This is the first story featuring Cornelius Coot. Only two more stories, both from 1957, followed: WDCS196 'The Snow Statue Contest' and WDCS201 'The Powerful Dye'.

Undoubtedly, the largest concentration of manpower ever used in Duckburg unfolded in this story where an enormous number of contractors, subcontractors, engineers, sculptors, plasterers, entrepreneurs, transportation teams, carpenters, and jewelers must have been building the numerous, colossal statues. The logistics involved are mind-boggling. Still, we never see a single one of all these industrious and skilled workers!

Barks: The statue-building contest between Uncle Scrooge and the Maharajah became ridiculous as time went on. I don't blame one woman for writing a letter saying that she thought it was a gross misuse of money. I wrote back to the office telling them that the woman had missed the point entirely. All the money that had been spent on those statues had gone into circulation, much better than if it had continued lying in the Maharajah's money bin or Scrooge's money bin. That money had created a tremendous amount of work for jewelers and goldsmiths and concrete men and hydraulics experts. Everybody had a job out of that, so the money hadn't been wasted!

When the ostentatiously rich Maharajah of Howduyustan arrives in Duckburg for a visit, tossing a few thousand droopees to bystanders, we have all the setup for a fierce contest, in which Scrooge readily picks up the gauntlet in order to flatten the visiting upstart.

In essence, Scrooge is an enemy of the capitalist system. Barks once fabulated: He would destroy it in one year's time! There would no longer be any competition or free enterprise! He would freeze all the stuff that keeps capitalism going, that is the spending of money. The faster money is spent, the more prosperity everybody has. Scrooge never spent anything, so everybody would grow progressively poorer as he accumulated more of his or her money, and in time nobody would have any money but him.
But in this story everything is effectively turned around; Scrooge spends vast sums of money and hundreds of workers are employed.

Despite being seen as the ultimate miser Scrooge rarely avoids a good challenge no matter how much it costs. In this story he is pouring out money as if it was water just to beat an upstart Maharajah, and in the end Scrooge benevolently shows the by now poor(!) man that he did, in fact, only use money from his petty cash safe! No miser-y here!

Basically, it seems a bit bewildering that the founder of DUCKburg (which is teeming with duck families) is a COOT! Barks never explained the peculiarity...

A great city such as Duckburg is bound to have a string of tourist sights and interesting landmarks. And in fact there is a plethora of statues and special buildings 'hidden' in the stories, but most of them are only mentioned (or drawn in the background) in single stories making it impossible to judge if they are still around. For example, it is more than plausible that the hordes of giant statues of the city's founder, Cornelius Coot, erected in one story, were removed or torn down, because we have not seen a single one of these giant constructions since then.

This is by far not the only story in which Scrooge flaunts his immense wealth. This time he does so in a competition where it becomes apparent that his wealthy opponent is nothing less than a pauper compared to Scrooge.
In 1994 Barks answered the relevant question of the size of Scrooge's fortune and the contents of the Money Bin by stating: Uncle Scrooge's fortune stands at precisely ... Five billion quintiplitilion unptuplatillion multuplatillion impossibidillion fantasticatrillion dollars. This translates into three cubic acres of money housed in the McDuck Money Bin.
However, this cannot be the whole truth, because Scrooge has also filled all the banks in the country with his money and the remainder is stored in the Money Bin. Furthermore, according to U$24 The Twenty-four Carat Moon, he owns a solid moon of pure gold with a diameter of 500 miles...

At one point in the story Scrooge sighs: A crazy world! A man's wealth isn't what he's got, it's what he spends!

In order to graphically render the many giant statues in the relatively small panels, Barks came up with the idea of letting fractions of the statues break through the upper halves of standard panels. This way he avoided having to cram the statues so much.

Barks was once asked how he came up with the founder's name: Gladstone Gander, Gyro Gearloose. It's a phonetic thing. Donald Duck is phonetic, you know; you wouldn't say Frank Duck! - The founder of Duckburg would naturally have to be a member of the feathered family, and here we get back to the phonetics again; Cornelius Coot sounds better than George Coot!

After having used uncountable sums on his building projects - not to mention having ruined the Maharajah - Donald suggests that Scrooge should hand the ruined man a dime to buy a cup of coffee. Scrooge explodes: Do you think that I'm a doggoned spendthrift? Scrooge can spend unlimited wealth massaging his own ego, but he has nothing to help the poor...

In the story Scrooge stores his money in a high street office building despite the fact that the Money Bin had been introduced a few months earlier in WDCS135 'The Money Bin Freezes'.
Therefore it can be speculated that Barks had actually developed the storyline for the statues story some time before he invented the Money Bin! Some sort of premonition to the coming size of the Money Bin can be deduced from Scrooge's casual remark to the defeated Maharajah, when he shows him what lies under the floor: My big money is the three cubic acres in the basement!