The attitude that the creators of this show were more interested in Darkwing than Ducktales is a fairly common one even from people who like the show- wouldn't pin that to donaldistducktoons alone.
That much is true — but I think there's a difference between "they really wished they could do Darkwing and it sort of distorted DT17 whenever they included Darkwing elements" and the notion that they didn't care at all about Scrooge & Co. (even their own versions thereof, granting the idea that they weren't respectful enough of the originals!) and were only doing DuckTales out of obligation in the hope that it might lead to Darkwing. I think they were quite excited about what they were doing in the here-and-now in DT17; they were just also very excited about the possibility of a Darkwing spin-off.
Returning to your comments on New Ducktales, one of the reasons I'm not terribly bothered by the varying-from-the-source adaptations of the DC and Marvel characters--like the Timm/Dini shows or some of the MCU movies--is that there really is no authoritative "source" for the superhero characters; Batman's comics universe, for example, has changed its tone and ambiance so many times over the years (from pulp-Gothic to Dick Tracy-ish stylization to candy-colored sci-fi antics to Marvel-esque dramatics to Frank Miller/Alan Moore "edginess") that one can point to comic-book sources to support the tone of most adaptations. The Ducks and their world have been much more consistent on the comics page over the years, and thus I think taking the same "shapes and symbols" approach to adapting their world strips that world of its essence much more than a similar approach does to superhero stories.
So far, yes. But where you see in aberration in DT17 I see the inevitable beginning of something new. It has to start somewhere. I do think for the better part of, oh, three hundred years, the Arthurian mythos was perceived as one thing; different poets' renditions might contradict one another in the particulars, tones might differ, but no more than a Scarpa tale will differ from a Barks classic. Eventually somebody had to be the first to tell a King Arthur story that kept only the bare bones — I wonder who it was. Perhaps in their day that first "aberrant" poet was reviled for missing the point entirely. But that would seem rather small-minded in hindsight.
Want something more modern? Well, take Sherlock Holmes. Someone had to do the first "non-Doylish" Sherlock (and I don't mean the William Gillette play); I think an argument could be made it was the Rathbone films, actually. At some point Sherlock Holmes slipped from a specific literary conceit, inextricable from a particular tone and style and genre, to one of the great archetypes — as familiar as Santa Claus or Hercules. And I suppose there are Doyle diehards even now who find this irritating; I will not deny that it can be a breath of fresh air to go back to the text now and again. But it's the way of the world.
We live in strange times; it's hard to speak about how the world will think of Scrooge McDuck in 2123 without feeling like I've gone loopy. But still — powers willing, I think it is entirely possible that all of us in this thread will live to see Scrooge falling into the public domain; certainly we shall see it happening to Donald. (Mickey's just around the corner, don't you know…) Even setting aside the specifics of copyright law, we shall soon live in a world where these stories and characters are a century old, and I cannot help but think that this… changes things. It puzzles me at time, this thought, even though I'm on the younger side. Perhaps because that was how the blurbs in the magazines and collections presented things, it still seems to me on some daft emotional level that Barks was "last generation" and that Rosa is "modern". What do you mean, he hasn't been working for twenty years? Madness.
But the point is, I cannot help but think that fanciful/shapes-and-symbols adaptations will accumulate in decades to come; that DT17 is in this respect merely the slightly-early forerunner of an inevitability. We haven't seen very many iterations, so the first big "weird" one after The Original seems wrong and arbitrary. But soon (in the grand scheme of literary history, at any rate; not necessarily soon in human terms) there will be five, twenty, a hundred Duckburgs; and DT17 will feel positively old-fashioned in many a respect.
I do realize that my view of the Duckworld is much more Barks-centric than that of many non-American fans might be; unlike the Disney Duck comics cultures of Brazil or Italy, the American Duck comics culture pretty much begins and ends with Barks; the most successful post-Barks American creator, Rosa, pretty much defined himself by his adherence to the Barks canon.
That was undoubtably the case twenty years ago, even ten, perhaps; but I think a more holistic view has resulted over the past ten years or so from the combination of the Internet allowing places like, well, this very Forum to thrive, and of the push for localisations of non-American/Scandinavian tales in IDW's monthlies (cries) and of course the ever-superb Disney Masters.
I do think it's fair, however, to critique Angones' Duckburg for missing the ambiance of Barks' Duckburg, since Angones and his team repeatedly invoked Barks and Rosa and spun the show as part of the Barks tradition, both in interviews and Internet comments and in the incessant references to Barks and Rosa scattered throughout the show. As Matilda puts it, the show continually "strung along" devotees of the traditional Barksian Duck stories with references like this; there were no comparable invocations of Italian or other non-American Duck comics, and I think the sci-fi and fantasy trappings which you reference as points of similarity between the show and Euro comics such as Super Picsou Géant are more a case of parallel evolution than a homage to other countries' Duck comics; superheroes and supervillains have become so culturally dominant worldwide that it's no surprise they pop up in both European Disney comics and in American Disney TV shows.
I do think the early marketing that promised some Barks-Rosa modernisaiton was unsporting. But spin will spin — even if a marketing strategy was misjudged to the point of being ethically culpable, I am unwilling to hold that over the show.
Moreover, while they didn't often invoke the European comics directly (though let me remind you that the entire notion of Della The Astronaut derived from a Dutch tale!), they were certainly open about wanting their show to be as much a homage to The Disney Afternoon Universe — the '87 DuckTales, Darkwing Duck and TaleSpin and so on — as to the comics, and that gets you to about the same place, since those shows certainly had a more elastic reality than Barks. And although much digital ink has been spilled about the damaging consequences of trying to do DuckTales when what you really wanted to do was Darkwing Duck, all along, nor can I, at a basic level, find it in my heart to begrudge people who grew up with both shows in tandem for viewing them as inherently and uncomplicatedly a package-deal.
Oh, you could certainly watch DuckTales Classic without Darkwing Duck, and never give a second thought to that Other Show which has similar character designs and an apparent shared universe, but a much more fantastical reality; sure. (I suppose to go back to superheroes this would be the equivalent of people who would rather not think about the low-sci-fi noir setting of Gotham coexisting with Superman and The Sandman and all the other grand cosmic stuff.) But equally, if you grew up watching both in tandem, thinking of it as trivially obvious that Launchpad was splitting his time between these two sets of adventures somehow, then it seems to me only natural that you would think nothing of all kinds of wild things happening in Duckburg too now and then.
Though in any case my point was less about “the DT17 crew were entirely habilitated to include such elements because they exist in some of the comics, technically”, and more “objectively a number of comics have included such elements without feeling like complete departures from What Disney Comics Are in the same way; so DT17's fault/peculiarity must be elsewhere than in the inclusion of these elements, per se”. (I'm not asking you to like Rebo, although if you don't like Eega Beeva we're going to have a problem. I kid, I kid. My point is that Rebo does not feel like Lunaris, ergo Lunaris's problem cannot be, per se, that he is an alien conqueror villain who shouldn't be going around getting defeated by Donald Duck.)
Finally, I agree that the "shapes and sets of symbols" approach to character depictions is a common one in superhero comics, but it's another element of superhero storytelling that, to me, diminishes the appeal of most superheroes for me. I prefer characters that are actually consistent, recognizable personalities, not just a set of costumes and powers that can be radically reconfigured as they pass through the hands of different creators; trying to find any consistency, from a characterization standpoint, in long-running multi-creator superhero comics series (such as the X-Men) can induce whiplash; just try reading the "fictional character biography" section for any prominent superhero on Wikipedia.
Well, granted; but that is a slightly different issue, since the whiplash in those cases is induced by the fact that those runs are in theory meant to exist in a single continuity. I wasn't referring to changing creative teams on the prime comics, but rather on the way adaptations are done; the Timm/Dini shows, the film adaptations, the video games even. Not to mention those comics which are explicitly new continuities (e.g. Marvel's “Ultimates” thing). Again I find the myth-and-folklore comparison instructive. Merlin in La Morte d'Arthur is not Merlin in The Sword in the Stone is not Merlin in Excalibur is not Merlin in, er, Merlin; and once you get in the right frame of mind I don't think this is unduly distracting or cheapening.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Jun 23, 2023 23:44:37 GMT
The critiques pile on, and I've yet, years on now, to find both the emotional energy and the time to write my Great If Nuanced Defence Of DuckTales 2017. But I've got a few off-the-cuff thoughts on this latest message, so please accept a few lengthy but improvised musings.
One thing I will do from the off is protest against the conflation of “the Barksian Ducks' world” with “the Ducks' world”. The Barksian ambience is a specific thing, and I do wish we'd get an adaption that truly captured it one of those days; but it is not the whole of the Disney Comics toybox by any means. There are of course your Darkwing Ducks and the like, or even just the Duck Avenger and his ilk; but even going off into those explicitly superheroic things, the wider world of Disney comics has long featured galactic conquerors (Lunaris is a Rebo substitute as much as anything; an inferior one, of course), grandiose supervillains or mad scientists (the Phantom Blot as generally imagined in European stories is the obvious example but we could be here all night listing one-off examples of the form, going all the way back to yer Doctors Ecks/Doublecks/Triplecks or Vulters in Gottfredson), not to mention a plethora of much more overtly magical characters than Barks's amateur-sorceress Magica. I do not think there is a single element in the entire DT17 show that I would blink at if it were the subject of a random story in the latest Super Picsou Géant. Alien invaders? Magical clones? Supervillainous spy organisation? Bring it on. Even though I'm sure Mark Beaks in the show was substantially influenced by Lex Luthor, he also increasingly turned into a reinventing-the-wheel doppelganger of good old Emil Eagle.
No, more than the individual ingredients themselves, it was in the presentation that DT17 strayed from something that ‘feels’ like the default world of Disney Comics as it has existed in my head since childhood (and to be sure, it did). You're getting somewhere in stressing "ambience" over substance, but you don't go far enough: I think it's *purely* in the presentation, not in the facts. It's the accumulation, the juxtaposition. It's the final frame of the Season 2 finale or the notorious falling-through-the-sky Season 3 poster where ghosts and robots and witches and tiny talking rodents sit side-by-side, undeniably part of the same wider world.
To look at it from another angle, some of this comes from a sort of Wiki-based thinking that follows on from Rosa, and tries to take seriously that the Ducks have had all these adventures in one lifetime. There is a kind of loose reset-button timelessness to the printed Duckburg or Mouseton. When Scrooge finds Harpies or the Philosopher's Stone, it's not the first time he's encountered the supernatural, but crucially, neither is it the seven-hundredth. Donald has been fired from many odd jobs, but not literal thousands of them. Etc. etc. There is an illusion of continuity, and it is well-known that my brain has always liked to push it further than the stories do, and genuinely try to account for things like the ever-expanding Duck family tree or the dozens of contradictory Atlantises; but that game is only fun because it's not something the stories themselves do. After a season's worth of Duck stories, Donald Duck really ought to be a celebrity who's hailed as “one of the greatest adventurers in the world”; but you shouldn't write him that way. No one stops Tintin in the street for his autograph; nobody has ever heard of Inspector Columbo on the news, no matter how many picturesque high-profile murders he's solved. It's the snake eating its own tail.
But DT17 bit that bullet right from the off, and I think that bullet got stuck in its throat.
And mind you, I think it did so knowingly. Part of this was the necessity of a more serialised format where Episode 3 really must substantially have happened to the characters as of Episode 28. And beyond that, it didn't just feel like there was no choice but to make the world Weird because Continuity Said So; they were after all a reboot. They wanted to replicate the energy of Gravity Falls or a number of comics and webcomics that take place in an unapologetically Weird World; one that's deceptively mundane at first glance but where your neighbour is a robot and there's a living statue of a horse working as an intern for your uncle's company. The fact of the matter is that it's an energy I like in its own right (although it can be a refuge of self-indulgent scoundrels). It simply isn't quiiite how the average Disney Comic pitches itself, even when Rebo and Witch Hazel are on the table. And so there's a strange disconnect at seeing some round pegs contorted around to fit into that square hole, even though there's nothing wrong with squares. Sometimes the reimagined character is (I will insist) perfectly fine, and just jars when compared to the memory of the original; Magica, for example; Gyro to a degree. Other times, as with Scrooge (unfortunately enough), too much is banked on the supposed mythic power of an iconography that's at odds with the completely new substance under the surface, and so it never quite coheres.
Where I will unreservedly agree that there was unwarranted borrowing from superhero tropes, it was definitely in the emphasis on physical fights. I do get it, I really do; working in TV, they wanted high-octane climaxes, so every villain had to somehow become a physical threat to be defeated, and in turn, heroes had to by definition be improbably good at hand-to-hand combat to match. But that is on no level what Disney Comics have ever been about — even the explicitly superheroey ones. Darkwing Duck and the Duck Avenger win through guile and gadgetry, not through physically tossing their enemies about; even Super Goof's super-strength is, in the manner of the Christopher Reeves Superman, usually exercised on mundane pieces of the environment, not in throwing down against other super-strong folks. I don't mind the occasional Barks-Rosa riff on the Young Scrooge having been improbably good at Asterixian brawls, but still, only in moderation. Kung-Fu Webby was at least designed with this in mind, but Scrooge, Donald and Della fighting off Eggheads was just embarrassing.
…Rereading all the above, I find that I come out sounding like I'm saying “well, I disagree with you on what it does wrong, but it certainly does something wrong", which may puzzle people who have forgotten where I generally stand on the show, and are therefore scratching their heads about my “I wish I could articulate by Great Defence better” opener. So without elaborating overmuch, I'll restate my general view: considered as an original show, I thought DuckTales 2017 was very good. I find its jokes funny, its visuals memorable, its characters generally lovable, its voice cast stellar. Not perfect — it struggled with an overlarge cast, and Scrooge never entirely worked — but by and large a success at the sheer business of entertainment. Probably a lesser sibling to even a close Disney relative like The Owl House (not to mention Infinity Train), but still something which takes its rightful place as one of the great shows of that little 2010s golden age of American TV animation. The problem simply comes from the fact that, despite a clear fannish interest in the source material it drew from, it used that source material more as an endless source of names and iconography to riff on, than as something to translate — or even really as something to whose preexisting fans they should try and appeal, provided they don't happen to be fans with the exact same fannish tastes as the showrunners.
And in a way perhaps that's the greatest superhero influence of all, at a meta level. Superhero fandoms are quite used to adaptations that just borrow the names and basic looks of characters, and then pitch their own things with different ambiences, tones, worldbuilding, pacing, you name it. No one blinks an eye if the new Batman thing decides that the Joker is yet again completely different; Gotham is reducible to a finite number of visual archetypes and attached names, and every new storyteller is free to attach those ingredients to what tone and storyline they want. Long-term fans may notice and enjoy specific echoes between one telling and another, but none should be taken as a given. I think DT17 often approached its task like that. “So, richest-duck-in-the-world adventurer called Scrooge McDuck; he looks like this. His sort-of-one-true-love-but-it's-complicated whom he met in the Klondike Gold Rush, called Goldie O'Gilt; she looks like this. What can we come up with based on that brief and that brief alone? [having come up with their own story] Right, and now let's throw in a couple of allusions to other possible tellings of this story, as a tip of the hat to the past. Let's say… 'a mammoth in White Agony Creek’? But let's change the context a bit, of course…"
And that approach is neither good or bad, I would say (though it does continue to rob us of a ‘straight’ Disney Comics-based show which I really think would work). It's what it means for these things to be modern myths, after all; very broad shapes and sets of symbols, to be retold and altered endlessly. Few modern stories about King Arthur and Merlin have much to do with Chrétien de Troyes or Mallory beyond some names and some very broad story directions, but they still get to trade on the mythic power of doing A King Arthur Retelling, and that's okay. But it's just not something we're used to in Duck-dom, when all those hundreds of authors since the 1930s have by and large all been playing in the same illusorily-continuous sandbox, as opposed to reboots inherently being the name of the game.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Jun 9, 2023 23:21:25 GMT
I say this as the Forum's resident DT17-enjoyer (enough so that the negativity about it sort of burnt m out on this place, though there were other reasons for my lessened activity), but mostly one wishes the references had been… less shallow? More concerned with the substance of what was being referenced, rather than "oh it's [Name]". A lot of these references are random name-drops in contexts which don't actually make any sense with the background of the original thing, e.g. "the Lost Key of Tralla La" and "Conqueror of Plain Awful" and so on, and that just gets old very quickly.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Jun 3, 2023 19:10:38 GMT
They're not Disney-exclusive, you'll find them in other funny-animals books of the same era, I've observed. Though I think Disney started it. I believe the usual word is that Barks started the trend of the *really* human ones — the ones who have a human skull shape with little to no snout — though I don't know if that's true (certainly the Phantom Blot predates him; but Gottfredson's early dognoses are slightly different, with vertical black noses instead of the more rounded ones Barks normalized).
That sounds pretty decisive—and yet later he purportedly claimed to have been involved with the thing, if only peripherally. I wonder whether he could have been *shown* the film at some later point, and whether that's what rang a bell in his brain...
Hmm. Here's another possibly stupid question: when did Barks sketch the famous draft family tree which named an "Old 'Scotty' McDuck", relative to when this exchange occurred? I'm now vaguely wondering if in deciding that Scrooge's father was a "Scotty McDuck", Barks was making a sort of meta joke because this whole business about a secret-even-to-him "ancestor" of the character who was known by that name.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on May 3, 2023 20:07:44 GMT
It's readily obvious that the character is a visual antecedent of Scrooge's of sorts; I would not say that makes him a "prototype". At best it seems that Barks may have been channeling a memory of the short to some degree when he *designed* "Scrooge's stingy Scottish uncle" (and this is true regardless of the dubious claim that he personally worked on Spirit; he could very well have seen it either way!), but only in the same broad design sense that the Phantom Blot may have been inspired by the Mad Doctor; that doesn't make the Mad Doctor "a prototype of the Phantom Blot". (In in-universe terms, of course, I do believe that Donald's mental image of "a stingier version of myself" was influenced by his knowledge of Scrooge; but that's a purely Watsonian point).
And while I do think some vague inspiration is entirely plausible, it's just as plausible that this is just because a Scotsman with glasses and sideburns is a basic, trophy archetype, and when you combine it with the basic Donald Duck design you will always get pretty much the same result — so that Spirit and Barks could well have come to it independently. Look at how TVtropes illustrates the character archetype of the Thrifty Scot: cane, round spectacles, whiskers, it's all there.
It's peculiar that outside of the intro, the Owl House characters don't seem to “mix” into the shared Chibi universe: so far they're only in-universe cartoons the other characters watch. I wonder if that's a coincidence or if a decision was made to treat Owl House differently (perhaps at the creator's request? not that I'd expect a project of such stark, base commercialism as this to check in with the show creators… hmm).
Hm. As an update on this it seems this more recent episode does feature Emperor Belos (albeit wordless) among the villains in the “real” world rather than as a show-within-the-show. And some of the protagonists have very short cameos at the end. Now I'm just confused.
btw, Disney characters are Disney property and it's up to them to decide what kind of depiction of them they would like to see around, it is perfectly understandable to me. Sure, Rosa's work is great and we all love it, but if the legitimate owner of those IPs and stories doesn't feel like they reflect the company, it is ok they stop the production of them
I mean. It's legally okay, no one can stop them, but that doesn't mean it's morally okay that there even is a corporate entity which places random executives in control of so much art to which they had no personal ties. Copyright in its current form is one of the great evils of the age, etc. etc. etc. The world be a better place if Don Rosa's comics could be creator-owned, with Disney having merely granted him a license to use the characters, rather than belonging to them wholesale. But so it goes.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Apr 17, 2023 17:07:29 GMT
It's peculiar that outside of the intro, the Owl House characters don't seem to “mix” into the shared Chibi universe: so far they're only in-universe cartoons the other characters watch. I wonder if that's a coincidence or if a decision was made to treat Owl House differently (perhaps at the creator's request? not that I'd expect a project of such stark, base commercialism as this to check in with the show creators… hmm).
But yes, this is a pretty dreadful fare. I will give it that the theme song is pretty fun. I honestly don't hate the basic concept of just this little mash-up universe with sillier variants of the “canonical” characters. But ye gads this art style is… limited.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Apr 13, 2023 11:52:14 GMT
I'm… rather curious to see what their proposed redrawn Bombie would have looked like! (Though the black blotch sounds like an artistically more interesting option.)
I'm young enough to have first been exposed to the "censored" Bombie, is the thing, and much as I don't like the original version being made unavailable, I think that design change was for the better. All prejudice aside the Bombie with the more realistic proportions just has more pathos.
But… Rosa already used a version of that redesign in his original art. Certainly his Bombie didn't have the giant gag nose. So I'm just wondering what the bedevils they would have redrawn Bombie as this time around. It'd all get very Ship of Theseus, I expect… but like, what's offensive about the design? Surely any lingering "problematicness" concerns itself with the sheer presence of a Haitian voodoo zombie as the "monster" (albeit a sympathetic monster), and particularly with Foola Zoola being a pretty unreconstructed Evil Witch-Doctor even if he was provoked. I don't see how any changes to the art could "fix" that.
That was wise on DR's part! Because there are three solutions I can see, and none are ideal : (a) Scrooge is losing his mind, (b) Scrooge was born in the XIIIth century, (c) he met some guy named "Marco Polo" after the famous explorer.
In the very same story, he also says that he sold concertinas to the soldiers of the Czar and that he sold recordings of "The Bagage Coach Ahead" at the 1904 world fair. Unlike the Marco Polo case, both these statements are plausible.
Option D would be a time-travel adventure! The Castle McDuck Ghosts aside, Rosa seems to have shied away from overtly fantastical elements in the Life & Times for understandable reasons, but such an incident wouldn't be out-of-place in his Duckverse (e.g. Once and Future Duck), let alone the wider Disney Comics universe.
Were I writing this story as a L&T "bonus chapter", I might make it a slight homage to Barks's Old California, with Scrooge waking up back in the present at the end and rationalizing that his encounter with the 13th century explorer must have been some kind of a fever-dream - although part of him wonders…
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Mar 4, 2023 14:49:01 GMT
Mh, I'm familiar. But that category is sadly rendered rather less useful than it ought to be by including pages about a variety of preexisting public-domain characters who have at some point been *adapted into* Disney stories, a category so broad as to drown out all the important cases.