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 (novel by James Hilton, later filmed by Frank Capra - Editor's remark). 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 nerve medicine was a running gag to help pull parts of the story together. I had learned about running gags before I ever worked at Disney. It was a kind of thread or connecting link in stories. The running gags were a necessary part of the stories, like a period at the end of a sentence (see more on the subject HERE - Editor's remark).