THEADAPTATION

BLUM'S SYNOPSIS

Rosa chose not to use Barks' outline, and so it was not until a decade later that American Barks-connoisseur and biographer Geoffrey Blum developed it into a comic book story which was drawn during the following two years by Carlos Mota (you can enjoy another joint venture story by Blum and Mota HERE). The finished story fills 26 pages and is coded as D/D2001-004. It premiered in 2002 the Danish Anders And & Co. #42+43, and the following year in U$321+322.

The following text reproduces Blum's original outline accompanied by a selection of Mota's comic book panels.

Dime and Dime Again
by Geoffrey Blum

Huey, Dewey, and Louie arrive at the money bin, summoned by Scrooge, whom they find pacing circles atop his desk. He wants their help in dealing with the terrifying ordeal of D-Day - something the boys are too young to remember. It stands for Dime Day. Once every ten years, Old Number One must leave the safety of Scrooge's octuple-locked vault and burglar-impervious premises to make the journey downtown to Spiffany's for a professional polishing and gentle electrolyte bath to remove micro-particulate pollutants.
During that time, every creep, crook, and itinerant footpad with designs on Scrooge's luck will have a crack at the old coin. It's all McDuck can do to keep publicity to minimum; luckily, he owns most of the newspapers in Duckburg, all except that rag the Times, which he unloaded last week on an up-and-dot-coming publisher.

Anyway, someone is needed to guard the dime at all times. Scrooge can't be on hand for the whole cleaning process, because he's in the middle of delicate negotiations to buy a Kookaburra ranch in Australia and will have to hang around the office. Donald should be here to help. Where is Donald? The nephews explain that Unca Donald has just landed a job at the Times.
We cut to Donald in the newspaper's morgue, helping to archive musty old papers by scanning them and burning them onto CD-ROM's. A particularly boisterous sneeze uncovers a fifty-year-old headline about Scrooge taking his dime to Spiffany's, and Donald figures he has stumbled on something hot: a story that will make him a star reporter and get him out of the morgue. He goes running upstairs to see the publisher.

Meanwhile, on the wrong side of the tracks, some unsavory types are celebrating another kind of red-letter day: P-Day, the day Grandpa Beagle gets paroled. The Beagle Boys bustle about, tidying their hide-out; 176-671 is baking a cake with a file in it (as a joke); and they talk about going on a crime spree as soon as the family is reunited. They dance and sing:
When Grandpa comes marching home again,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
We won't even mention the State Pen,
Hurrah! Hurrah!
He'll give us all kinds of sly advice,
We'll burgle Scrooge of his bucks and ice,
And we'll all get rich when Grandpa comes marching home!

Preparations at the money bin are interrupted by the arrival of Donald, with a band of reporters in tow. Scrooge gives the reporters the bum's rush (mechanical gag), but Donald remains, being sharp enough to avoid the standard trapdoors in the floor. Scrooge calls Donald a traitor to his poor defenseless old uncle; Donald counters by threatening a class-action lawsuit for denying the public's right to know. Scrooge protests; that would be like giving the public the right to burgle him! He ousts Donald with one final booby-trap.

Speaking of burglars' rights, the Beagles are just welcoming Grandpa, who has been in and out of the pokey so often, he is given a lift home in the Warden's limousine. See you real soon, says the Warden as the car pulls away. The boys are raring to go on a heist; Grandpa remains quiet and smug, just wants his brew and his slippers and easy chair. When he's settled comfortably with his grandsons around him, he produces the latest issue of the Times with Donald's story in it and breaks the news. This time they're not going after the money bin, they're going after something Scrooge would never expect them to burgle: The dime.
Of course, they've already tunneled in and out of Spiffany's so many times that they have their own back door, so it'll be an easy matter to get the jump on old McDuck.

The big day arrives! On the sidewalk outside the office, Scrooge and the nephews greet a cavalcade of armored trucks. Scrooge picks one by throwing dice; if he doesn't know ahead of time which truck will carry the dime, neither will the crooks.
From a nearby rooftop, Donald watches and signals to a series of reporters stationed atop other buildings along the street. As the cavalcade starts up, Donald's dangling surveillance microphone trips a truck's security device. A mechanical arm emerges from the roof of the truck, grabs the dangling wire, spins Donald around like a bola, and sends him flying overhead and into the fountain in Duckburg's Central Park. The comic tableau is commented on by a nearby mother and child.

Scrooge and the nephews arrive at Spiffany's with no further mishaps. Scrooge is welcomed by the manager, who is Grandpa Beagle in disguise. In fact, all the staff are Beagles in disguise. Scrooge asks what happened to Ramon, who used to wait on him. He's told that Ramon met a ballet dancer and moved to Fort Lauderdale. The camera cuts briefly to the alley behind the store to show the kayoed staff, stripped to their underwear and piled unceremoniously in a heap (clearly they're not dead; some have goose eggs, some have little tweeting birds and stars around their heads).

Grandpa leads Scrooge into the laboratory at the back of the shop, where the dime receives a series of special Rube-Goldbergish treatments before being zapped with negative ions and suspended in a beaker of zizzing chemicals. Grandpa then draws a little curtain across the alcove in which the beaker sits. When Scrooge protests that this is something new, Grandpa asks how Scrooge would like it if people watched him in the bath?
Everybody withdraws to the front of the shop for free coffee and bagels. Scrooge panics at first when someone mentions the arrival of the Bagel Boy from the local deli, but the free part calms him down.

As Scrooge is preparing to return to the money bin to clinch the Kookaburra deal, there's a noise out back (pun on "outback" in the conversation). Grandpa excuses himself, presumably to adjust the boilers. A second later, in runs Ramon, wearing a rain barrel for clothing. The ducks and Ramon go tearing into the back room, where they find the beaker overturned, the dime gone, and one clue: a Beagle Boy mask. Scrooge freaks.
Louie tries to calm him down, says the dime can't have gone far, and they know who took it. Scrooge replies: You don't understand. That dime is my core boodle-bringer, the spark plug of my vast financial empire. Whenever it leaves my possession, terrible things start to happen. He is interrupted by his cell phone ringing; the Kookaburra deal has fallen through.
Well, you've had your slug of bad news, says Louie, What more can happen? As they go out the door, Donald leaps in front of them and momentarily blinds them with a flash from his camera.

Back at their hide-out, the Beagle Boys figure they have it made. First they'll burgle Fort Nix, then the US Treasury. Their door is kicked in; it's Scrooge with a battalion of cops and lawyers. The Beagles play innocent; 176-761 took a law degree in Sing Sing and assures Scrooge's lawyers that the mask found at Spiffany's is purely circumstantial evidence. The cops turn the hide-out upside-down but find nothing.
Then Scrooge gets another disaster alert on his cell phone and has to leave. On the way out, one cop spitefully smashes Grandpa's cake with his billy club and hears it clink against something metallic, but it's only the file. Scrooge, cops, and lawyers leave, and the Beagles retrieve the dime from its hiding place deeper in the smashed frosting.

The Beagles know they can take their time now; the city isn't going waste policemen's salaries very long hunting for a dime. They decide to experiment; each one in turn will try out the dime's luck. Grandpa says fine, but he's an ideas man, and retires to his easy chair and his brew.
176-167 goes first; he takes the dime and heads for the Duckburg Mint, posing as an inspector. The other Beagles hoot with laughter; that disguise has never worked before. But 176-167 is ushered right through the great portcullised entranceway, shown all the locks and facilities, taken into a vault stuffed with currency, and left there to make his final report. He is so thrilled with his success, he decides to take a swim in the money, like old Scroogie.
In the hallway, the clerks ask each other where that nice new inspector has gone? He must have stepped down the hall for a moment. Well, they wouldn't want to fall behind schedule with an inspector on hand; better start processing all that worn currency they recalled. One clerk pushes a switch on the wall, and the Beagle finds himself and all his new-found wealth dumped into the Mint's industrial-strength shredder.

We cut back to the hide-out, where 176-167, looking rather tattered, hands on the dime to 176-176 and 176-671. These two infiltrate the Duckburg Billionaires' Club, posing as a newly-rich dot-comer and his caddie; their plan is to pick rich pockets while schmoozing and playing golf with the titans of commerce. They are doing all right, too, until it comes 176-176's turn to tee off.
On the first swing, he drives his ball into a tree; it bounces back, beans him and his chum, who drops their golf bag, spilling out all the purloined wallets and watches. The real billionaires are deterred from calling the cops by the consideration that pressing charges would alert their insurance company to the club's shoddy security system. The company would be bound to raise their rates, and this would drive up membership dues. So they leave the Beagles head down in the ornamental lake instead.

Again the dime changes hands. 176-716 plans to snag the million-dollar cash prize and silver loving cup at the Miss Duckburg Beauty Pageant; so he shaves his legs, dons a hair ribbon and bathing suit, and off he goes. He makes it through the preliminary screenings just fine (My hobbies are world peace and safe-cracking...), but a prissy young judge takes a shine to him, and 176-716 decamps (no pun intended) in terror - no million dollars is worth this!

While the dime passes from one pair of larcenous hands to another, Scrooge is losing money hand over fist. We see him in his office taking phone calls, faxes, e-mails, and telegrams, all bearing bad news. He shows Huey, Dewey, and Louie how far the level in his money bin has sunk: The lowest it's been since the panic of 1979! The boys point out that the incoming messages aren't all bad; some contest promoter has sent him a lottery ticket for a fabulous cash prize.
This sets Scrooge off. He starts on a rant about that being what's wrong with people today; they think blind luck can make you wealthy. That wasn't the way he made his millions, nor the way he kept them growing. He made them with pick and shovel and rifle, on the cattle ranges, in the gold fields, and tramping through the Transvaal - and he can bally well go out and build another fortune if he has to. Reaching up to a trophy on the wall (tools crossed on a shield like Confederate swords), he takes down a pick and a shovel, then hurls his annoying cell phone out the window, where it beans Donald, who is still stalking him for a news scoop.

Outfitted as prospectors, Scrooge and the kids head into the Black Hills of Calisota, where Scrooge immediately finds a vein of gold - then another - then another. They hike over the next ridge and find a copper mine. Donald, who has been lurking behind them, is allowed to join the expedition. Over the third ridge the diggings are grey and disappointing - until Scrooge pulls out a geiger counter and reveals that he's found uranium!
Donald loses control, snaps a picture, and is about to go running to his paper with the scoop, until Scrooge points out that radiation from the ore will have ruined his film. The nephews figure that at this rate, Unca Scrooge will soon have his whole fortune back, but Scrooge is still melancholic over the loss of his dime.

Back at the hide-out, Grandpa Beagle has had enough. He chews out his grandsons for forgetting that the Beagle Boys have always worked together, as a family. They decide on one last concerted effort to prove the dime's power: They'll burgle software mogul Gil Bates and all his rich cohorts by jumping out of the giant cake at the company's annual stockholder celebration. Unfortunately, giant cakes get switched at the bakery, and the Beagles end up jumping out of the cake at the Duckburg Policemen's Ball! (At least the Warden is on hand, and happy to see Grandpa once again).

At the money bin, Scrooge, his nephews, and his staff are celebrating: A graph on the wall shows that the McDuck fortune is right back where it should be. Scrooge is still wistful; he excuses himself and asks the boys to take a walk in the park with him, where he reminisces about being so poor one winter that he had to fight with a swan for a piece of bread. He wonders how the Beagles are making out. But they'd better get back to the party.
As they return along the sidewalk, an armored truck approaches. Is it one of yours? asks Huey. No, says Scrooge, I think it's one of theirs. It's a paddy wagon hauling the Beagles off to the pokey. Grandpa looks out the small barred window in the door of the wagon, sees Scrooge, and lobs the dime back at him with jeers and curses.

Scrooge returns to his office party, replaces the dime in its display case, and gets up on a desk to address the staff. This, he tells them, is where the dime belongs - but as a symbol, nothing more. It represents spirit and savvy and entrepreneurial spunk but carries no lucky whammy whatsoever.
He is interrupted by Donald and a gaggle of reporters, who come rushing in to photograph the scoop of the year: Scrooge's lottery ticket has just won the biggest cash prize in history - flashbulbs start to pop as armed couriers bring in - ten million dollars all in dimes!
Scrooge faints.