Money Bin

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The Money Bin is a fictional structure in Disney comic books, first appearing in comic book stories created by Carl Barks. It was later depicted in animated cartoons such as the theatrical short Scrooge McDuck and Money and the television series DuckTales. It is in this building that Scrooge McDuck stores the portions of his money he earned by himself and is the tallest building in the city of Duckburg, Calisota.

The Money Bin was built in 1902, shortly after Scrooge entered the diamond market and could no longer sleep at night because all the money he was storing under his mattress raised his bed too close to the ceiling, necessitating a more suitable storage facility for his money. His favorite pastime is to dive off a board into his money and swim through it.

Although the Money Bin is a twelve story skyscraper and a vault filled with three cubic acres of money, on various occasions it has been pulled around by a tractor, lifted to the top of a mountain, stolen by aliens from the bottom of the ocean, and blasted open with a cannon. The traditional location of the Money Bin is on top of Killmotor Hill. The Money Bin sits atop Futterman's Fault, a fault line which would prove catastrophic in the event of an earthquake.

The Money Bin is the victim of repeated assaults by many of Scrooge's enemies who try to steal his money, such as his archnemesis Flintheart Glomgold, the Beagle Boys, and Magica DeSpell, who is after Scrooge's Number One Dime (the first dime Scrooge ever earned).

To protect against these attempted break-ins, Scrooge has installed the greatest security system in the world to thwart any thought of even trying to intrude onto the premises.

Flintheart Glomgold has his own Money Bin, somewhere around Limpopo Valley, with a pound sign (£) instead of the dollar sign ($) that appears on Scrooge's as revealed when Scrooge pays him a visit in "The Second-Richest Duck". Although Glomgold uses some of Scrooge's ideas, like the cannon, he apparently doesn't have booby traps around his Money Bin, as Scrooge enters it without having to handle them although Flintheart didn't know about his visit. Although it's not so often as Scrooge's, Flintheart's Money Bin is also victim of assaults, as it's revealed in A Little Something Special, by the Beagle Boys, who don't care if the money they steal is Scrooge's or Flintheart's, and Magica De Spell, who was working with the possibility of Flintheart Glomgold being the world's richest duck, meaning she would need his Number One Rand instead of Scrooge's Number One Dime.

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[edit] Dimensions

A frequent topic of speculation among McDuck fans regards the dimensions of the Money Bin. Barks defined the volume of money contained inside as "three cubic acres," but the exact meaning, and therefore the volume, of a "cubic acre" is subject to interpretation by the reader, since an acre is a measure of area, not length. A series of blueprints created for a Scrooge McDuck story by Don Rosa state that the Money Bin is approximately 127 feet (39 m) tall, and 120 feet (37 m) wide. In the story, said blueprints are accredited to an architect named Keno D. Rosa, which is Don Rosa's actual name.

Another interpretation is to treat a "cubic acre" as a volume equal to the space that would be created if six squares, each an acre in area, were placed to form a cube. However, this would require the height and width to be 209 feet (64 m).

A third interpretation would be to take 'cubic acre' literally--thus making McDuck's cash holdings extensive enough to require six-dimensional storage. Taken literally, this would be over 66 billion cubic square metres (110 billion cubic square yards). Taken this way, one may consider McDuck's wealth as incalculable.

[edit] Development

Carl Barks invented the "money swim" in 1950, while he invented the "money bin" in 1951.[1]

[edit] Influences on Norwegian

The Norwegian name for the Money Bin is "Pengebingen", and has become regular word in the Norwegian language for a large amount of money or cash.[2]

[edit] References in academia

Russell W. Belk mentions the money bin in Material Values in the Comics: A Content Analysis of Comic Books Featuring Themes of Wealth, where he remarks that Scrooge's "childish fascination with money", where he takes pleasure in diving and swimming in the money bin, might account for Scrooge not being portrayed as a villain.[3]

Penelope Fritzer in the article Scrooge McDuck: Postmodern Robber Baron considers it possible for the money bin to symbolize the entire Disney empire.[4]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Carl Barks: Conversations, p xxxviii. Google Books
  2. ^ Vår tids eventyr ("Our time's adventure") nrk.no May 6 2003 (Norwegian)
  3. ^ The Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 14, No. 1. (Jun., 1987), pp. 26-42.
  4. ^ The Journal for the Liberal Art and Sciences, Scrooge McDuck: Postmodern Robber Baron, Penelope Fritzer, Florida Atlantic University

[edit] External links

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