The Billion Dollar Safari is a comic story written and drawn by Carl Barks. It features Donald Duck, Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck, Scrooge McDuck, Gladstone Gander, and, in their debuts, Scrooge's Dodo, the Man o'War Bird, the Politician Bird, Scrooge's Black Bear, Scrooge's Shrew, Lawsuit Joe, the Giant Worms, the Elephant Girls Ballet of the Jumbostan Elephant School, Fannie Fickle, Johann Strauss, Spotty and his master.
Plot[]
To create popular attention for his zoo, Scrooge McDuck creates a public contest wherein anyone who can bring him an outrageous bounty — namely, a speckled elephant with a square trunk — will receive one billion dollar from him. This seems like a foolproof plan until Gladstone Gander hears of the contest and hops on a plane to India, determined to, indeed, find such an animal!
Continuity[]
- Though not a straight-up sequel, The Billion Dollar Safari is not without ties to Barks's earlier and better-known stories Trail of the Unicorn (1950), sharing the setting of McDuck Zoo and the plot device of Scrooge sending Donald and Glastone on a competing hunt for a new mythical beast to draw in numbers. Don Rosa's The Crocodile Collector (1988) and Escape from Forbidden Valley (1999), alongside François Corteggiani and Santiago Barreira's Return to Shangri-Lala (2008), also serve as various measures of sequels to that story, but, oddly enough, none reference The Billion Dollar Safari.
Behind the scenes[]
Written in May of 1964, this story was first printed in December of that year in Uncle Scrooge #54. It was reprinted in Uncle Scrooge #118, Uncle Scrooge Adventures #16, The Adventures of Uncle Scrooge McDuck #47, and in the Carl Barks Library.