The Beagle Boys

The Beagle Boys are a group of characters from the Scrooge McDuck universe, loosely based on the popular image of Ma Barker and the Barker-Karpis Gang. They are a gang of criminals who constantly try to rob Scrooge McDuck and were created by Carl Barks. Their introduction and first appearance was in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories #134. In more recent productions such as DuckTales and The Three Musketeers, the Beagle Boys appear as henchmen for Flintheart Glomgold or Pete.

In the comics, the individual Beagle Boys are referred to by their prison numbers, indicated on the tags seen on the chests of their distinctive red shirts (which appeared as orange in the comics). The three most common numbers are 176-167, 176-671, and 176-761. In fact, no digits other than one, six, or seven appeared on their prison ID tags. Carl Barks used to include the words "Beagle Boys Inc" on their shirts under their numbers, which was later deleted. In later years, they appeared in the comics as a trio (some combination of the most common numbers with 671-176, 716-617 and 176-176), plus cousins and other relatives of various talents as spin-off characters. They live in a small tumbledown hide-out in Duckburg; in 1980s American-produced stories, their pet cat Ratty often lived there as well.

The Beagle Boys have lots of relatives who count each other as brothers and cousins: apart from Ma Beagle there are the Beagle Brats (sons or nephews), the Beagle Babes (older generation which happens to be a trio of female cousins and a younger generation which happens to be their daughters or nieces) and their grandfather Blackheart Beagle. The brains of the Beagle clan is Intellectual-176 (or I-176) who wears a mortar-board cap and glasses over his black mask. Grandma & Grandpa Beagle have appeared in the strips at various times.

According to Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Scrooge first met The Beagle Boys in his Mississippi riverboat days. Those Beagle Boys included Blackheart Beagle and his three unnamed sons. Scrooge first met the modern Beagle Boys during Christmas 1947, which was when he first met his grandnephews Huey, Dewey and Louie and met his nephew Donald for the second time. Since then, the Beagle Boys have been a constant threat to Scrooge's huge money bin.

Sometimes they team up with other villains such as Magica De Spell, Black Pete, Mad Madam Mim, or hire out their services to Flintheart Glomgold, Ollie Eiderduck or John Rockerduck. During these occasions, it should be noted, they continue to operate out of their own interests rather than their employers.

In Ultima, the Beagle Boys appear primarilly as their Ducktales selves, with Ma Beagle at the forefront of their gang. They were recruited by Pete after seeing promise in their skills, and now they have gained control over the Heartless like other members of the Organization. The Beagle Boys featured in Ultima are Ma Beagle, Bigtime, Burger, Bouncer, Baggy, Bugle, Babyface, and Bankjob. Their outfits have all been redesigned to be more in style to Nomura's design scheme for KH, as well as give more relation to their names.