Synopsis:
Donald invents a bomb that goes 'fut' instead of 'boom'. This is because it has a very special quality...

Comments:
Building an atom bomb is not a job for private persons. At the time, it took thousands of highly skilled scientists to achieve the result that was presented in the USA in the last months of the Second World War. There can be little doubt that Barks knew about this when he made his story, and one can only wonder why he deliberately chose an atom bomb as the main gadget...

Synopsis:
Scrooge finds an S.O.S. message - someone on an unknown island seeks help. He quickly takes off in the hope of earning a bundle on the rescue expedition...

Comments:
Especially in science fiction comic books machines and weapons operating with deadly rays are normal occurrences. In this story a hermit inventor has made a petrifying ray machine that turns living matter into stone - without killing any of it!!! Barks made a few stories featuring more down-to-earth ray guns, but they were still on the governmental drawing boards in the 1950s. The stories were U$63 House of Haunts, in which the Beagle Boys use a laser ray machine to open the Money Bin, and WDCS278 Have Gun, Will Dance, in which Donald uses a very special ray gun from the military.
In WDCS145 'The Hypnotizer Gun' Barks made a memorable story about Donald being hypnotized by a harmless toy gun. The invention might be seen as Barks' 'disarming' commentary about ray guns in general.

Synopsis:
Magica discovers a brew which changes people's faces. Will Scrooge give up his number one dime for the antidote?

Comments:
Especially fairy tale stories are filled with characters dabbling with magic potions that can change the appearance of themselves or others. Just think of the evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs! In this story Barks had a go at the same theme, and he - quite logically - used his own witch character, Magica, as the inventor of such a transforming potion.

Synopsis:
Scrooge wants Donald's house but he won't sell. The old miser plots to force his nephew out...

Comments:
Through the years countless stories and films have carried the intriguing theme of creating intelligent life from lifeless material or inferior life forms. In this story Barks joins in by letting Doctor Superthink create life from swamp gas! The surprising result is a Will-O-Wisp complete with brains, feelings, and the ability of movement!
A few years later Barks made another story (U$26 Krankenstein Gyro (see the corresponding Gyro page)) with the same main theme, but with quite another result!!!

Synopsis:
Gyro is visited by an evil witch doctor who can shrink people to a very small size. He suddenly has a king-size problem...

Comments:
The witch doctor has invented a Voodoo doll with shrinking powers. Most people have heard about Voodoo medicine that can, supposedly, cause the human target to behave in strange ways, but shrinking is not one of them. The only generally known form of human shrinking is different tribes of headhunters who shrink their enemies' decapitated heads - but these unfortunate persons do not live to tell as it is the case in this story...

Synopsis:
A super teaching machine falls in the wrong hands. Meanwhile Scrooge and half of Duckburg run around aimlessly in the swamps. What is going on?

Comments:
It has been the dream for several hundreds of years to have a machine that can incorporate knowledge into your mind with no efforts from your part. But it has never been invented - and it probably never will be!
In Barks' story a physicist makes such an educating device, though, and, later on, it even becomes a hypnotizing gun that can bring people to act against their will. Normally, a person can not be hypnotized against his or her will, but in this story it happens. This was also the case in U$47 The Thrifty Spendthrift, in which Scrooge was hypnotized by a ray machine to act as a spendthrift!

Synopsis:
Duckburg's billionaires(!) hold their annual picnic and the enterprising Scrooge joins in to do some business. But the place is swarming with ants...

Comments:
Doctor Thinknoble has constructed a machine that makes small animals bigger, and his primary choice is to have an 'army' of ants big enough to be of help to humankind. The basic idea is intriguing, as it would mean that small and strong creatures such as ants could develop into second-to-none transportation and building workers, but in reality this will probably never happen...

Synopsis:
Using an Atom Subtracter that can shrink objects drastically, the Beagle Boys shrink the Money Bin. It becomes so small an ant carries it off...

Comments:
In this story Scrooge's engineers have made an Atom Subtracter, which is able to press all the atoms in a given object so tightly together that it fills almost nothing.
The basic idea is sound enough, because in one atom there is ample space between the proton core and the swirling electron to press them drastically together, but Barks is forgetting one crucial fact, which can be best illustrated by using our globe as an example: If we were to extract all the 'air' in the atoms we would end up with our Earth being the size of a small ball, BUT it would still weigh exactly the same as before!!!