“...normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn´t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can´t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox news...” -John Hodgman
Thru A Glass, Duckly
I remember the show “Duck Tales.” Not exactly as it was, mind you. Everything about my memory of it is colored by the time of my life during which it was broadcast. I hated elementary school. Undiagnosed Attention Deficit Disorder and my school’s lax attitude toward schoolyard bullies did not make for a happy time in my life. “Duck Tales” was mile marker in my day because it was the first show that came on after I got home. The ordeal was over for that day once that filthy grave-robbing gazillionaire waterfowl appeared and started braying his vaudeville-brand Scottish brogue all over the place.
I loved that show. I would sit on the bus and silently will the driver to go just a little faster, because only then would I get home in time to adjust the antenna for minimum static on my parents’ five hundred pound cathode ray cube.
The adventures were whimsical and funny and most importantly far, far away. They would gallivant off to a duck-infested version South America or a duck-infested version Ancient Greece or deep beneath the duck-infested earth. It was pure, marvelous escapism. Looking back on it now, I can see just how incredibly well-animated it was for a syndicated weekday afternoon show. According to Wikipedia, Disney shelled out enormous, dare I say McDuck-sized, piles of cash to make the show, which was considered a financial risk at the time. I’m glad they took the leap. “Duck Tales” was there for me at the exact right time of my life, and (even more impressively) at exactly the right time of day.
McDuck Industries
I don’t remember a huge amount of merchandising accompanying the show. There was the obligatory NES game, which was absolutely incredible. If you can get a copy of it now, I cannot recommend it highly enough. In fact, all of Capcom’s Disney-afternoon licensed games are uniformly excellent, and I believe are available as a package on PSN, but I digress.
There was a “Duck Tales” branded comic, but Disney’s comics partner at the time, Gladstone, mostly filled the demand for “Duck Tales” comics by reprinting the show’s source material: the mid-century Uncle Scrooge comics by Carl Barks. Barks was a bona fide genius. If you haven’t read any of his work, but you like (or liked) “Duck Tales,” you will enjoy the Barks comics. There were none of the DT supporting cast – no Webby, Beakley, Launchpad, etc – but it was the same idea. Scrooge, Donald and the triplets either go on adventures, defend the money bin from the Beagle Boys, or some mixture of the two. I don’t want to go into too much detail, as I hope to write about these comics in a future post, but that’s the general idea. You know what I mean – all that, but brilliant.
Even Duckburg Has Issues
The show itself still holds up relatively well, even if there are some problematic things lying around. There is a bit of chauvinism in the sense that Mrs. Beakley is a pearl-clutching old-lady and Webby is essentially a non-character whose purpose is either to be emotional or captured by today’s antagonist. Doofus Drake is there to be fat, stupid comic relief, and of course there are the predictable (but mercifully few) moments of racism and cultural appropriation. Still, TV shows are greater than the sum of their parts, and “Duck Tales” is still quality viewing beyond simple nostalgia value.
McDuck Lives
And now to the meat of my post today, and what got me on to this meandering train of thought in the first place. In 2017, Disney rebooted “Duck Tales” as “DuckTales.” I was surprised they bothered. If you google DVD releases of the original show, you will find a lot of unsatisfied customers complaining that the entire series still hasn’t been released on DVD. I figured it would be a cheap re-hash, and probably an insufferably twee flavor of re-hash at that.
I was wrong. In a reflection of the original show, Disney surprisingly went absolutely all-out on production value and talent. Which brings me to…
A Brief Rant About David Tennant
Screw you, David. Seriously. You’ve worked at the RSC, where you played an amazing Hamlet, you chewed scenery as Barty Crouch, Jr. in the Potter films, you played Casanova, played one of the definitive Doctors and now Scrooge McDuck. All brilliantly. Your impeccable talent and seemingly lovely attitude sickens me, sir.
Duckburg’s Talented Population
DT 2017 is one of the best cast animated shows I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of “Batman: The Animated Series” which puts it in rarified company indeed. Every actor is perfectly cast, and the writing and voice direction keeps everything crisp and fresh.
I could go on forever about each and every one of the cast, but hopefully I’ll tackle most of that in the sections below on writing and character development. Suffice to say, there are few true missteps.
True story: My partner and I were watching an episode, when I indicated a character and said: “You know, they really should’ve got John Hodgman for that part.” She looked at me completely nonplussed and said “What are you talking about? That’s John Hodgman.”
Putting The Tales In “DuckTales”
There are two things that the creators of the new DT did better than the original show. The first is the introduction of strong continuity. The 87 show, like most half-hour animated shows of its time, did not have a whole lot of continuity between episodes. The pilot was a five-part episode, but beyond the odd cliffhanger two-parter, that was about it. The characters stayed more or less the same. Probably the greatest single character turn was in that five-part pilot where Scrooge decided he actually loved his family. That’s about it.
The new show really expands on the world and gives it a richness and texture that comes from smart serialized storytelling. The overarching plots are all interesting and have emotional stakes to them that make them compelling, but the creators are always careful to leave ample room for humor in the proceedings. Again, here they take many cues from Barks, but they have a more expansive vision of events that Barks never brought to bear on the characters. I’m not sure this is even a valid criticism of his work, though, because it’s hard to say what he would have done had he not had the structures and traditions of comics of the time (especially explicitly “children’s" comics) and possibly the needs of the IP holder to consider. It seems reasonable to assume that Disney expected each issue to be more or less self-contained so that any kid could randomly pull an issue off the rack at the grocery store and not feel lost.
Unrelated: How many people who ever read this will be old enough to remember when you could buy comics off a rusty, rickety magazine stand in a forgotten corner of a grocery store?
Expectations are different now, of course.
Streaming and binge watching have combined with the audience’s increased sophistication so that continuity is now the word of the day. Keep them watching, keep the characters developing, keep relationships growing and changing. And for those relationships to be compelling you need compelling characters.
Bless Me Bagpipes
The interesting thing about any form of serialized storytelling is that once something happens, it never, ever goes away. Take Batman for example. Even as far back as the 1940s, cultural pressures (which in 1954 coalesced into the Comics Code Authority) began to change Bob Kane’s original vision for his terrifying vigilante.
First, he lost his gun, then his willingness to end the life of his adversaries, then the Boy Wonder showed up…and more and more things got softened, trimmed and peeled away until finally, you get the absurd, campy 60s TV series. The dark, terrifying spectre of the night had been replaced by, well, Adam West.
Some of you may be cringing at the thought of that show. It is not, after all, “your” Batman. I freely admit I agree with that sentiment. By the 70s Neal Adams and Denny O’Neil brought Batman back to his darker roots, still minus the gun and killer instinct, but that feels like Batman to me primarily because I was raised on those versions of the character. But it’s not as if that satin clad, soft-bellied camp clown ever went away. Every now and then that campy interpretation comes back. It’s not my Batman, but it is a valid Batman.
So when DT came back, so did many of the things that had been done before, and with them comes the opportunity to make them more appealing to the purists who disliked those concepts in prior versions of the fiction. For me, this definitely includes Gizmoduck.
I never liked the idea. I did like the name of his secret identity. Fenton Crackshell is a pretty sweet name. I almost wish I had thought of it. But the rest of it felt out of step with the world of Duckburg. Gizmoduck seemed very real-world technological for such a fanciful show. DT relied more on magical thinking.
Even Gyro Gearloose’s contraptions mostly felt like Rube Goldberg machines brought to life by arcane forces.
The creators of DT 2017 seem to have looked upon the character of Gizmoduck as a missed opportunity. He fits in perfectly with their updated Duckburg.
The original show’s magical whimsy is still present, but now lives comfortably alongside a more technological society. It makes sense in a world with cell phones, tablets and HDTVs. Even Gyro now makes slightly more grounded machines, so Gizmoduck isn’t such a leap of narrative faith.
As with so many of the characters, they also gave Fenton a past, believable motivations, and problems of his own, including a nosy, police detective mother, whose every appearance is priceless. Casting Lin-Manuel Miranda as the now-Latinx Fenton Crackshell-Cabrerra probably didn’t hurt. That guy could sell almost anything to an audience.
Let’s be honest, Mrs. Beakley and Webby needed some help. Their original characters feel like a bunch of producers sat around a table looking at a list of demographics they felt they should appeal to, and when they got down to “Females, old” and “Females, young” they picked up the speaking tube labelled “character designers” and told them to create an old lady and little girl and put them in the show. Weeks later, the writers were told, and spent a long lunch trying to figure out what to do with them and never came up with great answers.
The 2017 versions are fantastic. They equipped both characters with special skills, a deep relationship to each other, and in Beakley’s case a strong connection to Scrooge’s past.
Plus Beakley can really mix it up. Which is pretty rad.
Webby really shines in the new show. I don’t want to spoil too much here, but I’ll just say this: she is deeply lore-obsessed fangirl of Clan McDuck and she is essentially a pint-sized Navy SEAL / ninja assassin. Look forward to that.
Glomgold! Glomgold!
Flintheart Glomgold is an extremely well-known character, mostly due to his appearances in the 1987 show. He was originally created by Carl Barks as a kind of Moriarty to Scrooge’s Sherlock. That original premise didn’t last long. Only a few panels, in fact. What he almost immediately became is an off-brand Scrooge McDuck. The second richest duck in the world, his entire being was consumed with becoming richer than Scrooge. In fact, he would be Scrooge McDuck if one hadn’t already existed. Glomgold simply couldn’t measure up.
In the comics, Flintheart Glomgold only appeared three times in Barks’ entire run. There just wasn’t much for Barks to mine there, so he didn’t bother. Magica DeSpell appeared far more often, as did the Beagle Boys, but even they were not in there all that much. Barks usually custom-built an antagonist for each adventure. With so many ideas running around in his head, it’s not surprising he never really bothered to go back and see if there was anything else he could do with Scrooge’s duckellganger.
For the new DT, the creators very clearly started with the core concept in the original comics, but then wildly extrapolated. They probably ended up far more afield of the source material with Glomgold than with any other character. In spite of their generous slathering of artistic liberty, for my money, theirs is the definitive Flintheart Glomgold.
Since the original character was an off-brand Scrooge, that’s where they started. They just lean into it far more than Carl Barks did. One of the things that makes Barks’ work with the ducks so brilliant is that the stories were always adventures that had room for comedy, but they always started with the adventure element. The closest comparison I can think of is Hergé's “TinTin.” For a half hour comedy cartoon, you need a little more comedy in the mix. Enter Flintheart Glomgold.
Flintheart Glomgold is now not just an off-brand Scrooge, but a bad reflection of Scrooge. Scrooge is an enthusiastic, but always in control. Glomgold is a manic buffoon. How he managed to make enough money to be second only to Scrooge McDuck is, frankly, a mystery that I don’t think will ever be explained. Scrooge has a family he keeps close to him and shares his life with. When Glomgold sees this as a strength Scrooge has that he lacks, his idea is to recruit Scrooge’s enemies as a makeshift family. Scrooge lays plans, Glomgold hatches, in his own words, “cockamamie schemes.” Everything about Scrooge is authentic. Even Glomgold’s beard is fake.
It’s true they play Glomgold mostly for laughs, but they do it so well it doesn’t matter. And they give him a believable past that lets the audience understand why this person has spent his whole life trying to unseat this one particular rival. Spoiler: It’s an event so small in Scrooge’s viewfinder that he doesn’t even remember it.
In With The Old, In With The New
Several new things get thrown in the mix as well. Most of them work, but there is one that just cannot seem to get any traction with me. Mark Beaks just does not work for some reason. Beaks is essentially a Bill Gates / Mark Zuckerberg stand-in. He’s a tech mogul with no ideas of his own who routinely steals other people’s inventions. And he really only cares about his social media buzz.
That’s about it.
Unlike most of the other characters in the show, Mark Beaks seems to have no real motivation for what he’s doing, no inner life, and no real conflict beyond his own narcissism.
It could be argued that is the whole point of his character: to be an empty, vapid thing too busy staring into his phone to care about the world around him. Which is fine in a comedy sketch. In a series of stories where he is a recurring character, it strikes me as lazy writing.
To make him a truly viable villain, he needs to have some reason for what he’s doing. What does he really want? Why does he want it? In absolute terms, Glomgold’s backstory is paper-thin, but it works because we believe that this character only needs a paper-thin excuse to drive his life over the cliff, gleefully cackling all the way. Beaks just is not there. It’s a shame, because new characters are always welcome in this universe. It’s a real missed opportunity.
On the other side of that scale are Webby’s new friends Lena and Violet. Once again, the creators do a fantastic job of making their female characters distinct, interesting, and useful in the story. I am not through the whole series yet, but so far the level of agency in the story is very high and never forced for these characters. Much has been made of Violet’s two dads, but the single episode I’ve seen with them in it didn’t have much of them. It’d be nice to see more of them.
Lena has a nice, meaty backstory that I won’t spoil here, but her inner conflict (and how it can spill over into the outer world) is one of the high points of character development in the show so far. If there is a DT 2017 comic, I will probably check it out just for the hope of getting more out of this single character.
Violet is a character that may have come too late in the run of the show to really fulfil her potential. Again, a comics series or some other form of media really should pick her up and run with her. She is a good foil for Webby, in that Webby has real-world practical knowledge and Violet brings to the table a more magical knowledge base. Lena is the point of a triangle in this relationship, as she is a source of magic that lives in the regular world. It’s an elegant setup for this friendship, and I hope this gets developed more.
Also worthy of note is the character of the triplets' mother, Della Duck. Without saying too much, she is a worthy addition, and having an imperfect single mother with adventure in her blood trying to learn the ropes of caring for triplets only after they are half grown provides some lovely character moments. Very good stuff.
Time For A Cup Of Nutmeg Tea
If I haven’t convinced you to give this show a try by now, I don’t know what more I can do for you. I have to say, even if you have no nostalgia or interest in the 87 show, this one is still worth a look and requires no prior knowledge. Check it out, I promise you won't be disappointed.
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