Unfortunately, it turns out that many well-adjusted, serious academics really are spending their free time running around and ruining the stuff we loved as kids with their brains. Unfortunatelier, when you actually hear their arguments, you almost want to agree with them that ...

We here at Cracked certainly aren't strangers to overanalyzing pop culture. In fact, we once suggested that the Harry Potter books imply that one of the characters was sexually assault by centaurs . But we always assumed that such humorous wastes of time were below actual smart people with, like, Ph.D.s and bow ties.

6 Donald Duck Promotes Soulless Capitalism

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Aside from being an uncredited creator of Inception, Donald Duck is one of the most beloved cartoon characters in the world. But Ariel Dorfman (an Argentine-Chilean novelist/activist) and Armand Mattelart (a Belgian sociologist) have this crazy theory that the comic book adventures of a violent, pantsless sailor might actually be inappropriate for children.

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Like a hysterical news story, we present this out-of-context screenshot as evidence.

According to the authors, Donald Duck cartoons might as well be the talking-duck version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In their book How to Read Donald Duck (Para leer al Pato Donald), the Dynamic Deconstruction Duo claim that Donald and friends teach kids that a person's value is dependent entirely on how much money he or she has, and that in the pursuit of money, there is no room for things like family or love, only for blind self-interest.

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"He knew no weapons but to pay for what he wanted. While pantsless."

Why It's Not That Crazy:

Have you ever noticed that there aren't any parents in Donald Duck cartoons and comics? Scrooge, for example, is Donald's uncle, who in turn is an uncle to Huey, Dewey and Louie, a first cousin to Gladstone Gander and a boyfriend (but never husband) to Daisy, who herself has three nieces, April, May and June (because fuck it, picking out baby names is hard). That means that the world these characters live in is essentially devoid of any real families and populated solely by orphans. Without parents and nepotism, each duck is left alone to constantly compete against the others for wealth and status. That's basically an ideal stage for, yes, really sad nightmares, but also capitalism: If you start with what you believe to be a completely level playing field (in this case, a world without parents where everyone starts out with the same chances in an orphanage), those who are strongest and smartest, and work the hardest, have the best chance of succeeding (where "succeeding" here means "making all of the money in the world").