Excellent! LP, you really have done a great job here! This tree is so massive and feels so complete. This will be a great reference for Duck relatives for all present and future fans of Duck genealogy!
You're too kind! I just wish I'd kept a record of the stories where every relative originates from. But I don't know how to document it in an accessible manner. Maybe I could do some sort of Google Drive-excel document/spreadsheet thing... That would have to be some other time though.
A Google Spreadsheet sounds like a good idea to me! (A part of me cringes that some other solution to store knowledge about all Duck relatives than, well, the Scrooge McDuck Wiki, is needed… but it's my own ruddy fault for having bit off more than I could chew with the Wiki, leading it to its present somewhat-dormant, still very incomplete state. Someday… someday…!…)
Has anyone else read the new Casty volume yet? “Trapped in the Shadow Dimension” has to be one of the best Mickey Mouse volumes yet. I highly recommend that one.
I have! Fun as ever, both in terms of Casty's output and of Disney Masters's. Mind, Shadow Dimension itself isn't my favourite Casty (I'd read it before in French) — I felt like its picture of the titular shadow-world and its Phantom-Blot-lookalikes never builds up to the epic oomph that it wants to have, and which Casty has shown himself well capable of reaching on other occasions — including the covers for this very story! But there's still plenty to like (such as Pete's delightfully loopy charade). And The World to Come was always excellent.
The inclusion of Triple-Dimensional Beagle Boy was a surprise (Ducks? in my Mouse book? more likely than you'd think!), but, as the meme goes, a welcome one.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Jun 22, 2021 2:08:23 GMT
Mmh. Thank you for the in-depth answer; I'll be back with more elaborate thoughts later. Suffice it to say that I was perhaps overdramatic when I wrote the first of my recent replies, having been in a fairly depressed state of mind for unrelated reasons at the time I wrote it. Perhaps I was lacking in the very same good faith which I think you should apply more of to the intentions of Angones & crew! For all that I apologise. Although there is still something about the negativity inherent in your approach which disheartens me on a personal level, that's not really a flaw on your part; it is just… what it is.
For now, anticipating but not replacing a self-contained argument later, my counter-counter-counter-rebuttal: the wording of your examples of being intrigued then disappointed in your second paragraph still make me feel that you're not approaching the show on the terms where I think it ought to be approached. Hoping to see an existing side of the classic characters represented faithfully on the big screen was my early hope for the likes of the Beagle Boys in Season 1, but by the time of Season 3, I think the “hope of being pleasantly surprised” that one should try to harbour with something like the Blot is more along the lines of hoping the resulting story will be engaging in practice, with the full expectation that it won't have much to do with Gottfredson. Applying a similar logic to the 2017!Blot that I did to 2017!Glomgold, the way I see it, “magic-hating crusader” is supposed to be an engaging gimmick in its own right; and separate from that, as a kind of cherry on top, one is meant to be amused and intrigued by the way in which the way this original concept is developed ends up being an unexpected but self-consistent mashup of the Epic Mickey Blot with the idea of the Blot as a mere, if extremely competent, mortal.
As I said, I view DT17 as a work of original storytelling rooting itself in the common baggage of a 21st century Duck fan, of someone with similar tastes to the creators; that there would be a body of "things with crossover-appeal to Duckdom" that is drawn from secondarily to the actual Disney material is unsurprising and an expected part of the process. I find the analogy to the action-figures games fitting… I just don't think that's a bad thing if they can pull it off. And I think they do. Somehow, all the "canon-wordplay" and the fannish influences coalesce into a coherent, unique tone and an equally unique fictional universe. I told myself the same kinds of unwieldily crossovery stories as you as a wee nipper, and I see what DT17 has achieved as essentially being a fully-realised version of the kind of thing we were aspiring to in those days.
In fact, although the end products could not be more different, I see that fundamental thrill as no different from the geeky delight of Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, where Don Rosa snaps together details that were never meant to fit together, but which many of us felt, as young readers, ought to, into a narrative that is itself satisfying, although it is utterly unlike a Barks story; and where additional fun is had by inserting history or movie references which don't really have a reason to be there, other than that Don Rosa is a fan of those things to, and they occupy a linked area of his brain to the part that loves the Ducks, and if as readers your interests overlap with Rosa's, this'll make sense to you in just the same way. Putting bits of John Steed's DNA in the backstory of SHUSH feels, to me, as being a similar kind of fun to, say, name-dropping Doctor Moreau in a Sherlock Holmes story. Somehow perfectly natural deep down, yet just odd enough to be interesting.
This fun would all be empty if the new story being told out of this recombined imagery were not engaging; but I feel that it is. And a glance at the many series of ‘Reaction Videos’ on YouTube will give a good sample of new viewers of various ages who don't have the "crutch" of the preexisting emotional investment in the classic material, and simply get sucked into the story DT17 is telling with no knowledge of how Don Karnage or Beakley or Rockerduck were used previously.
When it comes to emotional moments that worked or didn't — well, just to focus on Life & Crimes as an example, I did feel that the ultimate confession-and-forgiveness scene was botched in this instance, more on a plotting level than anything else. But I loved individual moments within the scene; I still think the Magica flashback is tremendously effective, and Tennant's delivery of Scrooge's realisation that he's "starting to wonder if [he] might be part of the problem" was, as I recall, marvelous, even if it only matched up to a flashback and a half. (Also, to counter your feelings on the matter in your post immediately before, I felt that Bradford's arc made complete sense both emotionally and thematically; I'll have more to say on the thematic side of things later.)
I believe there's a distinct different between rating a show on its artistic merits, and rating it on your enjoyment of it. Scrooge, you're obviously in the latter basket, full of I feel thats and IMOs. Djnyr seems to be more focused on the former, although I've heard convincing arguments that 'literary' criticism is putting the cart before the horse.
I'm not sure that's the whole of it. Art being art, I don't think you can denounce a piece thereof as a failure if the end result is in fact enjoyable in the manner in which the creators meant for it to be enjoyable. It is still worth analysing — but Djnyr's essays are more of an autopsy than an analysis. They seem to start from a premise that DT17 “failed”, and from there, try to eludicate how it failed (in a cunning and well-argued way!). And it is that mixture of personal feelings and attempted objectivity which rankles with me.
(…) I find it very hard to understand how it is possible to emotionally engage with this show, but I'd certainly be interested having it argued to me, and I'd never denounce anyone as "shallow" for taking that attitude. I carefully tried to steer clear of extreme pejoratives like that during this analysis (for example, I don't recall actually using the word "ugly" in regards to the animation); I know I've been guilty of using descriptors like "steaming pile of garbage" for the show in the past, and made a point of avoiding such "Fan Wrath"-style statements in my recently concluded analysis.
That's very kind of you to say — and I do know that you wrote it with quite a lot more thought put into the wording than a typical Internet Outraged Fan Screech, but to an extent this only exacerbated part of my problem (if it had been a Screech I could more easily discount it and distance it), though I am glad to know it was unintentional. To select a random paragraph from one of your last posts…
New Ducktales, on the other hand, had such a consistently glib, snarky and surface-level take on its characters that it couldn’t transition to sentiment or point a moral without feeling very insincere, even though it tried to give at least one character some “lesson” or other moment of “growth” in nearly every episode. These lessons (like Louie’s supposed schooling in humility in “Richest Duck in the World,” the jaw-droppingly stupid “Everyone needs to pay more attention to Dewey” arc in “Sky Pirates in the Sky”, or Scrooge’s apology to his rogue’s gallery in “Life and Crimes of Scrooge McDuck”) came off as more painful and forced than even the most clumsy moments in Original Ducktales--where exercises in sentiment sometimes felt like heavy-handed underlining of the show’s theme, but never felt like attempts to introduce themes entirely antithetical to the show’s overall tone.
…here we have you going "it couldn't make its moral without feeling very insincere”, X element “came off as painful and forced”, it had a “consistently glib, snarky and surface-level take on its characters”. There's scarcely an individualised modifier putting this into perspective. I am very glad to hear from you and Matilda that you'd welcome my counterargument, and accept that much in good faith, but please do try and understand how wearying the prospect seemed of trying to share a point of view starting from a place of “at the end of the day I did have a lot of sincere emotional investment in those ducks”, in the face of such declarations of “glibness”.
To put it another way: maybe that's a failure of communication rather than any actual such intent on your part, but in the absence of clarifications otherwise, it seems to me that by default “this show's sentimental elements are glib and unearned” and “to find them moving would demonstrate shallowness” are, on a level of logic, inextricably linked statements. One implies the other, as surely as "This flower is obviously, evidently red" would imply that people who see it as brown as colour-blind.
As to your central argument that the show was its own thing and shouldn't be compared to the comics, my counter to that would be my "Trading on Unearned Goodwill" section in the analysis; I found (and I'm far from the only one) that the showrunners made it impossible to judge the series as a new creation, by continually reaching back into the past for justification for its questionable decisions or to evoke audience sentiment. Again, I think it eminently fair to judge it against the material it was constantly trying to link itself to.
Ah, but again, that is not quite my argument. I think, ultimately, that it is doing the same thing with Duck Comics lore writ large as, I dunno, as Disney's own Hercules: The Animated Series was doing with Greek Mythology. To borrow a phrase coined by writer Lawrence Miles in another fandom: it is a show by, and for, people to whom the Duckverse is a native mythology, a dense reservoir of plotlines, characters, designs and Iconic Moments invested with emotional resonance. The show is weaving a new tale, which neither seeks to adapt nor replace this original material, but simply rely on this shared knowledge between crew and audience to convey anything from a joke to the emotional significance of a moment (a good example of the latter would be the investment of Scrooge's grief at the end of The Last Crash of the Sunchaser with additional Mythic Weight by mirroring Scrooge's first panel in Christmas on Bear Mountain).
Indeed, I think the nature of most of the references demonstrates that DT17 should be viewed in light of whatever it's referencing, but rarely if ever as an attempt to do the same thing as what it is referencing. They are references meant for people who have already experienced the comics/seen Classic DuckTales/seen Darkwing Duck/etc: new fans wouldn't get the nods in the first place.
You could perhaps think of what DT17 does as canon-puns — where different circumstances resolving, just for one moment, into something that directly echoes a pre-2017 element is a joke shared with an audience of like-minded people, like a piece of wordplay resolving into an ultimately meaningless shared sound between two phrases. Take DT17's biography of the conman-turned-billionaire known as Flintheart Glomgold. The "Duke of Baloni" and "Scottish or South African?" beats are anything but attempts to adapt Turkey With All The Schemings or whatever else — they are in-jokes with the audience. While already finding the altogether original story of the 2017 character Duke Baloney/Flintheart Glomgold funny and occasionally moving in its own right, one is meant to go "……ooooooh" at the way it ends up echoing certain well-known meta trivia about the original Glomgold. One is supposed to find it clever and possibly get a giggle out of it. Nothing wrong with that.
Crucially, with this sort of thing, there is no expectation that the new material should share the tone and values of what it's referencing. They are shared cultural baggage, which is not quite the same thing at all as examples to follow. Again I think back to Disney's 1990s cartoons, this time their Little Mermaid: The Series: like it or not, it was doing anything but trying to convey the tone of Hans Christian Andersen — that's not even on its radar. And yet the “Metal Fish” episode, which featured a fictionalised version of the actual man Andersen having an encounter with mermaids, partly relied on knowledge of where the Little Mermaid story had originated, before it went through a game of Chinese whispers to end up as the 1990s Saturday morning cartoon series. I don't see this as a contradiction.
Of course, all this is a dangerous game. Say you're, I dunno, a Star Trek fan: it is at heart a case of another Trek fan walking up to you and going "want to hear about my OCs? Now, it's not Star Trek, it's not even very likeStar Trek, but I was practically raised on Star Trek, I think in Star-Trek-terms half the time; so since you do too, then perhaps you will enjoy this other thing I made up, considering our shared background", and then sprinkling in Star Trek jokes throughout their story, in part to keep signalling that you and they belong to the same tribal subculture at heart. If you don't actually end up enjoying their story, then they have wasted your time. But if you do end up liking the story for its own qualities, and thus appreciate the Trek in-jokes in the spirit they're meant, then I think that justifies the endeavour well enough.
On the speed of talk in DT: in the interview Scroogerello posted (thread titled "Tony Anselmo and Terry McGovern Disney Duck Q&A"), Anselmo says the voices on DT '17 were sped up 20%. Do we know that that's true across the board?
I think it must be — as I assume that's the root of the slight, difficult-to-pin-down but undeniable difference between the triplets' voices in the “audio episodes” they did after the finale, compared to how they sounded in the series. Even Anselmo sounds more like "himself" (so to speak).
(line break because the following is aimed at, depending on how you want to read it, "everyone" or "djnyr", but certainly not at Matilda specifically)
…
…I've been fairly quiet, by the way, but I've been keeping up with what you folks have been saying — not without a degree of bitterness. A lot of those criticisms that have been discussed ring true, but I'm just generally disheartened by the glass-half-empty attitude of it all. I wish I had the time and mental energy to write “I come to praise DT17, not bury it”, and perhaps I will at that, someday, but for now you'll have to content(?) yourselves with the cliffnotes version: I loved DuckTales 2017 for as long as it lasted. I was not blind to its flaws, not even (as the archives of this long, long thread will attest) back in Season 1; indeed, I was more skeptical of it in Season 1, and liked it more and more as time went on, won over by its unique tone and setting and characters even as I accepted that it wasn't the comics-based show I'd hoped it would be at the very start. It seems a lot of people had an opposite experience — started moderately positive, then soured on it more and more with every grating decision.
The animation style was not the heights of 1960s Disney — but what is, in this day and age? The art-style was miles above most other current children-aimed animated productions, Disney and otherwise, and that includes shows I love (compare what some of the DT17 crew went on to do in The Owl House). Yes, yes, Legend of the Three Caballeros, I know; but if I'm being honest, I see the rigid Toonboom-ness of Legend's lovely designs, and the lively animation of DT17's flatter designs, as equal and complementary problems, which basically average out. Legend looks better in stills, DT17 looks better in motion; I'd be hard-pressed to say which one I liked more visually, on the whole. I maintain that there was more than technical proficiency in DT17's character animation, by the way. The range of comedic facial expressions was imaginative as anything; I'll always remember little moments like Glomgold's cockroach impression in Moonvasion!. And neither did the animators slack off when it came to conveying earnest emotion.
And as for the writing — well, what can I say? Nitpick and criticise as one might, they must have been doing something right. By the finale, I loved those characters, as fully as one ever does a cast of fictional characters. And the show was popular enough that I can't have been alone.
Sure, they were not the characters from the comics, but that much became apparent very, very early on, and anyway they never hid that this was a reboot with all that implied. In the end the 2017 Continuum was doing something akin to a modern cartoon tackling a well-known mythology and trying to craft a modern tale out of it, with no intention of being an accurate adaptation; creating its own characters with their own emotional arcs on motivations, but wrapping them up in the imagery and setpieces of the original myths, cleverly recontextualised. It was like that — but with "Duck lore" writ large as the "native mythology" whose symbols were thrown together and rewritten; no more or less an insult to Barks than Disney's Princess and the Frog was an insult to the Brothers Grimm (or indeed The Sword in the Stone an insult to Chrétien de Troyes). Is this what most of us hoped The New DuckTales Series would be, back in 2016? Well, no. But that is what it did, and while a measure of disbelief in 2017 that this was what it was doing was warranted… frankly, it seems sad and unproductive to me to see people still hammering at the show in 2021, with it dead and buried, for not being what we hoped for in 2016 — rather than appreciate the very special show we did get, or at least leave it to the audience it did find.
I will not speak as to whether DT17 was a good thing to have happen to the Disney Comics fandom. Putting on my Serious Analyst hat? It was probably a net negative. Without it bringing the upper echelons of Disney's attention back to the Ducks, perhaps we never would have had to suffer through the Erin Brady takeover and the unceremonious death of the IDW monthlies. And on a micro-fandom level, while it may have generated steady discussion on this very Forum and associated spheres, it also created a schism which I fear may never completely heal.
But looking at DT17itself, not DT17-the-hurricane-that-washed-over-Duckdom?… Well now.
DuckTales 2017 was fun, indeed it was often uproariously funny; its animation was better than it had any right to be, for all that it wasn't literally Marc Davis; and its characters were strange and unique and well-acted and engaging, for all that they weren't Barks's Ducks. It was clear, also, if one followed the blogs and social media profiles while it was being made and aired, that it was a labour of love from the writing and directing team; have whatever arguments you like about which of these people were "true" fans of the classic material, but they visibly cared very deeply about the actual stories they were writing, and I think that counts for a whole lot more in the grand scheme of things. I loved it more and more every season; perhaps the only reason it does not stand as my favourite animated show of the 2010s is that the decade also managed to produce Infinity Train, which is simply unfair competition.
I am still very sad that it is gone.
And though I cannot ask anyone to like it, for whom it just never clicked… it makes me even sadder, and played no small part in my lessening activity on this Forum which was once such a regular part of my online life, that heaping such an ocean of negativity on this thing I loved has become, not one of several viewpoints engaged in productive and polite discussion, but the norm.
I had thoughts on Life & Crimes of Scrooge McDuck and Last Adventure, you know; and not all of them were even positive, either! But I hardly posted the slightest fraction here. Why would I, when I couldn't even open this thread without tripping over ever-grander statements of Why New DuckTales Failed that seemed not even to countenance the idea of starting from a position that it was pretty darn good, actually, at the end of the day? Where you see an “unwieldy stew” I came to recognise a haphazard mix that, somehow, partway through became a magic brew, far more engaging than the sum of its parts would suggest. I daresay I am happier than you for it; for I have three seasons of a great show, and you have a lasting disappointment.
And again: I'm not asking anyone to love this show who doesn't do so already. And I respect the depth and quality of writing of your posts, djnyr , I truly do. But I think it would be fairer, and humbler, and kinder — just that, kinder — to do away with that high-handed undertone you have throughout your posts; this feeling (and I know you never said that in so many words; but, true or not, that's the feeling your writing on the subject gives off for me) that you hold anyone who'd fundamentally feel DT17 to be a successful and engaging show is somehow shallow, unable to "grasp" the "patent" fact that the art is "ugly" or the jokes are "grating". I may be coming in a bit late to say this, but if you could write on a basis of "here is why the show failed to click with me", rather than "here is why the show was Objectively Bad and people who like it are Wrong"… well.
It wouldn't be any less interesting, and, methinks, it would be kinder. That's all.
It is located in Toontown. Several segments make reference to the fact.
Ah, but do they? Remember that ‘Mickey's Toontown’ is an area of Disneyland. And, indeed, Donald's house as seen on the show matches that of the ‘Mickey's Toontown’ house of Donald. If Toontown is only referred to as the home of the characters, but not necessarily the place they're in right now, then it would make complete sense to continue placing the House on the corner of the Disneyland Main Street — with the Ducks & Mice living in the Disneyland version of Toontown.
The Toontown of 1990s Disney media (whether it be the character's homes as seen in House of Mouse/Mickey Mouse Works shorts, the Toontwown Online video game, or the Mickey's Toontown park area) is a much smaller, suburbian sort of place than the skyscraper-filled metropolis of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Visually, it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to try to construe the "big city avenue" seen in the opening credits, and in outside shots, as the location of the House, as being part of that Toontown.
I'm always amazed by the folks who want to create some coherent composite picture of present-day Duckworld and the Duck families, including All Stories Ever Published with their various contradictions...but surely it must be even less possible to create a coherent composite *history* of Duckburg, given the flagrantly contradictory versions in print!
Well, in this particular case, unreliable narrators are one's friend. This matter of finding a spring is the kind of slightly magical just-so stories, founding myths, usually given to cities. Perhaps Cornelius thought this was a more fun account of events to give than the "the Spaniards were already there" idea — after all, the whole Francis-Drake-and-Spaniard-occupation thing doesn't seem to be common knowledge in His Majesty McDuck, so whatever the folk tales in Duckburg about Cornelius are, they didn't include the Rosa version of events. So for my money: Jeromine did exist, and probably she did help Cornelius on his journey to Calisota, but the thing about the spring is a tall tale.
That being said, when in a tighter fix, never underestimate my willingness to fall back on magical (or science-fictional) explanations for things. There have been several stories where the Ducks were sent back in time into Duckburg's past, for example, so it's tempting to suggest that its history has genuinely been rewritten several times over in-universe as fall-out from clumsy time travel in experimental time-tubs and the like; such that records of various self-contradictory versions of Duckburg's past coexist, paradoxical but harmless.
Next, he appears in a flashback in a 1988 story by Pezzin, rated in the top thousand on INDUCKS, so perhaps I should try to get a copy. Can anyone say what happens in the flashback?
It's been a long time since I read it — I have generally good memories of it, but in no way is it Rosa-compatible, as it depicts Cornelius as active around the American War of Independence, going (IIRC) on a mission on behalf of George Washington.
Oh, also "le soda se boit sec"--the best Clarabelle Cow story ever, by Philippe Gasc/Cavazzano! Can you tell me what the title refers to?
Well, it's a phrase you'd expect from a purist telling you how X kind of alcohol should be drunk (à la James Bond's pontifications on how martinis should be “shaken, not stirred”), only here comically applied to “soda” — which in French vernacular is used to mean any kind of sweet, fizzy drink; Coca Cola is frequently referred to as simply “soda”. It's possible that a more direct movie quote or title is being referenced, although I don't know which.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on May 3, 2021 19:21:51 GMT
I'm a great fan of Claude Marin, both his Disney work and otherwise; and I think that though his artstyle was unquestionably well-suited to it, he was wasted penning so many “Disney Babies” stories. His Gottfredson-esque (dare I say Casty-esque, anachronistic as it is?) long-form stories are a great part of my childhood nostalgia; “The Giants from Planet Rong”, “The Phantom Blot Unchained”, “Donald's Fabulous Invention” stand tall alongside the likes of “The Flying Scot” or “In Ancient Persia” as quintessential Disney comic adventure stories in my book.
Not only that, but they then use NOTHING of the Brazillian comics to inform Zé Carioca.
Hm, did you think so? I thought the depiction of him as really being poor and a bit of a trickstery grifter, despite presenting himself as a smooth and ostentatiously glamorous gentle-parrot, must have been derived from that, albeit a bit distantly. It's certainly not in the actual 1940s package films.
(DT17-Rockerduck as nothing in common with his comics counterpart)
Huh, that's an odd statement. I mean certainly the whole bizarre literally-temporally-displaced-19th-century-robber-baron thing gives him a different framing — but his smug yet ultimately ineffectual, vainglorious, snobbish behaviour, combined with his over-reliance on Jeeves (albeit a completely different Jeeves), make him one of the most comic-accurate characters in terms of general personality, I think. Certainly moreso than Glomgold even though, on paper, DT17-Glomgold's place in the present day has more in common with Classic-Glomgold than DT17-Rockerduck's has to Classic-Rockerduck. And either way, I think that at this point I've at least pretty well accepted Rockerduck's DT17 voice as how the prime version will sound in my head from now on.