Italian logo in one of the hardcover printings.
The Great Parodies, also known as the Disney Literature Classics, Disney Parodies or Literary Paorides, and known in their original Italian as the Grandi Paordie Disney or Parodie Disney, are a loosely-connected series of stories stretching all the way back to the beginning of home-grown Italian Disney comics.
Description
Similar to the shorter-lived, American Walt Disney Theater, the Great Parodies are retellings of classic literary (or, in a few cases, historical) stories starring Disney characters, often with modified names.
The in-universe justification for the retelling varies greatly from story to story; sometimes, the events are happening to the modern-day version fo the character and merely resemble the plot of the book by chance (as in Donald Duck and the Count of Monte Cristo); other times, they are shown to happen to an identical ancestor of the modern version of the character (as in The Strange Tragedy of Doctor Donaldus Faustus); yet other stories are written with the pretense that the characters are starring in a theatrical or film adaptation of the original story (as in The Travels of Marco Polo or The Legend of Donald of the Woods).
Most often, in truth, the story opens with historical lookalikes of the recurring Duckburg and/or Mouseton cast, and never stops to clarify if we are dealing with coincidence, a parallel universe, identical ancestors, or an in-universe film.
List of stories
Due to the sheer number of Great Parodies in existence, this list is very much non-exhaustive and only covers the stories that currently have pages on this Wiki, or will someday soon.
- Mickey's Inferno
- Donald Duck on Treasure Island
- The Strange Tragedy of Doctor Donaldus Faustus
- The Legend of Donald of the Woods
- Donald Duck and the Count of Monte Cristo
- Donald Meets Baron Münchausen
- The Travels of Marco Polo
- Duckenstein
- Treasure Island
- Moby Dick
- Don Quixote
- Hamlet
- Bram Topker's Dracula