Remember that Webby is a fanatic about Clac McDuck - especially Scrooge. We know that she is a clone of him and something sounded familliar - Flash Memory. maiby she has some fragmenst of his memories due the cloning process?
Or i am completly wrong here?
Webby is searching for clues about herself but thinks its about Scrooge instead?
Lieutenant General Fredrik The Global Network Community The Junior Woodchucks - rank of brigadier general( a roleplay liveaction group ) --------------------------------------- Need information about the Duck family tree? check this out: goofy313g.free.fr/calisota_online/trees/ducktrees/myducktree.pdf
"I come to bury Ducktales 2017, not to praise it."
#6—Trading on Unearned Goodwill
I was going to do a short entry covering several minor miscellaneous characters, but realized that the points that I wanted to make about them fit well with the larger point of this section.
I’ve already touched on this theme at several points in my dissections of the characters, but I want to develop it at more length: Namely, New Ducktales’ ubiquitous references to Barks, Rosa, and the Disney Afternoon—the type of shout-outs which have come to be known as “Easter Eggs”, which I have also referred to as “Nostalgia Bait,” and which, by any name, caused pervasive problems for New Ducktales on several levels.
A. Bootless Reboot, Useless Boost
The first problem with the incessant Easter-egging was that it betrayed an embarrassing lack of confidence in New Ducktales’ self-avowed “different direction” (to quote the Disney employee who told Terry McGovern that McGovern wouldn’t be returning to his Launchpad role). Angones and company recast the voices of characters like Launchpad, Don Karnage, Steelbeak, and Darkwing, despite their voice actors still being active, and made major, often comprehensive, changes to almost every character whom they adapted from another source—as we’ve been discussing in the preceding pages of this thread. In other words, they behaved like people who have set out to Boldly Reimagine ™ an established franchise, with new, alternative takes on the characters.
However, due either to a justified lack of confidence in their own poorly conceived new ideas (which I’ve analyzed in depth in the preceding pages), or to a cynical desire to capitalize on the nostalgia of comics fans and Disney Afternoon devotees, or (most likely) a combination of both, Angones and his crew also took every opportunity to link their rebooted characters to their radically different original versions, in the process reminding us of the superiority of the original versions. The new Gyro, though an entirely different character from the Gyro of the comics or Original Ducktales, reviews a list of inventions created by the Original Ducktales Gyro. The new Ludwig, though placed in an entirely new context and role, still recites a ditty from his original animated appearance. The new Kit Cloudkicker’s background is filled in by a video crowded with visual allusions to the original Talespin opening credits. The new Nephews are shown in a “photograph” that mirrors the classic Barks “inner tube” cover/painting. New Scrooge is referred to by titles drawn from Rosa’s Life and Times chapters. I could go on listing examples for twenty more paragraphs, since every episode had at least one such “Easter egg,” and usually many more than one.
Angones’ Tumblr page and other interactions with fans were also peppered with the same cynical and/or insecure efforts to siphon off the goodwill of the original characters and use it to boost the unappealing reboot versions, by claiming that they were logical extensions of the original versions—resulting in bizarre and unbelievable assertions--like the comment about Original Gyro’s alleged “dark and deadpan” moments, the insistence that the new Steelbeak was just learning the ropes and was on his way towards becoming the original version of the character, the description of the new Blot as being partly based on the original Gottfredson Blot, or the claim that Don Karnage was a descendant of the original one and that there was a great unused pitch which would have explained what happened to the earlier Karnage and to Baloo. Even when Angones admitted that he had taken a character in an entirely unprecedented direction, he tried to pretend that he did so because of carefully considered analysis of the weaknesses of the original version, rather than admitting that he just chose to throw out the old character in order to mimic some other franchise’s characters—the prime example being the nonsense about how the need to eliminate Goldie’s “pining” for Scrooge necessitated turning her into an immortal version of Catwoman.
By trying to have it both ways—i.e., play around with radically revised versions of the characters while simultaneously capitalizing on the appeal of the old ones—Angones invited constant comparisons with the older versions that would have been disconcerting, and would have made the new versions hard to judge on their own merits, even if the new versions had been more interesting. Given the marked inferiority of the rebooted characters, the Easter-egging provided no boost and instead served as a truly painful reminder of how much better the old ones were—engendering that much more resentment of the various alterations.
B. Ah, Barks!
Besides painfully demonstrating the shallowness and wrongheadedness of the new versions of the Ducks and the other characters, the constant parade of Easter eggs felt more than a little insulting to devoted fans of the old versions--it created the impression that Angones thought such fans could be dazzled into admiration of New Ducktales through a barrage of extensive but surface-level references.
Bits like Bradford’s rattling-off of place-names from Rosa’s stories in “Great Dime Chase,” the references to things like Plain Awful, Tralla La and bottle caps, “Duke Baloney,” the Solego Circuit, and “Danger Woman,” the appropriation of the Nephews’ introductory letter from their debut strip for Donald and Della in “The First Adventure”, the cameos by characters named Jones, Yellow Beak, Hazel, etc.--all of these felt frustratingly hollow, since in each case the reference had little or nothing to do with the character, place or story ostensibly being referenced. Anyone familiar enough with the source material to recognize this name-dropping was also likely to be fond enough of the source material to want to see it translated more intelligently and accurately to the screen.
Angones appeared to think, however, that the fan audiences he was trying to attract would be so dazzled by name-recognition that they’d be unable to note the hollowness of the nostalgia bait. It made me think of the famous MASH “Ah, Bach!” scene, where Radar tries to make a success of a date with a classical music enthusiast by using that single phrase as an all-purpose exclamation. If Angones really thought that effectively saying “Ah, Barks!” was going to deflect fan backlash against the show’s many wrong-headed creative choices, he must have had a low opinion of Duck fans.
That said, I suspect that the hollow Easter eggs were only partly targeted towards the preexisting fan community, whether fans of the Duck comics or the Disney Afternoon; they also were clearly being used to create an illusion of lore-mastery for New Ducktales fans unfamiliar with the comics, the type who might Google “Plain Awful” or “Yellow Beak” out of curiosity, find that the names came from the comics, and admiringly exclaim “Wow, the New Ducktales guys know so much about these old comics!” without investigating further. Still, these same fledgling fans would have been equally or even more impressed if there’d been some substance behind the references—and old-school fans wouldn’t have been as alienated, which sounds like a win for everyone except the Angones crew, who would have had to dive more deeply into their source material instead of skimming along the top, something they were repeatedly adverse to doing.
C. Was That Supposed to be a Joke?
I know there were some on this forum who found some of Angones’ many references, such as Jones, the “Barksian Modulator,” and Duke Baloney, amusing on a meta-level. However, I question the advisability of humor that is so meta that it takes a paragraph of analysis to get the in-joke and that is simply not funny on a simple, non-meta level. Also, I found the “jokes” in each of these cases to be more than a little tenuous.
For example, as GeoX pointed out on his blog, the “Barksian Modulator” didn’t work as a commentary on the differences between the cartoon Donald and the comics Donald, since it not only gave Donald a new voice but also changed him from a hapless clown to a hard-boiled tough guy who had little in common with either cartoon-Donald or comics-Donald. Even worse, unless you were amused by the attempted meta-joke, the Modulator scene was not at all funny and was in fact downright frustrating and distasteful, with the other characters’ inability to understand Donald becoming unbelievably exaggerated and with the gadget getting forcibly rammed into his throat.
The same is true of the appearance by “Jones.” Here, apparently the meta-joke was supposed to be that, while Original Jones was a source of anger to Donald, New Jones is Donald’s counselor and is helping him manage his anger. However, this represents the sacrifice of a tried-and-true, often very funny old joke for a weaker new one; the mild meta-humor of making Jones Donald’s anger management counselor doesn’t supply half of the laughs that an old-fashioned, entirely non-meta backyard battle between Donald and Jones could have (particularly since such antics are so well-suited to animation). Furthermore, the Jones-as-counselor joke isn’t funny on any level other than a meta one; to someone who doesn’t know the comics history of Jones, giving Donald anger issues that require a counselor (and are based in supposed insecurity about his voice, to boot) just succeeds in making this show’s mocked and downtrodden version of Donald seem that much more depressing and unhappy.
As for “Duke Baloney,” I suppose the use of the name was intended as a in-joke alluding to the fact that the Duke of Baloni was the comics’ second-richest duck before Glomgold appropriated the title—but, again, this mild joke was not nearly as much fun as introducing the Duke himself could have been; I like the idea of adding a genteel, aristocratic, old-money richnik to Scrooge’s list of rivals (I can picture him finding Scrooge and Glomgold’s penny-pinching unbearably bourgeois and regarding Rockerduck’s ostentatiousness as annoyingly vulgar).
The focus on obscure in-jokes is hardly unique to Angones; it’s one of the mainstays of modern Internet “nerd” culture--just take a look at the videos of HISHE (How It Should Have Ended, which rely heavily on obscure cross-references and allusions). Such humor can be funny at times, but it works better for pure parodies like the HISHE videos; in a supposed adventure series, like New Ducktales, where you’re supposed to be actually engaging with the narrative and characters, meta-humor pulls you out of the proceedings in a way that genuine character-based humor does not.
D. Short Cuts to Sentiment
The New Ducktales crew not only relied on preexisting goodwill to impress and amuse their audiences, but to move them as well. So many of the attempts at creating Drama and Emotion (TM) only really worked if the characters were viewed as their original selves—which the many changes to the characters made it impossible to do.
For example, we were regularly reminded of Donald’s paternal devotion to the Nephews—but we only occasionally saw him interact with them; the boys spent the vast majority of times tagging along with Scrooge or with one of the other various adult characters. Angones and company appeared to expect viewers to mentally import the long-established familial relationship between Donald and the Nephews from the comics into New Ducktales, saving the showrunners the trouble of actually taking time to show them interacting regularly as a family—but these versions of Donald and the Nephews were too different from their prior comic-book and animated selves to really give them the emotional benefit of their prior history.
An even better example is one that Lieju pointed in the comments section on GeoX’s blog—i.e., the supposedly heart-wrenching flashbacks in “Last Crash of the Sunchaser” which show Scrooge emptying his bin in a futile search for Della. If this were the Barks or Rosa Scrooge, who has a genuine emotional attachment to his fortune, the scene might have some weight—but Angones repeatedly told us that New Scrooge is all about being the World’s Coolest Adventurer, not being the World’s Richest Duck (except insofar as it augments his coolness). Thus, unless we can mentally substitute Original Scrooge for New Scrooge (which is very hard to do, given the divergence between the characters), the scene just doesn’t have the impact it was supposed to.
The same was true of the various Disney Afternoon characters, as I’ve already analyzed—for example, we’re supposed to feel a lump in the throat when New Kit Cloudkicker yells “Spin it!” or reunites with Molly Cunningham, but that lump is meaningless once it’s been established that this version of the character has nothing to do with the one we actually care about. We’re supposed to laugh at Darkwing Duck’s criticisms of Gizmoduck because we know the characters’ history—even though these characters don’t actually have that same history.
E. Playing to an Uncomprehended Audience
At least Scrooge, Donald, and other established characters had lots of genuine goodwill to exploit. The show’s attempt to build an enormous mystery around Della and derive high emotion from her return was even more misjudged, since it appears to have been based on an entirely mistaken notion of What the Fans Want and a belief in nonexistent emotional investment in the “return” of the character. Angones and company acted as if they believed that the “disappearance” of Della was a riddle that had gnawed at the minds of Duck comics fans for years, and appeared to think that its resolution would thrill those fans—who, in actuality, may have engaged in speculation about Della, but who were also aware that Della really couldn’t come back without disrupting the comics’ established universe.
Angones’ misjudgment of What the Fans Want extended to misreading their negative emotions as well; his Tumblr proclamation that he expected “collective hatred” for making Bubba the first of the McDuck line was comically tone-deaf; he didn’t seem to understand that no one hated the caveduck himself on Original Ducktales, but simply resented the fact that a one-joke gimmick character was turned into a needless regular (keeping Bubba as a one-episode guest star was one of the very few positive changes Angones made to his source material). Similarly, Angones appeared to think that all Original Ducktales viewers shared his loathing for Doofus and would get a laugh out of his demonization and dehumanizing of the character, when most viewers either would have preferred to see him simply improved or dropped.
Ultimately, all the efforts of the New Ducktales to amuse, move, or otherwise play to the built-in audience for their source material betrayed a fundamental ignorance of both audience and source material. Although the show was repeatedly sold as being created by fans for fans, it felt more like the work of a bunch of superhero fans trying, on the fly, to master just enough of the idiom of Disney funny-animal fans to hold their interest—much like a traveling salesman trying to make a pitch in a foreign language that he’s only had a one-week crash course in.
I love the connection you make to Radar's "Ah, Bach!" Spot on. Also, I would very much like to have someone write a comics story featuring the real Duke of Baloni as you imagine him. What would the old-money aristocrat make of Scrooge's habit of swimming in his cash? Not vulgar, because he doesn't do it for show; but childish?
I can't get over the fact that Angones thought that the fans' deep curiosity about HDL's parents would be satisfied by a mother who abandoned them for no good reason and a nonexistent father. And that we would then find it moving when said mother returns out of the blue, claims parental authority she forfeited before they were hatched, and bonds with one of her sons in preference over the other two.
I love the connection you make to Radar's "Ah, Bach!" Spot on. Also, I would very much like to have someone write a comics story featuring the real Duke of Baloni as you imagine him. What would the old-money aristocrat make of Scrooge's habit of swimming in his cash? Not vulgar, because he doesn't do it for show; but childish?
I think the Duke of Baloni could be put to very funny use to highlight just how childlike and eccentric Scrooge's relationship to his wealth really is, by "normal" billionaire standards. You could do a nice humorous short story, kind of akin in spirit to Barks' "Fun? What's That?" or "The Fabulous Tycoon," with the two characters--have the Duke showing Scrooge around the Duke's castle (of course he'd have a family castle), and use a series of gags to demonstrate how the Duke's money helps him to afford the "finer things"--good clothes, classy cuisine, an art collection, high-level social events, gentlemanly sports like polo or fencing, and all the other things you'd expect an old-money aristocrat to be interested in. Scrooge can be perplexed or bored by all of this. Then, have Scrooge invite the Duke to see how he lives, and have the Duke be flabbergasted by the fact that Scrooge isn't interested in any of the perks of money but rather finds joy in the opportunity to play with his money, like a little kid building castles out of coins.
Blofeld (or shall I say, "Bro-feld") or Palpatine (or shall I say, "Grandpa Palpatine")?
They missed a stitch by not revealing Bradford as Scrooge's long-lost relative, you say?
Well, they came awful close to the Grandpa Palpatine revelation by having Bradford be the one responsible for Webby's creation. I suppose we're lucky they didn't also make him the Nephews' father while they were at it.
I love the connection you make to Radar's "Ah, Bach!" Spot on. Also, I would very much like to have someone write a comics story featuring the real Duke of Baloni as you imagine him. What would the old-money aristocrat make of Scrooge's habit of swimming in his cash? Not vulgar, because he doesn't do it for show; but childish?
I think the Duke of Baloni could be put to very funny use to highlight just how childlike and eccentric Scrooge's relationship to his wealth really is, by "normal" billionaire standards. You could do a nice humorous short story, kind of akin in spirit to Barks' "Fun? What's That?" or "The Fabulous Tycoon," with the two characters--have the Duke showing Scrooge around the Duke's castle (of course he'd have a family castle), and use a series of gags to demonstrate how the Duke's money helps him to afford the "finer things"--good clothes, classy cuisine, an art collection, high-level social events, gentlemanly sports like polo or fencing, and all the other things you'd expect an old-money aristocrat to be interested in. Scrooge can be perplexed or bored by all of this. Then, have Scrooge invite the Duke to see how he lives, and have the Duke be flabbergasted by the fact that Scrooge isn't interested in any of the perks of money but rather finds joy in the opportunity to play with his money, like a little kid building castles out of coins.
Surely an eccentric old money type like the Duke of Baloni would be exactly the sort of person who loves to swim in cash? Lord Money collected rare typewriters, after all. If you want to have somebody who's revolted by all of this, take a Mark Beaks nouveau riche kind of guy, who loves to throw around his money and influence. But I agree with the rest of your outline!
I've always thought of the real duke as an exiled aristocrat, based on what we learn in The Secret of Atlantis: Balonia isn't a country anymore. (Yes, I'm deliberately mixing up two Barks stories -- the names are close enough.)
I'm with djnyr, here--I agree that the old-money aristocrat would find money-swims to be puerile, and a bit too blatant. The idea of real money is that it be unmentioned and invisible in polite society, while everywhere in evidence. You can perhaps spend some of your money on a quirky collection, but you can't have the cash itself *be* the quirky collection. Even if you generally enjoy it in private, it's just Not The Thing.
The nouveau-riche guy would understand Rockerduck's showing off, even if he (or she) showed off in a different way. And if he had Scrooge's knack for money-swimming, he would likely want other people--at least a select few, powerful other people--to know about it, in order to impress upon them his awesomeness. What he wouldn't understand is Scrooge's ability to *play* in his money. Playing for its own sake. His reaction to discovering the underground "studio" of the Phantom of Notre Duck would not be, Ooh, let me help build the cathedral!
And, wresting this back on-topic: DT17 Scrooge also would not react to the Phantom's project in this way. He would not be charmed by it. DT17 Scrooge is incapable of being charmed by anything anyone else does, because he is Just Too Awesome himself. Definitely too awesome to be playful.
The whole dropping references as a smokescreen has permeated nearly every genre. I see it (well, listen to it) in country music all the time. What does a new country artist do to establish his name in Nashville? Record real country music and not watered down Nashville pop? Hardly. They name drop Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson and people think they are legitimate. Superficial. Knowledge in today's world is a mile wide but an inch deep.
"I come to bury Ducktales 2017, not to praise it."
#7—Gods and Monsters
Like the preceding analysis of New Ducktales’ Easter eggs and nostalgia bait, this section is intended as an in-depth examination of an issue that I’ve often touched on in passing in my previous posts--namely, New Ducktales’ heavy reliance on supernatural characters and plot devices, to a much greater extent than either the comics or Original Ducktales, and its simultaneous insistence on trivializing and undermining its supernatural elements. In doing so, the show not only destroyed any sense of mystery, terror or wonder that could have been minded from the supernatural story elements, but also made it impossible to regard the Ducks as relatable humans.
A. Things Not Found Within Recorded Time—Actually, They’re in the Garage
As an extremely overimaginative kid with an embarrassing dread of the supernatural, I remember taking great comfort in Barks’ habit of rationalizing away the paranormal elements at the end of stories like “The Flying Dutchman,” and also remember being quite disturbed by Original Ducktales’ “Sphinx for the Memories” with its ghost/possession plot and its rampaging mummy, and by “Raiders of the Lost Harp” with its scarily unstoppable giant minotaur. My reaction was "Things like that just don't happen in the Ducks' world!"
As a less skittish adult, however, both of those episodes rank among my all-time favorite Original Ducktales adventures, and I think that they also provide excellent examples of just how to handle supernatural and mythological plot elements in a Duck context. The mythopoeia and the scary stuff are balanced with humor (the enchanted harp in “Raiders” rebuking people for “fibbing”, the ghostly pharaoh being called “The Garbled One”), but are presented with proper gravitas when appropriate (the terrifying awakening of the minotaur in “Raiders”, the surprisingly moving exit of the Garbled One and the mummy’s ghost in “Sphinx”, to name two examples). There was always a sense that these ancient mysteries and menaces are a Big Deal, and represent something outside our normal experience and the normal experience of the Ducks.
That sense is entirely lost in New Ducktales. The tone of this series’ attitude towards legendary marvels and terrors was established in the pilot, when we find that Scrooge keeps a pirate ghost, a headless man-horse, and a Chinese dragon in his garage alongside garden hoses and old magazines. The characters’ utter familiarity with the supernatural only increased in later episodes; when the lead character’s parents are Druidically cursed with eternal life, his butler is a ghost, his R&D lab employs a headless man-horse, and the lead character himself has become magically immortal, the paranormal becomes the dull normal, and there’s no more chance to feel awe or fear as the characters encounter the ancient and the uncanny. As Young Donald and Della say in the “Last Christmas” episode, when confronted with a time-traveling relative and a Wendigo, “We’re the Duck family—this is only like the fourth weirdest thing that’s happened to us on Christmas.”
It didn’t have to be this way; the showrunners could have had Scrooge refer to some strange magical adventures in his past on occasion (there’s dialogue to that effect in the above-mentioned “Raiders of the Lost Harp”) and show both recognition and alarm (the more so because of the recognition) when supernatural menaces return, rather than have him banter smugly with pirate ghosts bent on beheading him. Similarly, they could have had Webby fascinated by arcane legends but reacting with believable surprise, awe and dread when the legends come alive, rather than depicting her as an unbelievably deranged fangirl who not only expects to encounter the supernatural at every turn but revels in the encounter, no matter how dangerous (like her absurdly delighted reaction to the revival of Toth-Ra).
Even when the New Ducktales characters do react with actual fear to supernatural menaces, it’s always on a simple “Wak, I could get killed!” level—there’s no sense that any of the fear emanates simply from the overpowering uncanniness of the menace itself. As C. S. Lewis said, in commenting on H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, “What really matters in this story is the idea of being attacked by something utterly ‘outside.’ . . . If the Martian invaders are merely dangerous—if we once become mainly concerned with the fact that they can kill us—why, a burglar or a bacillus can do as much.” To New Scrooge and his crew, the gods and monsters on this show might as well be burglars, given how little of a sense of “outside” fear and awe they evoke.
B. Who is to Awe when the Gods Themselves are Dragged Into the Awfulness?
It’s not just the Ducks’ reaction to supernatural and mythic figures that kills any sense of fear or wonder on New Ducktales—it’s the relentlessly deflating presentation of the figures themselves. Here, instead of echoing the best of Original Ducktales' supernatural/mythic episodes, Angones seemed to be channeling some of the worst--episodes like "Ducky Horror Picture Show" and "Ducktales Valentine" which used classic gods and monsters as vehicles for sub-par sitcom shenanigans.
The most ubiquitous example of Angones' own deflating depiction of supernatural characters was, of course, Manny the Headless Man-Horse. He’s a supposed harbinger of the Apocalypse—but he really just wants to work in a lab and live a “normal” life, and his most dramatic moment--his out-of-left-field, nostalgia-baiting transformation into a Gargoyle--is immediately verbally undercut (“I live again! Again.”).
The guest-star supernatural characters fare just as poorly for the most part. About the only mythological guest stars who sort of worked were the Kelpies, in the "Missing Links of Moorshire" episode; despite being in part a pop-culture parody that is bound to date indifferently, they retained enough of the mischievous lethality of their mythic originals that they felt like a respectable humorous take on those originals rather than a dully obvious deconstruction or “subversion.” Perhaps their being more obscure than some of the other mythological figures had something to do with this; even the parody-obsessed Angones couldn't mock something that his audiences were unlikely to be familiar with.
The same can’t be said for the other folklore guest stars, all of whom were aggressively diminished or mocked in one way or another. Classic Halloween bogeys like werewolves, witches, and vampires (in “The Trickening”) are turned from fearsome creatures of the night into petty candy-snatching curmudgeons—while, like Magica, they’re simultaneously made far too dark, being shown as quite ready to eat the kids before changing gears for an affable sitcom-style “lessons learned” finale. The use of “Witch Hazel” as one of these off-putting quasi-villains was particularly absurd and rather ironic, given how the original, June-Foray-voiced version of the character managed to be at once a classic-style Halloween witch and a funny and likable character, as opposed to these dull and off-putting would-be parodies.
As for the mythological gods, turning Ragnarok into a pro-wrestling match and the World Serpent into an anthropomorphic wrestling champ was puerile and anti-mythic enough, but the treatment of the Greek pantheon was even more deflating—the gods are a very modern-seeming sitcom-style family (chatty and quick-witted daughter, lovably naïve and oafish son, egotistical and inept dad) with no gravitas at all. The handling of Zeus was particularly one-note and particularly revealing; the King of the Gods is not only reduced to being a selfish bumbler, but he’s shown as being primarily driven by resentment and envy of a mere mortal—Scrooge, of course—and earns no more respect from the showrunners than, say, Glomgold does. I can’t think of a more emphatic way to say “Those old mythical characters were lame; see how cool our new mythic figures are by comparison.”
C. Powers and Abilities Far Beyond Those of Mortal Ducks
The discussion of Zeus and his family brings me to the other big problem with this show’s depiction of the supernatural as simply part of the everyday—namely, the fact that doing so effectively dehumanizes the Ducks. Even were their personalities less one-note and obnoxious, the Ducks of New Ducktales would have been barred from achieving any level of human relatability, due to the superhuman circles in which they move.
As discussed in prior entries, original Barks Ducks--the Everyduck Donald, the smart, brave, but recognizably childlike Nephews, even the eccentric Scrooge--were all very human and relatable figures. By contrast, this Scrooge is an immortal who travels through time with the Ghosts of Christmas, casually bests Zeus in games, and engages in annual wrestling contests to save the world from destruction. Even the put-upon Donald is best buds with Hercules ("Storkules") himself and, as a kid, thinks nothing of fighting monsters or meeting time-travelers. As for the Nephews (and Webby), they “audition” for the role of new gods, and only give up that destiny because they realize in effect that they’re already god-tier awesome as they are. These are superbeings who we can (theoretically) look up to, not humans we can identify with, and without some feeling of the protagonists’ mortality, it’s hard to get involved in their adventures (even if those adventures had been better-written).
Tolkien, after the success of The Hobbit, could not sell The Silmarillion, with its gods, elves, and superhuman mortal warriors, to his publisher, who asked for more Hobbits—resulting in The Lord of the Rings. The very human Hobbits in that novel provided a sort of gateway to the more powerful elves and heroes, giving human readers someone to identify with and go adventuring with in Tolkien’s mythopoeic world. The very human Ducks, if brought into a fantasy world, should provide similar identification for the audience—as Erickson and Cavazzano did in the Tolkien-pastiche “World of the Dragonlords,” or as Rosa did in his Kalevala story. They shouldn’t be treated as superhumans themselves, the equals or superiors of the mythic beings they encounter.
There is one sense in which I can excuse some of the over-reliance on the supernatural: the need to avoid the colonialist overtones of the treasure hunts can lead people to introduce more fantastic or supernatural elements in their Duck adventures. If I look at the long Scrooge comics stories written in the last thirty years or so, an increasing percentage of the ones I like have been Magica stories. I've always liked Magica, true, but I think the preponderance of Magica stories among my recent favorites has to do with the difficulty of telling more realistic adventures of the world's richest (Scottish-American) Duck in culturally sensitive ways. One way or another, this tends to lead creators to more fantastic characters or peoples or magical or supernatural plot devices.
That said, I wholly agree with you about the Angones team's handling of supernatural or magical elements. No awe on the Ducks' part, the supernatural beings themselves drained of numinosity.
While I haven't watched all the episodes, I also agree that the kelpies in Moorshire were a more than usually successful recasting of a mythological entity. In addition to the factor you cite--Angones couldn't subvert something with which his audience was unfamiliar--I'd also mention a couple of other aspects of that episode which helped give the kelpies heft. First, my recollection is that Webby, who identifies the kelpies, is warning of their true nature rather than celebrating the encounter. Perhaps that is largely because the writers had to inform the audience what to fear from a kelpie. Second, the visual design of the episode conveyed a strong sense of the ancient and mysterious. As I said on GeoX's blog, I thought the stone circle was cool and mysterious, and I liked the look of the mystical otherworld, its shapes and colors. I thought at the time that this was the most visually impressive place in the series so far, compared to the disappointing Atlantis and the vanilla Ithaquack. There was, to put it another way, an element of awe in the visual design of the episode which I hadn't seen before--and didn't see much since.
I also completely agree with your contention that the Ducks sacrifice relatability by being so casually at home with the supernatural. Scrooge's (and Goldie's, and Scrooge's parents') immortality is the extreme instance of this, but the fact that the Ducks hang out in supernatural circles dehumanizes the whole central cast. Yes, if the Ducks are going to encounter mythical or supernatural beings, they themselves should remain folks like us, like hobbits, knowing themselves to be out of their depth. Valiant at times, but also awestruck, or at least freaked out.
How would you (or others here) compare the treatment of the ancient pantheons in DT '17, Legend of the Three Caballeros (World Tree Caballeros!), and Barks' Mythic Mystery? While I respect Barks' usual approach of (as you put it) rationalizing away the paranormal, I think Mythic Mystery is a very weak story, because the burden of the plot is that the ancient gods Warn't No Thang. As for LTC, overall I feel it did far better than DT '17 at conveying a sense of awe and adventure along with the humor, in part because it didn't have the snarky, cooler-than-thou attitude. I'm not particularly fond of the gods in World Tree Caballeros, but even in that episode the world tree itself was pretty awesome, and negotiating it felt like a wholehearted adventure.
How would you (or others here) compare the treatment of the ancient pantheons in DT '17, Legend of the Three Caballeros (World Tree Caballeros!), and Barks' Mythic Mystery? While I respect Barks' usual approach of (as you put it) rationalizing away the paranormal, I think Mythic Mystery is a very weak story, because the burden of the plot is that the ancient gods Warn't No Thang. As for LTC, overall I feel it did far better than DT '17 at conveying a sense of awe and adventure along with the humor, in part because it didn't have the snarky, cooler-than-thou attitude. I'm not particularly fond of the gods in World Tree Caballeros, but even in that episode the world tree itself was pretty awesome, and negotiating it felt like a wholehearted adventure.
I'd agree that Mythic Mystery is a bit of a disappointment, in that its gods are thoroughly demystified by means of quasi-scientific explanations that really aren't any more believable (and is a good deal less interesting) than a mythological explanation would have been. I think the famous missing splash panel would have helped a bit, since I think it might have made the satire of Earth, and not the debunking of Valhalla, the most memorable point of the story.
On the Three Caballeros' World Tree episode, and on that show's handling of the supernatural in general: I have my reservations about making Donald, Jose, and Panchito's primary reason for teaming up to be fighting wizards and monsters and meeting mythological legends, rather than have them engage in a wider range of adventures, which would allow occasional supernatural exploits to feel more special. That said, the show did do a much better job of handling mythology in ways that were amusing without being utterly destructive of the spirit of the original myth. Charon running a creepy cruise line to the underworld was my absolute favorite; it riffed on the myth without subverting it and landed a nice satirical punch on modern materialism and consumerism. I thought that the rusticated Olympians, along with the comical platitude-spouting King Arthur, were some of the least successful mythological depictions on the series, but even those characters got to recapture former greatness and engage in heroic derring-do in their episodes' respective climaxes; you never got the sense, as you did with Angones' Zeus, that the writers despised these characters or were out to intentionally insult them.
Incidentally, the Disney Wiki claims, albeit with no source to back it up, that the gods in "World Tree Caballeros" were originally slated to be the Norse pantheon, but that someone within the Disney corporate leviathan asked for a switch to avoid diluting the Marvel Thor brand. That would make some sense, since the World Tree belongs to Norse and not to Classical mythology, and there would be a much stronger joke in the idea that the gods had given up war to become gardeners, since the Norse pantheon was always much more pugnacious than the Graeco-Roman one. It would also explain why Apollo pops up without explanation in the follow-up episode to drop the Caballeros off; I would assume that the three gods in the original script would have been Odin, Thor, and Freya, and that it would have been Thor in the chariot at the beginning of the next episode. This could also explain why Angones avoided using Thor and most of the other big names of Norse mythology in his "Rumble for Ragnarok" episode (although I think Disney's attempt to call dibs on centuries-old legendary heroes is ridiculous, I am nevertheless grateful for it in this one instance if it kept Angones from trashing yet more mythological characters).
I agree about the look of the World Tree--and the look of most "Legend of the Three Caballeros" in general--as being much better than most of the allegedly fantastical settings in New Ducktales. I'll be touching on this in more depth soon; I want to do a separate section on New Ducktales' animation and visuals, and intend to do some comparing-and-contrasting with Caballeros, Original Ducktales, and the classic-era Disney animation.
How would you (or others here) compare the treatment of the ancient pantheons in DT '17, Legend of the Three Caballeros (World Tree Caballeros!), and Barks' Mythic Mystery? While I respect Barks' usual approach of (as you put it) rationalizing away the paranormal, I think Mythic Mystery is a very weak story, because the burden of the plot is that the ancient gods Warn't No Thang. As for LTC, overall I feel it did far better than DT '17 at conveying a sense of awe and adventure along with the humor, in part because it didn't have the snarky, cooler-than-thou attitude. I'm not particularly fond of the gods in World Tree Caballeros, but even in that episode the world tree
Incidentally, the Disney Wiki claims, albeit with no source to back it up, that the gods in "World Tree Caballeros" were originally slated to be the Norse pantheon, but that someone within the Disney corporate leviathan asked for a switch to avoid diluting the Marvel Thor brand. That would make some sense, since the World Tree belongs to Norse and not to Classical mythology, and there would be a much stronger joke in the idea that the gods had given up war to become gardeners, since the Norse pantheon was always much more pugnacious than the Graeco-Roman one. It would also explain why Apollo pops up without explanation in the follow-up episode to drop the Caballeros off; I would assume that the three gods in the original script would have been Odin, Thor, and Freya, and that it would have been Thor in the chariot at the beginning of the next episode. This could also explain why Angones avoided using Thor and most of the other big names of Norse mythology in his "Rumble for Ragnarok" episode (although I think Disney's attempt to call dibs on centuries-old legendary heroes is ridiculous, I am nevertheless grateful for it in this one instance if it kept Angones from trashing yet more mythological characters).
I find this very interesting, and like you, I find that it makes more sense of the episode to put the Norse gods in proximity to the World Tree and to have them swear off warring. I will view the episode through this filter next time I watch it, and I believe I'll like it better. Definitely more on point to have the Norse gods give up war; that makes it more than just a joke of how the old gods have gotten old. And yes, it must have been meant to be Thor's chariot at the beginning of the next episode! I suppose there would be some question of how Xandra knew the Norse gods....
"I come to bury Ducktales 2017, not to praise it."
#8—Family is the Greatest Adventure
This will be my last entry on the storytelling aspects of New Ducktales (I plan to follow it with entries on animation and voice work, and then a short epilogue). I think it’s appropriate to conclude an overview of the show’s writing by addressing its handling of its two professed central themes, Adventure and Family.
A. Expected Journeys
Angones and his crew, beginning with the original New Ducktales “First Look” teaser (“Uncharted territories! Bold new discoveries!”), hawked the show’s adventurousness for all it was worth. However, just as the supernatural elements of the series were ruined by being made utterly mundane, the showrunners also foreclosed the possibility of any genuinely exciting Barks-style treasure hunts by treating adventuring as basically the entire Duck family’s principal pastime rather than true trips off the beaten path. Where normal families would go on hikes or a trip to the zoo, the Ducks jaunt off to foreign lands or mystical alternate dimensions—which, just like their easy familiarity with the supernatural world, makes them a lot less relatable, as well as making adventure seem utterly mundane.
In Barks, by contrast, even Scrooge doesn’t usually plan and organize treasure-seeking expeditions from the ground up (as previously discussed in this thread); in “Mines of King Solomon” and “Seven Cities of Cibola,” probably the two quintessential Barks treasure-hunt stories, he stumbles onto the trail of fabled lost treasures while engaged in more ordinary business ventures. “The Philosopher’s Stone” is one of the only Barks treasure-hunt stories where Scrooge, right from the beginning, has a clear idea of exactly what he’s looking for when he sets out on his quest—and even there, the story is filled with unpredictability and changes of scene as the Ducks chase new clues around the map (“Call the wild goose! We’re on our way again!”)
It’s the unpredictability factor that makes for the best treasure hunts, expeditions, and quests—the puzzling clues that lead adventurous but ordinary people to odd and dangerous places and encounters with ancient or outlandish folk, the feeling that “still round the corner there may wait a new door or a secret gate.” The Original Ducktales pilot, “Treasure of the Golden Suns” also had a touch of this element, with small clues gradually snowballing into revelations of the extent of the treasure Scrooge is searching, and the history of that treasure. I think the single best term to describe this quality of adventurous unpredictability is Tolkien’s phrase “Unexpected Journey;” most of the foundational adventure stories of modern Western literature—King Solomon’s Mines, Treasure Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World—possess it to some degree or another.
However, there are almost no Unexpected Journeys in New Ducktales, and little real sense of exploring uncharted territory, solving ancient riddles, or encountering unknown civilizations. Angones’ Scrooge has been everywhere and seen everything, and has some kind of past connection with nearly every strange or exotic place visited or referenced in the course of the show, from Mount Neverrest to the mystical realm of “Goathoo.” Even when the Ducks encounter something that’s not old news to Scrooge, any sense of discovery is destroyed by the Angones crew’s unwillingness or inability to even try to imagine what ancient or alien worlds might really be like. Atlantis, in the pilot episode, is just a generic booby-trapped lost city set for the characters to clown around in while establishing their “personalities”; the “Living Mummies of Toth-Ra” are embarrassing ninnies defined by an obsession with burritos, and are denied any of the dignity given to similar time-frozen ancient Egyptians in Barks’ “Mummy’s Ring” and Original Ducktales’ “Sphinx for the Memories;” the Moonlanders, as noted in previous posts, are a bunch of sitcom suburbanites led by a couple of escapees from a superhero comic.
All that said, and as much as I dislike Angones’ Della, I will admit that “Whatever Happened to Della Duck” was one of the few episodes that actually took classic-style adventure somewhat seriously—by taking a traditional subcategory of unexpected journey, the “quest to survive in a strange and hostile environment” saga that used to be known as a “Robinsonade”, and developing it at some length, instead of treating it like a careless toss-off or completely subverting it. I would give Angones a lot more credit for Della’s Crusoe-like adventure, however, if The Martian hadn’t come out in 2015; the video diaries in “Whatever Happened…” in particular made it fairly clear that Angones, in crafting Della’s space-Robinsonade, wasn’t really trying to approach a classic adventure trope with greater seriousness than usual, but merely engaging in another knock-off of a recent popular movie (just as he repeatedly homaged/ripped-off the Marvel movies). And, in any case, Angones couldn’t even carry the Robinsonade for a full episode without bringing in the Moonlanders and thus escaping back to the comfort of more modern tropes.
Ultimately, for all New Ducktales’ yammering about “adventure is in [the Ducks’] blood”, and its attempt to frame its Ultimate Showdown as a clash between the philosophies of Adventure and Unadventurousness, one never got the sense that any of the writers were really interested in exploration, discovery, undiscovered wonders, or the treasures of the past for their own sake, but instead were only interested in such things in so far as they could be used as a vehicle for jokes, action setpieces, pop-culture riffs--and character interactions, which leads into the next section.
B. Duck Family Values
New Ducktales regularly made perfunctory use of journeys and quests simply in order to have an excuse to have the members of the Duck family bounce off of each other, as in “Last Crash of the Sunchaser” or “Golden Armory of Cornelius Coot”; the latter actually did have some good historical-treasure-hunt elements, but was finally smothered by the heavy-handed “Webby wants to be awesome like Della” character-based subplot.
This continual use of adventure simply to throw the characters together would perhaps be more excusable if those characters were more appealing or if their family dynamic was more believable. I’ve devoted the first six sections of this dissection to analyzing just why those characters were unappealing and their dynamic unbelievable, so I won’t belabor my points too much further here. Suffice it to say that the sentimental and dramatic things we were told about the Duck family in this show were continually belied by what we were really shown.
We were supposed to believe that Donald and Beakley were defined by their protectiveness of the Nephews and Webby, respectively, but saw those kids spend most of their time with Scrooge instead of with these supposed parental figures, and the alleged family bonds were only allowed to surface when it was time to manufacture sentiment or drama. We were asked to empathize with Della as a loving parent separated from her kids, and get misty-eyed about her lonely little Moon lullaby—but were shown a reckless narcissist who abandoned those kids for a life-risking joyride. We were supposed to believe that Launchpad was simple but noble, someone that conventionally smarter characters could learn a few things from, but were shown someone so unfathomably dumb that he could only be considered a grave danger to himself and others. We were asked to regard Scrooge and Goldie as a charming on-again-off-again romantic pair of daring equals, but were shown a toxic relationship between an honest man and a pathologically selfish, greedy, and treacherous woman. We were shown what was supposed to be a tragic family rift between Scrooge, Donald and the Nephews, but which actually came off as a ridiculously contrived conflict. We were told much about the glories of Clan McDuck, but were shown a squabbling, cartoonish, dysfunctional collection of sitcom kinfolks.
Above all, we were told, ad nauseum, that all these characters, and others, had a deep familial love for each other—but their interactions were almost always marked by insults, mockery, bickering, lying, and one-upmanship that was obviously supposed to be hip, cool and funny, but instead came off as off-putting and unpleasant. Barks’ character interactions could of course be quite sharply cynical, but his cynicism was a darkly humorous commentary on the flaws of human nature; he also knew the highs and lows of his characters, and of human nature, so well that he could also effortlessly and convincingly switch from cynicism to sentiment without mawkishness or awkwardness.
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.
The sheer dissonance between New Ducktales’ overall tone (with its “humorously” abrasive character interactions and wonder-stale protagonists) and its harped-on theme of Family Adventure! (TM) is so strong throughout the show’s run that my reaction to Huey’s climactic proclamation of the Moral of the Show—“Family is the Greatest Adventure of All!”—is pretty much that of Bradford’s: “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” No matter how dramatically it's pronounced, that moral doesn’t really jibe with anything that we’ve actually seen over the course of the show's three seasons.