Early Disney Television

Earlier this year I read the Carl Barks collection Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes. Though it’s volume 7 of Fantagraphics’s Complete Carl Barks Disney Library, it was the first volume to be printed. It collects Donald Duck comics from 1948-1950, after Bark had hit his stride and established most of his characters.

And I still can’t tell Huey, Dewey, and Louie apart.

But obviously Barks knew them well enough to anticipate how kids would behave in front of a television—even back in 1948, when only a few American families had a set.