Money is the Root of Upheaval (entitled Zio Paperone e la Scorribanda nei Secoli in the original Italian version) is a comic story written by Jerry Siegel and penciled by Romano Scarpa with inking by Sandro Del Conte. It features Scrooge McDuck, Gyro Gearloose, Donald Duck, and, in their debuts, King Tutanbuono, the Egyptian Apothecaries, and the Last Man on Earth. Napoléon Bonaparte, King Midas and Christopher Columbus are also mentioned, alongside Leonardo Da Ginchy and Jonah Lisa. The original version also mentioned the Maharajah of Kishaki, a mention which is removed in the English translation.
Plot[]
Visiting his private museum, Scrooge McDuck accidentally awakens an Egyptian pharaoh who had been in stasis for five thousand years. With the help of Gyro Gearloose's latest time machine, Scrooge and Donald Duck attempt to take back King Tutanbuono to his native time in exchange for endless treasures. Things predictably go wrong and the three 20th century Duckburgians soon find themselves on a loopy journey through the centuries.
Behind the scenes[]
This story was first printed in May of 1973 in the Italian Topolino #911. It was finally printed in English in Uncle Scrooge #441.
As, by then, the original Jerry Siegel script had been lost, Joe Torcivia was tasked to recreate it through localization. In the process, he replaced a temporary English title of unclear origins, Pharaoh and Far Between, with Money is the Root of Upheaval — a pun on the saying that “money is the root of all evil”, which the story's nightmarish trip to the future so aptly illustrates. For fear of censors who might reject the story otherwise, Torcivia scaled the apocalypse back from the year 487000 to the even more distant 844008 (another motive for this was not to contradict the timeline presented in The Terrifying World of Tutor), and removed the explicit mentions of humanity's extinction, leaving open the possibility that the population of Earth had merely evacuated.