Legends Summarized: El Dorado

So in summary, the search for El Dorado was: 10% gold 90% painful, agonizing failure

Friendship and gold?.... “Both? Both?” Both is good.”

Natives: dumps gold in a lake for sacred rituals Spain: “Ha, what idiots, they don’t even realize the value of their own treasure!” … “Now let’s dump this useless platinum in the Ocean so those darn counterfeiters will never get to it again.”

Just imagine if El Dorado was real and the Spanish had actually found it. "Yeah, this genuine city of gold is great and all, but... is there a place where we can get EVEN MORE gold?"

So what you're saying is... there's an untapped supply of platinum at the bottom of the sea around the coast of Spain? Perhaps it is still there to collect! Onwards friends, let us find El Platino!

"What would YOU do with a time machine?" Go get all the platinum the Spaniards wasted.

Audience: "this story isn't realistic humans aren't that greedy or stupid" Real life: "IT'S NOT YELLOW IT'S USELESS!"

I see El Dorado as an allegory for Spain's own self-destruction. It was a kingdom that had everything: A powerful military, colonies rich beyond imagination, a leading role in Europe, a vibrant culture; it was the world's first true superpower. But it wasn't enough, it could not be enough, there would never be enough to sate its greed.

Moral of the story: The real treasure was the friends they made (and maimed) along the way. ...That, and the platinum they dumped into the ocean.

"It really is the map to El Dorado!" "...You drank the sea water, didn't you?"

11:58 "What about Argentina? Have we tried there yet?" FUN FACT. Argentina was originally called "Virreinato del Rio de la Plata" and Rio de la Plata means "River of Silver". It was given this name because similarly to the shit going on in central America, conquistadores though there was a city of SILVER here. So of course they called the river that. "Argentina" means "Argentine" which means "silvery". So our country is LITERALLY CALLED "THE SILVER ONE" OVER THAT STUPID LEGEND AND CONQUISTADORES' GREED.

"Desperate to get rid of (the conquistadors) and sending them off on a wild goose chase." The most hilarious reference to this is in the original DuckTales, where one obsessive conquistador named Joaquin Slowly (yes, it's a terrible pun) was so convinced that El Dorado was real that he kept on searching after everyone else gave up. The natives kept telling him it was somewhere to the north until he eventually ended up at the North Pole, where he conquered and enslaved a tribe of penguins to help him continue the search, because IT HAD TO BE SOMEWHERE, DAMMIT!

The conquistadors were literally "Perhaps the true reward is our found friendship?" "NO I WANT MY GOLD GOD DAMNIT"

Lake Guatavita, 1545: “Remember, don’t play yourself.” Lake Guatavita, 1580: “Don’t play yourself.” Lake Guatavita, 1898: “Congratulations, you played yourself.”

"It's such a perfect metaphor for the failure of colonialism that if I'd read it in a book, I'd have called the writer a hack" Ngl this statement's holding up true for a lot of things these days.

"El Dorado is the kind of ancient city with zero drawbacks!" Economists would disagree

Conquistadors: “The real treasure was the friends we made along the way” Local: “you burned down a house filled with children and ripped the necklaces off their corpses” Conquistadors: “oh yeah, and the gold.”

"GEE IT'S ALMOST LIKE THIS PLACE IS DEEPLY SACRED SOMEHOW AND F*KING WITH IT IS ASKING FOR TROUBLE"

Alternate title: Red Takes Over Blue’s Job For A While

My takeaway from this is that even if they had found El Dorado they would have said 'sure it is a city made of gold, but it isn't a very big city is it?' and immediately begun the search for El Dorado Grande.