Like many of you, I often find myself in (totally sober) discussions regarding the logistics of the Disney cartoon series ”Ducktales.”

To this day, I am still confused about the fact that, in this town of anthropomorphic ducks (Duckburg, duh), there were non-anthropomorphic ducks that the anthropomorphic Ducks sometimes fed at the park, with absolutely no acknowledgment that they were one and the same species, or that the other ducks were technically naked by anthropomorphic Duck standards.. I’m also pretty unclear about why the only other anthropomorphic species in Duckburg were dogs. Recently, a friend wondered out loud about why Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck have different last names, so I looked it up on my phone. The answer was simple enough: Scrooge was Donald’s Uncle on his mother’s side… but while looking for it, I found out some even more important information!

According to this family tree I found on Wikipedia the other day, Scrooge McDuck was born in 1867 and died at the ripe old age of 100 in 1967. What does it mean? It means that Uncle Scrooge was obviously a vampire. Which is of course why he was able to dive into gold bullion and not get hurt. At first I thought he was probably a ghost, but given his ability to also spit out said gold bullion in the fashion of a water fountain, I’ve gone with vampire as the only obvious explanation. Certainly, the idea of a duck vampire is not unprecedented in cartoon history.

I also discovered…

- Dewey’s real name is Deuteronomy. As in the part of The Bible that lays out the laws about when and where one can wear tassles, the regulations on which female captives you can take as your wife, and bans setting children on fire or kicking your husband’s adversary in the balls.

- Huey, Dewey and Louie were first sent to stay with Donald Duck after sending their nameless father to the hospital by putting dynamite under his chair. Said father was last seen hiding behind a tree sometime in the ’60s, and as far as I could tell, their mother hasn’t been seen since around then either. What does this all mean? My guess is murder.

- Donald Duck has a “beatnik” cousin named “Fethry” who apparently only exists in Europe and Brazil. In these comics, he and Donald are secret agents who work for Scrooge’s “Paperon Intelligence Agency,” which he set up not to fight commies (as one would assume), but to protect his money from the Beagle Boys and a mad scientist named Zantaf.

- The oldest known relative of the McDuck clan was named “Dingus McDuck,” which is just kind of fantastic and makes me giggle a lot.

If anything, the Duck/McDuck family tree has raised more questions than it has answered. Personally I’d still like to know where Scrooge was getting all of those gold coins with dollar signs stamped into them. If you have any theories regarding the Duck/McDuck genealogy, or advice for how I might get any of my various employers to pay me in gold bullion, feel free to leave them in the comments!