Just 4 months later the potential project of having Scrooge star in a cartoon was definitely cancelled with this letter from Peterson. At that point in time the stationery had changed again, as Lady and the Tramp was to be Disney's next feature length cartoon. It premiered on June 22nd, 1955.

BACKING DOWN

Peterson wrote a new letter to Barks on February 14th, 1955. Barks had visited the Disney Studio shortly before and seen the storyboards for a cartoon with Scrooge and Donald. It is obvious, from Peterson's letter, that Barks' synopsis had not been followed: We are still working on the Scrooge McDuck and Donald idea we had on the board at the time you were here. We hope to shape this story up for a first effort. We may still be interested in using your story idea at a later date...

THE MOUSE STORY

Peterson also told Barks that the Studio wanted to keep his script for another month or so, unless Barks wanted to use it for a comic book. But Barks never used his synopsis as basis for a comic book. He later said: I just didn't have quite enough action. I would need to have jazzed it up and introduced some clouds of rats, or something. In other words, it would have been a story that starred Uncle Scrooge, and the kids and Donald wouldn't have had enough to do with it. I would have had to have used them in there.
But, just the year before, Barks had in fact used fragments of the plot in one of his stories. In WDCS171 'Impervi-waxing the Money Bin' Donald is working in Scrooge's Money Bin when a mouse enters and has to be caught. Then, suddenly, the story changes completely venturing into a tale of the whole Bin being sealed by special wax. What happened to the menacing mouse was never explained...

REAL PROBLEMS

Peterson did keep the script until May 6th, 1955. Then he returned it with a letter explaining that the Studio was heavily involved in television production, and that the chance of producing a Scrooge cartoon was remote. One of the reasons was indeed that Disney had decided to further explore their engagements with the upcoming media Television, but other main factors contributed; the Studio found it difficult to come up with ideas for cartoon shorts starring a grumpy sourpuss of an old miser, and another very real problem was to find a credible voice for such a character.

SCROOGE ON THE SCREEN

Much later the Studio did manage to come up with two Scrooge cartoons, but they were both of a special type tailor-made for the character. In 1967 he starred in a double-length cartoon Scrooge McDuck and Money, which was an educational walk-through about currency and its history, economics, and investing. Of course, Scrooge was the obvious choice for such a participation. In 1983 Scrooge was again the obvious choice in the half-hour cartoon Mickey's Christmas Carol, which is based loosely on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol featuring an old miser by the name of - Scrooge.
Scrooge also entered the world of television when in 1987 he starred in a long-running series titled DuckTales, but living pictures never became Scrooge's medium. He was born by Barks to the world of comic books and here he has survived big-time!

One idea from the script survived and the resulting drawing was published as the front cover for U$10.