Scrooge McDuck

Named after the character Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens' 1843 holiday novella A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is an incredibly rich business magnate and self-proclaimed "adventure-capitalist", whose dominant character traits are his wealth, frugality, and tendency to seek more money through adventure and treasure hunting. Scrooge founded the company called McDuck Enterprises. He is the maternal uncle of Donald Duck and Della Duck, the maternal great uncle of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, a financial backer of inventor Gyro Gearloose, and the world's richest person — all within the context of the fictional Donald Duck universe.^[7] His business interests are comically diverse and all-inclusive. Both his "Money Bin" and Scrooge himself are often used as humorous metonyms for great wealth in popular culture around the world.


McDuck was initially characterized as a greedy miser and antihero (similar to Dickens' original Scrooge character). However, in later appearances, he has often been portrayed as a thrifty hero, adventurer, and explorer. He was originally created by Barks as an antagonist for Donald Duck, first appearing in the 1947 story Christmas on Bear Mountain (Four Color #178). However, McDuck's popularity grew so large that he became a major figure in the Donald Duck universe. In 1952, he received his own comic book series, called Uncle Scrooge, originally published from 1952–1984, and has had various revivals over the years (as have other Disney comic lines). The most recent revival, by IDW Publishing, ran from 2015–2020.


Scrooge was most famously drawn by his creator Carl Barks, and then later by Don Rosa. Like other Disney franchise characters, Scrooge McDuck's international popularity has resulted in literature that's often translated into other languages. The comics have remained Scrooge's primary medium, although he has also appeared in animated feature films and television programs, most extensively in the TV series DuckTales (1987–1990), and its reboot (2017–2021), as the main protagonist of both series.