up with 1,000,000,000,000 or 10¹².

THE STORY

U$06 'Tralla La' - 1954

Synopsis:

Scrooge McDuck is stressed and after having reached his breaking point he travels with Donald Duck and the nephews to Tralla La, where the concept and value of money are unknown. Until they arrive...

Scattered comments:

Journey:
Scrooge is fed up with his tumultuous working life and consequently decides to move permanently to a peaceful and tranquil place far from everyday routines and troubles. At long last he finds the desired place in the Himalayas.
The nephews use their Junior Woodchucks guide book in order to figure out where in the Himalayas the happy land of Tralla La is located: The waters of a spring come through fissures in the basic rock!
According to the natives along the route to the serene place, Tralla La is situated in a valley, but the ducks only encounter one town in the valley, so the name may well refer to the town as well.
Scrooge asks a man where Tralla La is: My grandfather once said that his grandfather's grandfather saw a traveler that had seen the valley. Scrooge snarls: Must have been big news at the time of Marco Polo!

Medicine:
Barks made two stories in which Scrooge's use of medicine triggered the stories as well as being important to the plots. In this one he is heavily dependant on bottles of nerve medicine for his stress symptoms, and in FC0456 Back to the Klondike he had to take special capsules for his amnesia.

Generosity:
Scrooge has been the big spender in more stories such as CP9 Christmas in Duckburg, U$47 The Thrifty Spendthrift, WDCS138 'Statues Galore', and WDCS268 Christmas Cheers - just to name a few donations to the Duckburgians. But nothing beats his gift in order to accommodate the citizens of Tralla La, as he orders a thousand planeloads of bottle caps to be distributed over the land. Now, there's a donation for you...

BARKS' COMMENTARIES

The title of this story is deceptive. Tralla La is not a musical operetta, it is a place. It is a far-off land, where cares are unknown. It is a land without riches of any kind, especially of gold, silver, or diamonds. It is hardly a land that Uncle Scrooge would ever want to visit, but it has a lack of other things, too, that makes it seem suddenly attractive to the busy old money grubber. It is a land without greed or selfishness or envy. What happens to this lyrical land and to Uncle Scrooge as a result of his visit shouldn't happen to dogs, to say nothing of ducks.

It's obvious that Tralla La is a parody on Lost Horizon. At the time I wrote it, Lost Horizon with its land of Shangri-La, was very popular. I saw the movie. I never read the book, but I read so many reviews of the book, I felt I knew it. Anyway, I felt it wouldn't matter if my version of Shangri-La was a parody of the book or not.

I also wanted to do a story that had a billion of something in it. I read about the appropriations that Congress makes of a billion for this, ten billion for that. I got to thinking of how much of something a billion really amounts to. You can visualize a million because you can think of a thousand thousands of bottle caps or whatever. But when you multiply that pile by another thousand, then you are into numbers that are beyond the ability of the mind to visualize. I hoped to find a story that could put that point over.
So, I dreamed up this bottle cap business that disrupted the people's way of life. They had always been satisfied with what they had, and suddenly one of them got one little piece of metal that no one else had. That started it!
This guy now had something that nobody else had. It really tested these people to see if they were all they were cracked up to be. Human nature wouldn't allow them to be quite that good when they got up against the real nitty-gritty. Instead of the guy putting it in a museum for everybody, his wife urged him to sell it for the highest price he could get. The guy wanted a profit. Very quickly the profit system was working in Tralla La.

THE TITBITS

In reality, the simple figure of one Billion is quite incomprehensible to us, especially as our governments juggle with such numbers all the time rendering us unable to grasp its magnitude. Maybe these few 'easy' titbits can contribute to some measure of understanding:
If someone gets the insane idea of counting to one billion and starts at birth, they will still not have reached the number at age 65! - If you decide to give away 1,000 dollars every day, the task of distributing a billion will be reached after 2,739 years! - The human heart beats about 3 billion times during its lifetime!

In a few stories Barks mistakenly gave some of the secondary characters 5 fingers on one hand, instead of the usual 4 used in the funny animal universe. Examples can be found in WDCS130 'The Rare Coin Story', WDCS146 'The Omelet Story', and WDCS159 'The Wispy Willy Story'. In Tralla La Barks was persistent; all the inhabitants have 5 fingers!

The aeroplane bringing the ducks to their destination is a Boeing 307 Stratoliner (see more HERE).

In 1968 Barks made a special - and uncharacteristic - story that he finished in watercolour, namely Go Slowly, Sands of Time!, that was first published as late as in 1981 in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden as D6856. In it Scrooge will not accept that he is mortal so he sets out with Donald and the nephews to find a rejuvenator. They manage to find a place where people apparently have eternal life and the valley seems to fit his expectations. The story has parallels to U$06 'Tralla La'.

In the story we are told that Scrooge lives at 33B Street, a place we never hear of again...

Barks always portrayed his natives as look-alikes throughout his career. Here are some examples from other stories:
DD46 Secret of Hondorica (the Indians), FC0223 Lost in the Andes (the Plain Awfultonians), FC0422 The Gilded Man (the Indians), U$18 Land of the Pygmy Indians (the Pygmy Indians), U$29 Island in the Sky (the asteroid Indians), U$48 The Many Faces of Magica de Spell (the faceless people), WDCS034 Good Deeds (the black duck tribe), and WDCS211 'The Coconutty Story' (the island tribe).

In the 1980s Barks was asked to give titles to some of his untitled adventure stories: FC0495 Trouble from Long Ago, U$04 The Menehune Mystery, U$05 The Secret of Atlantis, U$06 Tralla La, U$07 The Seven Cities of Cibola and U$08 The Mysterious Stone Ray.

You can find the story rendered in full at the Internet. One example (accompanied by music!) can be found HERE.

EXTRA

The best known 'apprentice' of Barks' comic book work is the American artist Keno Don Hugo Rosa, who followed Barks' style and ideas in a number of stories. Several of these were in fact a sort of sequels to Barks' adventures, in which Rosa fabulated over possible following events in the style 'What happened next?'. Here is Rosa's sequel version of the Tralla La story which he interlaced with some of the plotline from U$14 The Crown of Genghis Khan:

Synopsis:
In Rosa's 30-pager story D90314 Return to Xanadu from 1991 (U$261+262 in the USA) Scrooge returns to Tralla La to present Genghis Khan's crown hoping to get more valuables instead, but the people are not interested. Instead they bar the ducks from leaving.

Review:
Barks and Rosa had some mail correspondence covering diverse subjects during the 1990s. Here is an excerpt of a letter from November 3, 1990, to Rosa:
...I have read your sequel story of the 'Crown of Genghis Khan' cum 'Tralla La' and had to dig out the original stories of both tales to see where you had made the hook-ups, it being many years since I read either of those opuses. Well, you did a sequel, there's no doubt about that, and in the process you invented so many new situations that the old tales are hardly needed as a springboard. Congratulations...