That's the exact title, per the card--"The Golden Goose Part I."
Okay, here we go. Nothing to do with Barks' "Isle of Golden Geese," for better or worse. The idea is that Scrooge and HDL are in Arabland to collect old junk to pawn off as antiques (um…didn't "Much Ado about Scrooge" establish that this is considered immoral by the show's metric?); Glomgold is also there, looking for…stuff. And there's Dijon. And there are a bunch of monks, led by Dijon's brother…Poupon. Actually, this makes me think of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, in which Eli Wallach's bandit character ("the ugly") also has a brother who's a priest.
Anyway, these here monks venerate this golden goose statue that can turn anything into gold if you say the secret password ("gold") while you touch it. The Beagles are trying to steal it for Glomgold, while Dijon vacillates about whether or not he ought to take it himself. Yadda yadda, it accidentally gets stowed in Scrooge's luggage and towed back to the States, and it's quite weird how the show emphasizes how completely worthless he thinks it looks. Dude--it's a gold statue. He would be all over that shit, whether or not he knew its secret.
Glomgold tries to buy it, so naturally Scrooge doesn't want to sell it, and there's a funny back-and-forth where he repeatedly marks up the price. Once he figures out what the score is, he goes GOLD CRAZY--I'd go so far as to say he develops another case of The Terrible Gold Fever from way back in the pilot episode--how's that for full-circle? Certainly, his behavior is reminiscent of "The Fabulous Philosopher's Stone."
Back in Arabland, Poupon is insistent that they go recover the goose--otherwise, for unspecified reasons, the END OF THE WORLD may occur, as it's been known to do. But back, again, in Duckburg, the Beagles succeed in stealing the statue from Scrooge, and TURNS THE NEPHEWS TO GOLD OH NO and to be continued and I can't help pointing out that if you can turn people into gold, there is really no chance that Scrooge wouldn't have accidentally done it to himself in his transmutation binge.
This episode mostly feels like build-up, really; not awful, but not particularly notable, either (how often has THAT been the case?). The Beagles are more intolerable than usual, and believe me: they ain't usually all that tolerable. Still, I harbor a vague hope that the second part will really bring it, and we can end on a relative high note (yes, you will note that this post and the next one are going up at about the same time, but I haven't seen the second part as I write this. I'm not tricking you.)
Stray Observations
-Okay, Dijon isn't so bad here, and at least there's his brother to sort of counterbalance him.
-Again, the writers have no concept of gold's consistency. Scrooge would pretty much have destroyed his entire estate if this were remotely realistic.
First of all, as I said before, these are two of my favorites. The "this is a special sale" scene never fails to make me laugh.
ReplyDeleteSorry to nitpick, but I have some points to make. First of all, the overseas location is clearly established to be India in Part Two.
I don't think the monks "venerate" the statue, because that would mean they'd pay it respect and worship it. I think that they see it as a dangerous nuisance more than anything else, and since they have no means of destroying it, they guard it to prevent greedy people from stealing it and potentially destroying the world.
I think that when you take actual old items from halfway around the world, it's fair to describe them as exotic antiques, because curios that are made in far away places with strange sounding names always have some level of value in the U.S. It's only when you try to pass off mass-produced cheap junk from Hong Kong factories as antiques that you're stepping over the ethical line.
Scrooge clearly states that he thinks the goose isn't worth much because it's much too light to be solid gold, so it "must be gold-plated." I think he gives it a sniff, using his gold smell powers he figured that he could probably sell the statue as is for more than he would make if he took the time to scrape off the presumably very thin layer of gold.
Technically, the overabundance of gold would only crash the gold market if it were released to the general population, like in "Dough Ray Me." There are enough diamonds in the world that if they were all put on the market, they'd be only a little more expensive than rhinestones. However, DeBeers and other businesses only release a limited amount each year, so diamonds still command a high price. If Scrooge kept all his new gold to himself and just tossed it up and let it hit him on the head and just released a little at a time, the gold market wouldn't crash.