Spin It! (A Talespin Retrospective)

[djnyr]

Thanks to That Duckfan's retrospective of Rosa's non-Disney work over in the Lounge, we can pin down at least one Rosa survival in "I Only Have Ice for You"--the name of Higher for Hire's client, Prince Neferhaz Ben-Broak. Rosa repurposed that name from one of his old Captain Kentucky stories. As discussed earlier, the whole rubies-hidden-in-jam and diamonds-hidden-in-iceberg parts of the plot also felt very much like a shout-out by Rosa to Barks' "All at Sea" and "Status Seeker." I would love for someone to ask Rosa about this on his Facebook page (I don't have FB) or elsewhere; if he still has his storyboards, it'd be fascinating to compare them to the finished episode (that gag with Wildcat and the propeller just has to have been a Rosa storyboard survival).

It's interesting how much opinions can vary; from what I've seen, "It Came from Beneath the Sea Duck" is rather well-regarded in the Talespin fan community. I think that I prefer "Ice" on the whole myself, but I do have a much higher opinion of "Beneath" than you. To me it feels a bit like Rosa's "The Coin," in that it's a sort of tour of the characters and their world that demonstrates their personalities and almost maps out their physical surroundings, even though its plot is less high-stakes than other outings. What really surprises me about it is that Rosa had such a good feel for the characters, considering how he had zero history with them as opposed to his long love affair with the Ducks. I also like it for being one of the first of several Talespin episodes that manages to depict child characters humorously, naturally, and unsentimentally; again, I'm surprised that Rosa of all people pulled this off, since his depiction of the Nephews is typically very un-childlike.

I do agree that Charlie Adler's Mad Dog voice is preferable in small doses; although I think "Beneath" is a good one, I think it was wise that future episodes never tried to use the Mad Dog/Dump Truck team to carry as long a stretch of the narrative as they did in that episode. They work better as foils to Karnage than they do carrying the villainy on their own. I used to assume that the same actor voiced both Mad Dog and Mepps, but Mepps was actually Peter Cullen (who must have really tortured his vocal cords to get that screech; his natural voice--heard as Joaquin Slolee and so many other guest villains on Ducktales--was much deeper).

[That Duckfan]

Jun 5, 2022 22:17:46 GMT djnyr said:

What really surprises me about it is that Rosa had such a good feel for the characters, considering how he had zero history with them as opposed to his long love affair with the Ducks. I also like it for being one of the first of several Talespin episodes that manages to depict child characters humorously, naturally, and unsentimentally; again, I'm surprised that Rosa of all people pulled this off, since his depiction of the Nephews is typically very un-childlike.

Is it so surprising, though? Roda's Disney work goes through stages; it's only after he starts the Scrooge biography that his work becomes more typically what we think of as Rosa's style. His early ten-pagers, like Metaphorically Spanking, or a story like The Crocodile Collector show much more 'normal' nephews. These TaleSpin stories were written during his Gladstone period. If you look at only those stories, you can also see that Rosa was for a time more willing to bend to other styles of storytelling.

[djnyr]

That's fair; Rosa's views of the Duck characters weren't nearly as set in stone as they later became at the time he did his Talespin work. As I recall, it also wasn't really till after the Life and Times that he began regularly stating (on the DCML and elsewhere) that he just couldn't bring himself to write stories about Mickey, or Launchpad, or any other character that he hadn't formed an attachment to through childhood comics or childhood television. A pity that he stuck to that attitude during his later career, since his Talespin episodes show he could do very good work even with characters to whom he had no prior attachment at all.

[Mesterius]

Jun 6, 2022 22:16:42 GMT djnyr said:

That's fair; Rosa's views of the Duck characters weren't nearly as set in stone as they later became at the time he did his Talespin work. As I recall, it also wasn't really till after the Life and Times that he began regularly stating (on the DCML and elsewhere) that he just couldn't bring himself to write stories about Mickey, or Launchpad, or any other character that he hadn't formed an attachment to through childhood comics or childhood television. A pity that he stuck to that attitude during his later career, since his Talespin episodes show he could do very good work even with characters to whom he had no prior attachment at all.

Interesting -- I didn't know Rosa only started saying that stuff about childhood attachment to the characters he's working on several years into his career with the Disney ducks. Of course, by the time he was working for Egmont, it had probably actually become conceivable to him that he could do exactly that (which was his biggest dream, after all) for the rest of his career. When he worked for Gladstone, that prospect was on shakier ground. Going from memory, when Disney took over the comics publishing in 1990, Rosa needed to take on extra scripting and/or illustration jobs (like DuckTales comics!) outside of the stuff he wrote and drew himself. That was what led to his writing scripts for TaleSpin too, wasn't it?

[djnyr]

Jun 7, 2022 20:09:35 GMT Mesterius said:

Jun 6, 2022 22:16:42 GMT djnyr said:

Interesting -- I didn't know Rosa only started saying that stuff about childhood attachment to the characters he's working on several years into his career with the Disney ducks. Of course, by the time he was working for Egmont, it had probably actually become conceivable to him that he could do exactly that (which was his biggest dream, after all) for the rest of his career. When he worked for Gladstone, that prospect was on shakier ground. Going from memory, when Disney took over the comics publishing in 1990, Rosa needed to take on extra scripting and/or illustration jobs (like DuckTales comics!) outside of the stuff he wrote and drew himself. That was what led to his writing scripts for TaleSpin too, wasn't it?

I think Rosa may always have felt that way (i.e., the only characters really worth working with were those he'd formed a childhood bond with), but, as you say, he didn't really find himself in a position to do so until after the Life and Times made him the International Duck Loremaster in the eyes of so many fans.  Post LaT, he seemed to become more self-conscious about his position, and spent a lot more time explaining his positions on the characters' personalities, initially in places like the DCML and eventually in the stories themselves (as in "Beagle Boys versus the Money Bin", where he has the Beagles explicitly lay out his own notion that the Bin contains only Scrooge's "memory money.")  

Also, in response to your question--yes, I think it was the uncertainty in the post-Gladstone I era that led Rosa to dabble in Disney Afternoon-related projects.  I wouldn't want to lose his early Egmont work--I think he was at his artistic peak during that period--but I also wish he had worked a little more with the Cape Suzette characters and also maybe with Darkwing as well (his sense of physical humor and his knowledge of the older superhero comics, like the 1950s Superman, would have been a good fit for that show).  His first Caballeros story and first Black Knight story, two of my favorites from his later years (in both cases the sequels don't really work for me, though), show that even in his more self-conscious later years, he could get good results when he stepped outside his self-imposed limitations and worked with characters other than the core Duck cast, and more experience working outside those limits in the late 1980s/early 1990s could have made him more comfortable with going outside the box more often in his later years. 

I still like the idea of a new Life and Times chapter called "The Capitalist of Cape Suzette," by the way; if by some unlikely miracle Rosa could be persuaded to script it, it could combine both his themes and the Talespin character dynamics to very good effect.  Scrooge, who by then would be in his jerky, empire-building, grumpy lone-wolf phase from Chapter 11, would charter the Sea Duck to assist him in some venture or other; Baloo's carelessness and lack of ambition would irritate Scrooge (he could even give the bear an early version of his later ice-cream-soda lectures to Donald), while Becky would be initially eager to please the up-and-coming tycoon and would snap at Baloo for not making a better impression, but would eventually get impatient with Scrooge's outrageous penny-pinching and call him out over it.  Scrooge would be grumpy towards the kids at first, but would eventually come to see something of his young self in the ambitious Kit, while Molly would remind him of his sisters; you could get good pathos out of him recalling his more innocent years.  Scrooge would be competing with Khan, of course, and the air pirates could be worked in to the story as well; Scrooge would ultimately fail to obtain the prize he sought (a common motif in Rosa), but would have his neck saved by the efforts of the Higher for Hire crew, and a seed would be planted in his mind that maybe having the support of a loyal team for his ventures--whether hirelings like Khan, a criminal band like the pirates, or, best of all, a family unit like Higher for Hire--would help him in the future, foreshadowing his later family excursions with Donald and the Nephews.  Of course, you'd want to avoid any bogus Frank-Angones-style lectures on "family," but done right I think such a story could work very well.  

[That Duckfan]

Jun 8, 2022 11:04:36 GMT djnyr said:

Also, in response to your question--yes, I think it was the uncertainty in the post-Gladstone I era that led Rosa to dabble in Disney Afternoon-related projects.  I wouldn't want to lose his early Egmont work--I think he was at his artistic peak during that period--but I also wish he had worked a little more with the Cape Suzette characters and also maybe with Darkwing as well (his sense of physical humor and his knowledge of the older superhero comics, like the 1950s Superman, would have been a good fit for that show).  His first Caballeros story and first Black Knight story, two of my favorites from his later years (in both cases the sequels don't really work for me, though), show that even in his more self-conscious later years, he could get good results when he stepped outside his self-imposed limitations and worked with characters other than the core Duck cast, and more experience working outside those limits in the late 1980s/early 1990s could have made him more comfortable with going outside the box more often in his later years.

I agree with that, but I do think a closer collaboration with the Disney TV shows is something of a foregone conclusion. It's already apparent in Captain Kentucky that Rosa is very keen on artistic control. The comic medium just suits him better that way. I imagine that he was able to convince himself to work on TaleSpin when its Barksian influences became apparent to him, but ultimately the experience must have been a letdown. The fact that he never worked on DuckTales (save for that one comic story) is probably indicative of his views of the Disney Afternoon projects. As production on these shows progressed, they evolved away from Barks and from Rosa. His relationship with DuckTales has only soured as fans have routinely mistaken him for a DuckTales artist...

All this talk of Rosa is only confirming my belief that a full Rosa retrospective is well overdue. The only English-language retrospective I know is Matthias DeRider's aborted series of blog posts, which is now almost a decade old. Still, it's a heck of an undertaking, and you or I likely wouldn't get to it any time soon.

[Mesterius]

Jun 8, 2022 15:34:12 GMT That Duckfan said:

Jun 8, 2022 11:04:36 GMT djnyr said:

Also, in response to your question--yes, I think it was the uncertainty in the post-Gladstone I era that led Rosa to dabble in Disney Afternoon-related projects.  I wouldn't want to lose his early Egmont work--I think he was at his artistic peak during that period--but I also wish he had worked a little more with the Cape Suzette characters and also maybe with Darkwing as well (his sense of physical humor and his knowledge of the older superhero comics, like the 1950s Superman, would have been a good fit for that show).  His first Caballeros story and first Black Knight story, two of my favorites from his later years (in both cases the sequels don't really work for me, though), show that even in his more self-conscious later years, he could get good results when he stepped outside his self-imposed limitations and worked with characters other than the core Duck cast, and more experience working outside those limits in the late 1980s/early 1990s could have made him more comfortable with going outside the box more often in his later years.

I agree with that, but I do think a closer collaboration with the Disney TV shows is something of a foregone conclusion. It's already apparent in Captain Kentucky that Rosa is very keen on artistic control. The comic medium just suits him better that way. I imagine that he was able to convince himself to work on TaleSpin when its Barksian influences became apparent to him, but ultimately the experience must have been a letdown. The fact that he never worked on DuckTales (save for that one comic story) is probably indicative of his views of the Disney Afternoon projects. As production on these shows progressed, they evolved away from Barks and from Rosa. His relationship with DuckTales has only soured as fans have routinely mistaken him for a DuckTales artist...

DuckTales was winding down production by the time Rosa got into the DA world, so I don't think he'd have worked on it in any case. Nor do I really picture that he would have wanted to, even in Season 1 when it had at least a bit more Barksian influence than later. When you're that attached to the original version of a creative universe, it's hard to accept all the changes a project like DuckTales makes to it.

As for that one DuckTales comics story... it's been years, but I remember the opening of Rosa's notes on it in the Scandinavian Hall of Fame (paraphrased): "Let me explain. I needed the money."

[djnyr]

Jun 8, 2022 15:34:12 GMT That Duckfan said:

Jun 8, 2022 11:04:36 GMT djnyr said:

I agree with that, but I do think a closer collaboration with the Disney TV shows is something of a foregone conclusion. It's already apparent in Captain Kentucky that Rosa is very keen on artistic control. The comic medium just suits him better that way. I imagine that he was able to convince himself to work on TaleSpin when its Barksian influences became apparent to him, but ultimately the experience must have been a letdown. The fact that he never worked on DuckTales (save for that one comic story) is probably indicative of his views of the Disney Afternoon projects. As production on these shows progressed, they evolved away from Barks and from Rosa. His relationship with DuckTales has only soured as fans have routinely mistaken him for a DuckTales artist...

All this talk of Rosa is only confirming my belief that a full Rosa retrospective is well overdue. The only English-language retrospective I know is Matthias DeRider's aborted series of blog posts, which is now almost a decade old. Still, it's a heck of an undertaking, and you or I likely wouldn't get to it any time soon.

In re Rosa's keenness on artistic control: I recall another old DCML discussion of whether a writer/artist duo could turn out comics on the same level as comics that were the work of a single artist; Rosa was very skeptical of the idea that a collaboration could be compared to a solo work, even when several of the European contributors invoked Uderzo and Goscinny.  He was never fated to last long in a collaborative medium like television animation; Barks also, of course, got tired of all the changes that were invariably made to his original storyboards when he worked in animation, although he would frequently mention how much he learned through his time in Studio story conferences.  

A Rosa retrospective would be a good idea (it's funny how he invariably shows up in every thread sooner or later--there were also a lot of Rosa tangents in the Ducktales 2017 thread); I'd be interested in contributing to such a thread, but not for a while; I still have three more episodes and the four-part pilot to cover before I'm officially halfway through Talespin.  

[djnyr]

Spin It! Part 5--Episodes

XXVI. “Vowel Play”

Kit is experiencing difficulty with spelling in school, but Baloo assures him that “spelling is like darts: close is good enough.” Becky, however, has decided to start hiring out the Sea Duck for skywriting assignments, which puts a strain on Baloo’s own very shaky spelling ability. However, in spite of Baloo’s erratic handling of his skywriting assignments, Higher for Hire quickly acquires a recurring client, a Mr. Weasel, who repeatedly requests apparently meaningless skywritten messages. These messages are really coded communications between master criminal Heimlich Minudo and his gang, who are plotting a tremendous diamond heist. Detective Thursday, of the Cape Suzette police force, gets on the track of the skywritten messages, and ultimately recruits Baloo to help him defeat Minudo’s plot by skywriting some substituted messages—a task which will require Baloo and Kit to be better than “close” with their spelling.


“Vowel Play” was edited by the familiar team of Ken Koonce and David Weimers, but was written by Dean Stefan, who would go on to a lengthy career as a TV animation writer (on the Disney Afternoon and elsewhere) but who was a relative newcomer to the field at the time of this episode. He had, however, written for several episodes of The Smurfs and a few other late-1980s cartoon series, and there is definitely an 80s Saturday-morning-cartoon feel to the didactic basic structure of this episode; it follows the old Saturday-morning throughline of “Hero is Indifferent to Something Useful and Beneficial, and must Learn how Important it Really Is so he can Beat the Villains.”

However, the didacticism of “Vowel Play” is mixed with enough energy, humor and wordplay to prevent said didacticism from leaving a nauseating aftertaste; in this regard it resembles some of Vic Lockman’s better Western Publishing stories, in which Lockman’s moralizing tendencies were mitigated by his tendencies towards buoyantly quirky dialogue and situations. “Vowel Play’s” many examples of exuberantly eccentric humor include the running gag about the pronunciation of Weasel’s name (“It’s We-zel!”), which owes something to a recurring joke in W. C. Fields’ films, Baloo’s ingeniously slovenly misspelling (like rendering “Joe’s” as “Joze”), the absurd laundromat secret entrance to Detective Thursday’s headquarters (probably an allusion to the tailor-shop secret entrance on Man From U.N.C.L.E.), the spelling-based third degree to which Thursday subjects Baloo, and the misunderstanding Becky and Baloo (who think Baloo is in trouble for his atrocious spelling), visual jokes like the gem-loving Minudo’s diamond teeth, and the weirdly inevitable way in which Baloo keeps managing to lose his skywriting instructions (even after Becky has stapled the instructions to his jacket).

  

Using skywriting as the vehicle for the episode’s spelling theme is another one of its good points; after two episodes in a row (“Baloo Switcheroo” and “Balooest of the Bluebloods”) which used standard television plots that could have easily worked with any set of characters, it’s nice to have an aviation-specific story again. The skywriting idea also fits neatly into the established character dynamics; it feels like just the kind of offbeat business notion that Becky would come up with, and it’s also just the type of boutique idea that the earthy Baloo would grumble about even if it didn’t tax his spelling abilities.

Using the skywriting as a basis for a villainous code was also a neat way of tying the spelling theme into an adventure/action story, but it has to be said that while Heimlich Minudo’s communication system is clever, his master plan, the “Heimlich Manuever” (threatening Cape Suzette with bombing by a fleet of dirigibles unless the city hands over all its diamonds to him) is not terribly ingenious, nor, upon examination, very plausible; the amount of money it would have presumably have taken to build his enormous dirigible fleet and recruit and train his criminal pilots could probably have bought him most of the diamonds he sought without taking all that trouble (but then, you could make the same criticism of many other master criminals).
  
Heimlich Minudo himself is nicely designed (a large leopard clad in the over-dressy style of a 1930s mob boss) and is voiced with bombastic energy and a hybrid German/Italian accent by Kenneth Mars, a face/voice actor best known for playing the deranged N@zi playwright Franz in the original The Producers. Some Talespin fans have lamented the fact that Minudo never made a return engagement, but although he’s entertaining enough, his flamboyantly narcissistic mannerisms and eccentric accent make him rather similar to Don Karnage, and I think he would have felt redundant as a recurring villain unless he had been developed further. The biggest difference between the two heavies (and the only real reason that Karnage himself wouldn’t have worked in this episode) is that Minudo, until he launches his dirigible raid, operates secretively and relies on intricate schemes, while Karnage prefers to perpetrate his crimes in the spotlight from start to finish and relies more on shock and awe than on strategy. Minudo’s henchman Weasel (sorry, We-zel), who, like Minudo himself, is functionally amusing but not terribly distinctive overall, is voiced by comedian David Lander, like Mars an actor with experience in both face and voice acting. The rest of Minudo’s gang are a legion of near-identical raccoons whose identicalness, and invariable masks, provide an echo of the Beagle Boys.


The most memorable guest character of the episode is the dogged Thursday, a small but determined canine detective with a gruff, somewhat Bogart-like voice (provided by Jack Angel), who comes off as both competent and funny. His dogged (pun intended) no-nonsense attitude serves as a good counterpoint to the eccentricity around him, and also makes his interactions with that eccentricity quite amusing (like his awkward efforts to navigate the secret entrance or his disgusted reaction to Baloo’s report cards). His personality, unlike that of the villains, is distinctive beyond the needs of the plot, and I would have liked to have seen him again in the series.


Thanks to its sustained quirky humor, “Vowel Play” maintains a breezy, whimsical tone throughout, and effectively minimize its Saturday-morning didacticism; even though Baloo finishes the episode by directly stating the moral (“Close isn’t good enough” when it comes to spelling), we go out with a smile on our face thanks to all the humor along the way. Besides, averse to didacticism though I am, I have to admit that I learned something new thanks to the episode (the more obscure second part of the “I before E except after C” rhyme—“Or when sounding like ‘a’ as in neighbor or weigh” which Kit remembers at a crucial point during the finale; I recall wondering as a kid why words like “weigh” apparently didn’t follow the rule, but never really getting an answer other than “well, it’s an exception.”).

XXVII. “Last Horizons”

Cape Suzette hosts a parade for famed explorer Monty Mangrove; Baloo, feeling like a “nobody” compared to the celebrated adventurer, and wanting to make Kit proud of him, decides to do some exploring of his own and sets out to find the fabled hidden city of Panda-La, which he once glimpsed from the air many years ago. He manages to find the city, deep in the remote mountains, and is feted by its apparently friendly inhabitants. He returns to impress Cape Suzette with the tale of his discovery, but finds himself faced with a battle instead of a parade; the pandas of Panda-La, who are really warlike conquerors, have followed him to Cape Suzette in their own airships and are now demanding the surrender of the city. Cape Suzette’s defenses are no match for the pandas’ ingenious weaponry, but Baloo, who has an idea of how those weapons work, mounts a desperate defense of his own, hoping to make amends for precipitating this invasion.


Written by Jeremy Cushner, Chuck Tately, and Dev Ross, and edited by Mark Zaslove, “Last Horizons” is the most adventurous and exciting episode since “Whistlestop Jackson, Legend,” but fails to coalesce as satisfactorily as that episode did; it’s full of good ideas, good moments, and good visuals, but is just too overcrowded for its own good. The multiplicity of writers makes me suspect that, like another episode we have yet to review (“Gruel and Unusual Punishment”), “Horizons” may have been originally pitched as a two-parter and then pared down. Certainly, it would have worked much better as a two-parter, with more room to work out its intriguing plot threads and also more space in which to remedy several plot holes. For example, the pandas’ behavior gives rise to an obvious but unanswered question: if they are this warlike, why haven’t they attacked the outside world long before this? This could have been addressed by having Baloo’s arrival in Panda-La somehow free the pandas from externally imposed isolation—perhaps by dislodging boulders from a long-obstructed mountain pass—but there’s simply no time to spend on such matters; the writers have to get Baloo to Panda-La, introduce the city’s leader Wan Lo, drop clues as to the pandas’ secret weapon, get Baloo back to Cape Suzette, and begin the attack on the city within the first ten minutes of the episode.

Similarly, the sequence in which Kit, Becky, Wildcat, and Louie all show up to help Baloo in his desperate bid to defeat the pandas, after he has sadly concluded that his friends have deserted him, could have had real emotional and dramatic punch if each character’s entrance had been spaced out a little, but as it is, they pop up so rapidly that the sequence becomes more humorous than stirring, and also raises questions of logic (the issue of how Wildcat managed to get aboard the pandas’ airship is particularly vexing, since he couldn’t possibly have stowed away on the Sea Duck—we see him watching it take off).


It’s a pity that “Horizons” is so rushed in its execution, since it’s very solid in concept. For one thing, the script allows the plot to develop out of the characters’ personalities, rather than sticking them into a standardized situation. Having Baloo be spurred into his search for Panda-La by his desire to be “somebody” is very much in keeping with the repressed insecurity that we’ve repeatedly seen beneath his casual cheerfulness, in episodes like “From Here to Machinery” and “Wing and a Bear”; you get the sense that, deep down, Baloo knows he’s not made as much of his abilities as he should have, and wants to put to rest the nagging feeling that he’s really just a talented but purposeless layabout. Kit’s silent protestation that Baloo is already “somebody” to him is also a good character beat. Becky’s initial dismissiveness of Baloo’s tale of Panda-La and her unfavorable comparisons of him to Monty Mangrove feel a bit harsh but completely in-character; as she has to deal with Baloo’s elaborate excuses and perpetual laziness on a daily basis, we wouldn’t expect her to credit his yarns or acknowledge that him as a “great man” on a par with Mangrove.


The episode’s antagonists are also interesting, if not fully developed. Having the apparently peaceful folk of Panda-La turn out to be aggressive conquerors entertainingly spoofs the Asian Mountain Utopia trope (which Barks also spoofed, albeit more subtly, in “Tralla La”), and also makes for an amusing reversal of the popular image of pandas as cuddly and generally adorable. Gregory Weagle maintains that the episode’s use of Asian-coded villains caused the episode to be protested by Asian-American groups and pulled from syndication, but I have not found any independent substantiation of this claim and I take it with several grains of salt; I know the episode aired on ToonDisney, which was not at all shy about editing or simply never airing cartoons deemed problematic, and I find it hard to believe it appeared there and not elsewhere. I have heard it rumored among those who have DisneyPlus that “Horizons” is missing there, but I cannot independently confirm this either, and if the episode has in fact been withheld from streaming, I suspect that this was more due to Disney’s ongoing courtship of the Chinese market rather than any residual outcry from the episode’s original airing.

In any case, the pandas, though villains, do not really embody any familiar “Oriental villain” stereotype; their mountain city of course suggests Tibet, while their costumes are basically Chinese—but their fierce, straightforwardly militaristic villainy is quite at odds with the surreptitious, emotionless and shadowy “Fu Manchu” Chinese villain trope. The writers are also careful to have the pandas’ leader Wan Lo proclaim that “good pandas especially despise us,” emphatically making it clear that the denizens of Panda-La are outlaws among their own kind. It would have been interesting, though, to have seen the pandas developed more as individuals—here, again, a two-parter would have improved things; for example, we get only a brief glimpse of Wan Lo’s cute and playful little daughter, but in a longer episode there would have been time to use her to illustrate that not all the people of Panda La are villainous (perhaps by having her develop a friendship with Molly, who is absent from the actual episode). Wan Lo’s sons are also very lightly sketched, with the animation giving only a vague idea of their personalities (one appears to be large but clumsy, the other small but tough). Wan Lo himself is an entertaining villain, however, thanks in part to the strong voice work of Robert Ito, a Japanese-Canadian actor with lots of experience in both face and voice acting. Ito makes the panda warlord sound cunning, dignified, and sinister, but also is able to unbend humorously when the script requires (as in his reaction to the failure of his secret weapon: “The rockets aren’t working!” “I know that! Why do you think I’m hopping up and down?”). More overtly villainous than Khan, far less manic than Karnage, and much more competent than Spigot, Wan Lo doesn’t feel (unlike Minudo in the prior episode) like a mere retread of one of the regular antagonists.



Although Wan Lo’s daughter is not developed as a character, the writers do cleverly use her to provide Baloo and the audience with a clue to the pandas’ secret weapon. Said weapon—heat-seeking explosive rocketry--is a clever gimmick, while the gambit which Baloo uses to counter it (masking the Sea Duck’s engine with frozen goods and tossing out lighted sticks of dynamite to distract the rockets) is also clever, as well as visually amusing. The pandas’ ornate hot-air balloons also provide some nice visuals, making an interesting change from the show’s usual heavier-than-air aircraft, and also making the Panda-La invasion fleet look suitably alien. The initial air battle between Cape Suzette’s air force and the pandas’ balloons, and Baloo’s later one-plane assault on the invaders in the Sea Duck, are excitingly and vividly animated, with the usual strong musical accompaniment. The final takedown of the panda armada is also strongly animated and scored, with Baloo apparently sacrificing himself and the Sea Duck to lead rockets into the armory of Wan Lo’s flagship and blow it up. The other characters’ reaction to this sacrifice is moving, although, as with other promising moments, somewhat truncated; there’s barely time for Becky and Kit to start to mourn Baloo before Louie spots that he’s survived after all.
 
 

“Last Horizons” has all the elements necessary to make a great Talespin episode—effective character touches, a good villain, exciting aerial action, humor, and colorful visuals—but although those elements make the episode fun to watch, they never quite come together satisfactorily, thanks to the hurried and overcrowded narrative structure of the story.  

Up Next: “Feminine Air”

[djnyr]

Spin It! Part 5--Episodes

XXVIII. “Feminine Air”

The loudmouthed and misogynistic pilot Cool Hands Luke, the regular winner of the yearly Great Air Scavenger Hunt, has been baiting Baloo incessantly about working for a “rookie, non-pilot female,” and has also been poaching clients from Becky by using the same line of criticism. Baloo, determined to show up Luke, sets out to compete in the Scavenger Hunt, while Becky begins hatching her own plan to silence Luke’s jeers. Unable to find any other aviation club to sponsor him in the race, thanks to Luke’s badmouthing, Baloo disguises himself as a woman (“Tan Margaret”) in order to obtain the sponsorship of an all-female airplane club called the Daughters of Aviation. Becky simultaneously enters the Sea Duck in the race under the aegis of the Daughters, hoping to take Luke down a peg by beating him with a female pilot and navigator. “Tan” winds up being assigned to pilot the Duck, while Becky herself does the navigating; the duo must then work together to defeat Luke, whose underhanded cheating and unexpected violent crush on “Tan” combine to make the Scavenger Hunt a frenetic experience for all concerned.


“Feminine Air” was co-written by Julia Lewald and Bruce Talkington, with Talkington also serving as editor; Lewald (as writer) and Talkington (as editor) were also responsible for the earlier episode “All’s Whale that Ends Whale,” with which “Air” has several points in common. Like “Whale,” “Air” was obviously intended to Send a Message (in the prior episode, “save the whales;” in this episode, “women can excel in male-dominated fields”) but, as in “Whale,” Lewald and Talkington avoid turning the characters into mere puppets of the message and keep them (mostly) in-character. In fact, “Air” improves on “Whale” in this regard; the characters’ motives for entering the Scavenger Hunt (Baloo to vindicate his reputation as a flyer, Becky to boost her business) are much more firmly tied to the characters’ usual preoccupations and personalities than the rescue of Moby Dimple was in “Whale.”

Still, some of the ways in which the episode’s point is put across are rather silly—like having Becky use nail files and silk stockings to obtain key items during the scavenger hunt. Showing stereotypically feminine items to be useful in a stereotypically masculine context appears to have been intended to underline, by metaphor, the point that a woman can handle “man’s work”, but the point could have been made a lot more simply and effectively by having Becky make competent use of more useful equipment—axes, ropes, etc.; having her rely on repurposed vanity items for the scavenger hunt doesn’t make her seem terribly well-prepared and somewhat undercuts the attempted point.  However, the stockings and the nail file do later figure, less absurdly, in her final exposure of Luke’s cheating, so they did have to be planted somehow earlier in the episode . Becky's use of a broom to knock Luke’s disabling magnet off the nose of the Sea Duck works better, as it’s an impromptu reaction to an unexpected problem— and also goes beyond mere underlining of the general theme of the episode to give us a good illustration of both Becky and Baloo’s personalities. Becky’s unorthodox but effective method of removing the threat is very much in keeping with the outside-the-box thinking that is a key part of her personality, while her lack of a plan for saving herself after she’s saved the plane is a good example of the impracticality that’s the flip side of her ingenuity; her dialogue—“Okay, how would they handle this in business school? They’d fall!”) is a very funny acknowledgment of the experiential gaps in her white-collar background. Baloo, after being momentarily panicked by the unexpected loss of control over his “baby,” the Sea Duck (another very character-appropriate reaction) then demonstrates his own strengths by executing a spectacular piece of flying to get Becky inside the plane.
 

By having the characters work together in this fashion, Lewald and Talkington avoid turning the scenario into a simplistic “boys versus girls” morality play--unlike certain Original Ducktales episodes (“Merit-Time Adventure” and “New Gizmo-Kids on the Block” being the most egregious examples), which attempted to allow Webby to shine, but threw undeserved shade on the Nephews in the process by making them behave in uncharacteristically jerky and incompetent fashion. The writers of “Air”, by contrast, are sophisticated enough to craft a story that allows Becky to demonstrate her strengths without denying the existence of Baloo’s usual strengths; despite the farcical aspects of his female impersonation, his flying skill is on display right alongside Becky’s resourcefulness, as in the abovementioned action scene with the magnet. Between the magnet sequence and the final scene, in which Baloo thanks Becky and admits “I learned a lot today” and Becky replies by indicating that she saw through Baloo’s disguise all along and expressing gratitude for his help (“Only a fool wouldn’t recognize her best friend”), the episode winds up going beyond a generic “Girls Can Do Stuff” moral to make a more character-specific point—namely, that Baloo and Becky need each other’s strengths, and that those strengths (Becky’s determination and inventiveness and Baloo’s experience and skill) actually make them a really good team.


The villain of the episode is less skillfully delineated than the protagonists. Cool Hands Luke, a bombastically boorish polar bear with a “dem, dese and dose” accent and a bad case of five o’clock shadow, is amusingly designed and amusingly voiced (by Ron Feinberg), but the combination of drawing and vocals makes him seem such a thuggish buffoon that the efforts to present him as a genuine threat to Higher for Hire’s business feel contrived. It’s hard to believe that anyone would take Luke seriously enough for his smear campaign against Higher for Hire to gain much traction; the only client that we see being poached by Luke—a fussy, well-dressed rabbit—really doesn’t seem like the type to be impressed by such an extremely sloppy and lumpish cargo shipper, even if the alternative is a “rookie, non-pilot female.” Even if you could accept that misogyny would invariably prevail over socioeconomic snobbery and make prospective shipping clients choose Luke over Becky, it still remains difficult to accept that the polar bear wields enough clout to turn every aviation club in Cape Suzette against Baloo, given how other episodes (like “From Here to Machinery”) have shown that Baloo is considered a top man in his field.


We could assume that Cool Hands’ repeated triumphs in the Scavenger Hunt have made him respected enough to be listened to by the aviation community, but, again, it’s hard to believe that the thick-witted, loudmouthed lout we’re shown in the episode has successfully managed to hide his cheating for years and convince everyone he’s a top flyer. The villain in this episode should have been a more persuasive and presentable type (along the lines of Covington in “Molly Coddled”) whose repeated success at cheating and manipulation of popular opinion would have been a lot easier to credit. Having a smoother and more poised villain improbably fall head over heels for the decidedly rough-hewn and ungraceful “Tan-Margaret” would also have been even funnier than seeing the slovenly Luke do so, although the contrast between Luke’s Pete-like patois and romantic rhapsodies (“Let me escort you to your craft, my angel of all things wonderful”) is pretty funny itself. Incidentally, the fact that the misogynistic Cool Hands is only capable of respecting a woman (as he thinks) who’s capable of punching him out provides a nice satirical indictment of the mindset, noticeable in certain contemporary male filmmakers (Joss Whedon, J.J. Abrams, Frank Angones), that the only strong female characters worthy of respect are those who can beat up everyone in sight. Becky more or less directly rebukes this “strength=kickass” mindset as well, in her dialogue towards the end: “We’re going to win this contest like ladies—with our brains.”

 
The Scavenger Hunt itself is fairly perfunctory, with amusing but easily-solvable clues, and is essentially just there to give Becky and Baloo some busywork until the above-mentioned third-act action scene with the magnetized plane—which is a well-animated piece of action, as well as a good showcase of both lead characters’ personalities. The paper airplane contest at the beginning of the episode provides a nice little foreshadowing of the climactic action, with Luke’s bad sportsmanship beating the other competitors until Baloo’s superior maneuvering vanquishes him. Kit has little to do beyond acting as starter for the paper airplane competition and serving as Baloo’s sounding board in the earlier scenes of the episodes, and the other regulars do not appear. Among the incidental characters, the most memorable are the goat official in charge of the Scavenger Hunt (who indulges in an amusing if slightly jarring bit of de-anthropomorphizing humor by casually snacking on a piece of his couch) and Mary Lamb, the ovine representative of the Daughters of Aviation, whose firm but kindly voice and slightly old-fashioned aviatrix outfit create the impression of a ladylike but very capable character, rather like Grandma Duck if she went into the aviation arena.


A more credible villain would have made the central conflict in “Feminine Air” feel a lot more like a genuine existential crisis for Becky and her business, lending greater weight to Higher for Hire’s triumph and making the episode’s point about Becky’s capabilities that much stronger. However, although the competition with the clownish Cool Hands Luke never feels truly urgent, it is fun to watch Becky and Baloo work together during that competition and show some respect for the other for a change, without seeming out of character. The episode’s solid grasp on the two leading regulars is what ultimately makes it work, despite the air of contrivance that hangs about its plot setup.

Up Next: "Plunder and Lightning," the series pilot.  Although it was divided into four episodes on the Disney Afternoon, I will be reviewing "Plunder" in one long entry, since it's really a single movie in terms of pacing and plot structure, much more so than the episodic Original Ducktales pilot was.  

[Mesterius]

Jul 4, 2022 22:35:57 GMT djnyr said:

Up Next: "Plunder and Lightning," the series pilot.  Although it was divided into four episodes on the Disney Afternoon, I will be reviewing "Plunder" in one long entry, since it's really a single movie in terms of pacing and plot structure, much more so than the episodic Original Ducktales pilot was.  

The word "pilot episode" is one of the most misunderstood on the internet, so I don't blame you for getting it mixed up, but I still feel like saying this: None of the introductory movies/serial stories for DuckTales, TaleSpin, Chip 'n' Dale Rescue Rangers etc. are "pilots". They are introductory stories, yes, but not "series pilots" or "pilot episodes". A pilot isn't necessarily the episode that sets up a series plot-wise -- in fact, that has nothing to do with what "pilot" means, even though most people think it does. A pilot is an episode that is produced in order to test the waters for the full series. In many cases, the pilot gets aired on TV by itself long before the regular series premiere (as in, half a year or more before); in other cases, it's screened internally for producers and execs. Whatever the specifics, though, a pilot refers to the episode in question being produced before the commitment is made to do the series. This doesn't apply to any of the opening stories for the Disney Afternoon shows -- those movies/episodes were all produced long AFTER the shows entered full-fledged production, and after the cast and crew had already aquainted themselves with the characters and format through a bunch of regular half-hour episodes. If TaleSpin really has a "pilot episode", it's probably "I Only Have Ice For You".

[djnyr]

You're right, and I had intended to make a similar point when I write my full "Plunder and Lightning" piece--i.e., that the Disney Afternoon introductory episodes aren't really "pilot" episodes in the traditional television sense. I tend to think of "pilots" as the episodes that (1) sell the show to executives and (2) introduce the show to the audience, but only (2) applies to the Disney Afternoon shows, and, as you say, introducing the show to the audience is not really the precise function of a pilot episode. In some ways, the fact that the Disney Afternoon introductory episodes weren't real pilots worked to the series' advantage; a lot of actual pilot episodes can tend to feel like a first draft of the subsequent series, since the writers and producers may not fully have a grip on their characters, or may even be deliberately playing up or playing down some elements they've planned for the series in order to appeal to the executives more. The pilot episode of the original Perry Mason show, for example, features a lot more action and gunplay than the rest of the series did, evidently because the production crew wanted to reassure the network execs that the show would be "exciting." "Plunder and Lightning" and the rest of the Disney Afternoon pilots, on the other hand, were--as you point out--done after the crew knew who the characters were, and were also made at a point in the process when the crew didn't need to impress the execs, only the audiences.

[Mesterius]

Jul 5, 2022 9:58:50 GMT djnyr said:

You're right, and I had intended to make a similar point when I write my full "Plunder and Lightning" piece--i.e., that the Disney Afternoon introductory episodes aren't really "pilot" episodes in the traditional television sense. I tend to think of "pilots" as the episodes that (1) sell the show to executives and (2) introduce the show to the audience, but only (2) applies to the Disney Afternoon shows, and, as you say, introducing the show to the audience is not really the precise function of a pilot episode.

(1) is what a pilot episode actually is, not (2). I know a lot of people also think of (2) as a pilot, but that's where the misunderstanding lies. I think the confusion came about because in a number of cases, a pilot episode DOES also set up the show and introduce the main character(s), and even ends up being designated as 'episode 1' when the full series gets produced and broadcast. From my impression, this is true of many live-action shows in particular, like the pilot episode for the original "MacGyver". So people watch episode 1 of a series, read somewhere that it's also the pilot, and think, "Aha! So a pilot episode is the first/introductory episode of a show." Nope -- the pilot episode just HAPPENS to also be the first or introductory episode of SOME shows. But not  Disney cartoon shows like DuckTales, TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck and so on.

Of course, it doesn't help the misunderstanding any that an official DVD edition like DuckTales Volume 2 describes that show's introductory storyline as "pilot" on the cover. But it's still not correct.

Jul 5, 2022 9:58:50 GMT djnyr said:

In some ways, the fact that the Disney Afternoon introductory episodes weren't real pilots worked to the series' advantage; a lot of actual pilot episodes can tend to feel like a first draft of the subsequent series, since the writers and producers may not fully have a grip on their characters, or may even be deliberately playing up or playing down some elements they've planned for the series in order to appeal to the executives more. The pilot episode of the original Perry Mason show, for example, features a lot more action and gunplay than the rest of the series did, evidently because the production crew wanted to reassure the network execs that the show would be "exciting." "Plunder and Lightning" and the rest of the Disney Afternoon pilots, on the other hand, were--as you point out--done after the crew knew who the characters were, and also didn't need to impress the execs, only the audiences.

I think what you're remarking here is exactly why Disney TVA waited with doing the opening storylines for the syndicated shows until they were well into production. They wanted to work out the series' quirks and get to know the characters in the first few episodes they did, and then have the introductory movies/episodes show off the series at their very best. Regarding TaleSpin's actual "pilot episode", I don't really know enough about its history to say if "I Only Have Ice For You" was done separately from all the other early-produced episodes. But it certainly FELT like a pilot episode to me, which is part of why I found it interesting to watch. In addition to Don Karnage really being played up as a grand, imposing villain (as I mentioned earlier), there's also a very explicit focus on the relationship between Baloo and Rebecca, which can be said to be the heart of the show.

[Mesterius]

By the way... will you be reviewing the actual movie version of "Plunder & Lightning", i.e. the version that originally aired on the Disney Channel as a movie in 1990? I'm asking because (as I'm sure you know) the opening movie for TaleSpin has more significant differences from the episode edits than any other of the opening storylines for the Disney shows. The movie contains an entire song sequence that didn't make it into the episode version - "Home Is Where the Heart Is" - as well as numerous smaller shots and moments that were also cut from the episodes (due to the serialized version only filling 4 half-hour episodes rather than 5). On the other hand, there is at least one scene of slapstick business with Baloo, Kit and some thugs in Don Karnage's lair in the episodic version that is not included in the movie version. Clearly, both versions were done fairly simultaneously, but I think the movie cut is the more interesting here, and also feels more epic in scope. It's a pity that the movie version of "Plunder & Lightning" has never been released on home video at all... I doubt executives at Disney are even aware of how much footage viewers are missing out on in this particular case, with the episode edits being all that is available.

[Matilda]

Why would Becky even own stockings? Doesn't she wear pants virtually all the time?

I get irritated by the stories that have female characters win/succeed by means of stereotypically feminine accessories or activities...it brings me back to the Disney comics of my youth, where girls would occasionally win by using their gurl skillz. Sewing! Cooking! Long fingernails! This was true in stories of Junior Woodchucks and female scouts in the late 1960's and 1970's and even lasted into the JW stories of the 1980's in Italy. As you say, they could have shown Becky succeeding by her brains, not by virtue of some element of The World That Only Ladies Know. Those plots may let the girl/woman win, but they don't truly put the female characters on a level with the male characters.