Taking Uncle Scrooge to the Bank : Pat Hanifin prefers Donald Duck’s relative to the more ‘whitewashed’ Disney characters. His Balboa home is a treasure trove of international collectibles.
In the comic pages Uncle Scrooge McDuck--often spelled $crooge--has a money bin, a huge vault where he has so much gold and other wealth stored up that he can ski on the slopes of it, or dive in it and swim.
Pat Hanifin has something of a vault of his own, a room in his Balboa apartment actually, in which he’s amassed not gold but a trove of Scrooge McDuck items from around the world. Though many are only plastic toys or comic books, the collection is worth a small fortune. A book of paintings by Scrooge creator Carl Barks that sold for $200 a few years ago now goes for $1,200.
Hanifin has Mexican Scrooge safes worth $400 and plastic toys that go for equal amounts. Recently, he purchased a pair of deluxe English-made statuettes--limited to 100 and with real gold in the money bags--for $5,500 apiece, and turned around and sold one for $7,500 a couple of months later.
“It’s neat because Scrooge was so concerned with money, value and profit, and these things just keep going up in value,” remarked Hanifin, a boyish 44, attired this particular day in Levis and a KROQ T-shirt.
For the past couple of years, Hanifin has worked as a stand-up comedian. He does pretty well at that, working almost nightly at such venues as the Improv, the Comedy Store and the Laff Stop. He also makes some money from property he invested in with his earnings from the Hanifin Sports Center, a longtime Balboa Peninsula surfer’s landmark until he sold it a few years ago. Hanifin started out by making his own surfboards. Los Angeles born, he’s been a Newport resident since he was 16.
Talking to him, you almost get the feeling you’re conversing with Tom Hanks’ character in “Big.” When Hanifin discusses the relative powers of comic-book super heroes, it’s with the insight, earnestness and lack of guile of a 9-year-old.
“Between Batman and Superman, I like Batman because he has to use his wits. Superman seems kind of far-fetched to me. He could always get out of any situation because he had those powers. But mostly I like Scrooge. Even though Scrooge is a duck and all that, he was written just like a real person. Usually characters in comics are these young macho guys with guns. Scrooge is a bent-over old man, but he still goes on all these adventures,” Hanifin said.
Much as he likes Scrooge, Hanifin doesn’t have much use for his nephew Donald.
“I don’t like him. To me, he and Mickey (Mouse) have been real whitewashed. Mickey’s always waving the flag and being a leader, whereas before he was a character that had a lot of adventure and power to him. He used to be a detective and stuff, now he’s a master of ceremonies at Disneyland, whitewashed. Scrooge is still cantankerous, so he’s fun to read about. He isn’t always a good guy. You might open a door and he’ll be pointing a cannon at you. He can be mean and underhanded.”
In the United States, Uncle Scrooge has been relegated to the backwaters of Disney’s cartoon kingdom. He only appeared in a couple of Disney cartoons. Most of the time since he was originated in 1947 by cartoonist Barks, he could only be found in the Disney-licensed Dell comic books. For more than two decades, his adventures were drawn and written by Barks, who--not atypical for comics of the time--was uncredited in his work. Hanifin said kids only referred to him as “the good artist” because they noticed the strips drawn by Barks were so much better than ones done by other artists.
Barks, still active and painting in Oregon at 92, has now become something of a cult hero, and his work is collected by the likes of George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg (Hanifin claims the giant boulder chase in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was borrowed, in tribute, from a Barks’ strip).
Scrooge meanwhile has gone on to appear in sanitized, simplified form in the Duck Tales children’s cartoons, which Hanifin can’t stand. “They added corny characters, like Launch Pad, the guy who flies the plane, and a little girl duck. I don’t care for them. And the jokes are all bad puns. I think kids are a lot smarter than they give them credit for. I know Carl Barks wrote stories that he’d want to read himself, rather than just say, ‘That’s good enough for a 7-year-old.’ ”
Curiously, while Scrooge hasn’t found much respect in his homeland, he’s a very popular comic character in other countries. He’s Zio Paperone in Italy’s Topolino comics. In Spanish-speaking nations, he’s Tio Gilito. In these foreign strips, he’s depicted as embodying the vices of American capitalism, and (go figure), they love him.
In one recent foreign comic Scrooge goes to Alaska where an Indian tribe has an ever-renewable fruit that could feed the world. In trying to exploit it, Scrooge manages to pollute the environment so badly that the plant dies off, leaving everyone hungry.
Bark’s U.S.-published stories were far more lighthearted and whimsical. Hanifin said: “A lot of Donald Duck stories were just dealing with everyday life, where Scrooge’s were a real adventure. Always looking for money, they (Scrooge, Donald and grand-nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie) would wind up in space, under the sea, or going to the center of the earth.”
Hanifin first read some of the comics in his youth. Then, eight years ago he was ill and wandered into a comic book store looking for some light reading. There, he found the Scrooge comics he once read for a dime were priced at $10 and $20, but he bought a few and became hooked.
Along with the comics, Hanifin began lusting for three-dimensional Scrooge toys, but it was over a year before he found one, a rubber bath toy for $55. Since then, it’s been a steady progression of spending up to the $5,500 statuette. He’s heard that one collectibles maker is planning a limited $25,000 Scrooge statue, and isn’t entirely sure he’ll avoid buying it.
“I hate to say this, but generally, if I don’t have it, I want it pretty bad and I’ll buy it. I’m pretty addicted to the whole thing. But then, for $25,000 you could have your own money vault.
“I really debated buying the $5,500 ones. It’s kind of stupid because it’s so valuable you hate to leave the thing out.” Hanifin does indeed keep the statuette safe in its molded foam packaging.
His collection also includes small Mattel toys, Pepsi glasses--”The ’77 is the rare one, not the ‘78”--windup toys, wallets, Pez dispensers and European Fanta soda containers with Scrooge’s likeness.
“I buy stuff I don’t even like sometimes because you get to be such a complete-ist. Afterward, I go, ‘Jeez, what a piece of garbage.’ I do make some sacrifices to afford these things, money that there probably are better places for. But I enjoy it. Unlike Mickey and Donald, Scrooge things are really hard to find.”
Along with attending Disney collectible shows, Hanifin stays in touch with an international network of collectors, from Canada to Germany. In keeping with Scrooge’s relative popularity, most of the items Hanifin finds are foreign, though he did recently spend a fruitless weekend scouring shops in Tijuana and Ensenada for Scroogeabilia.
He has traveled a fair amount with his comedy, including cruise ship stints that took him to the Bahamas, Mexico and Alaska. Wherever he winds up, he seeks out Scrooge trinkets. This month, Hanifin also put out the debut issue of $crooge Hunter, a photostated fanzine devoted to Scrooge memorabilia.
There may not be enough of a link for him to write his Scrooge purchases off his taxes, but Hanifin does think there’s some connection between Scrooge comics and his own humor.
“It’s well-written, well-structured humor and I really appreciate that. I’ve read the stories many times over and never get tired of them. Like it, my humor is real clean material. Mine is a fun act with a lot of props, like a hand that goes flying way out, where I say you can drive next to old people and use it to turn the blinkers off on their car.
“So much humor has gotten really stale. I think I’m just for having a good time and playing with everybody. People tell me I’m like a little kid onstage, where I just play.”
Sometimes being a Scrooge fan gets a little lonely for him.
“Some people have Scrooge stuff all over their house, but I keep it to this room. I don’t know that I want people knowing I’m into it that much. None of my friends, except my Scrooge friends, are into this in anyway. The people I know who surf or do comedy have no interest in me talking about this stuff at all. If you gave them all my Scrooge stuff it would be at a garage sale the next weekend.”
