I’m not talking about screen time but the roles and characteristics and wether should della be in other things besides ducktales Della isn’t a character that was written as a new one but instead a character who took a lot of Donald’s roles and characteristics that he usually has in comics and cartoons .
Della never changed his dynamics with Daisy, Goofy, Jose, and Panchito.
One could argue by that logic something similar happened in the 1930s where Mickey lost his edge with his flaws going to Donald and Goofy in the cartons, making him bland. Does that mean by that logic Mickey can't coexist with Donald and Goofy since they more or less have the edge that was sanded down from him later on?
So how would you go about handling Della if you were handling her and keeping in account she is Donald's twin (of course she'd have some similarities with him)?
Though Mickey in the comics is a well written character and work as a detective and I think he deserves a cartoon that show it just like Donald who could have been written well in ducktales if the writers cared . my point is about if della should be in other things . I’m a comic reader before a cartoon watcher and I certainly don’t want to see her in the comics especially the Italian ones It’s not my job to write a new character for her But I certainly wouldn’t change Donald character to give her his traits. It’s not about them being similar as a lot of Donald traits were erased to give them to della The prank scene is the most obvious one when Donald have always been someone who liked pranks. Why did the writers make him be some well mannered one while della is the pranker ? Making Donald who’s an adventurer and likes adventures in the comics ( unless he’s being exploited ) to be an adventurer hater in ducktales while della is the one who loves them :/ I certainly wouldn’t want to see this kind of dynamics at all in comics neither in the next duck cartoon if they do a new one as Donald deserves a good writing instead of being used as an excuse to add a character because she’s his sister Though dt17 seems to be its own universe like quack pack which is good . At the end of the day . Donald is the main character of the ducks and one of the main Disney trio . It’s not like Disney will make him being second fiddle to other duck characters to be the normal thing after dt17
Am I the only one who doesn’t see della as an important character that has to be in other cartoons or comics ? I felt as if she was just a replacement for Donald . In ducktales , they just made Donald to be the angry fighter while took away his other traits and relationships. Even in one scene della wanted to prank the kids while Donald refused . While in both comics and cartoons , Donald is a massive prankster. And while he can be tired from all the responsibilities, he’s still full of life and a lot of times plays and runs around with the boys while in ducktales , it’s della . Not to mention the adventure thing. Donald is an adventurer in the comics . Some times he fights with Scrooge over going into one because of low payment / exploiting but generally he likes an adventure and did a lot of them with just him and the boys alone . He’s also a pilot and know how to ride all kinds of vehicles as Scrooge forced him to do a lot of work . His relationship with the boys is a different matter . But really all I see in della is that she’s Donald replacement. They even gave Donald two girls to adopt as della replaced Donald when it comes to the boys . One thing I see some ducktales fans say as a justification to include della outside ducktales is she’s Donald Duck sister. Ok But what did she exactly add to Donald’s character to even say that ? She just took his role . Some even compare her to max though max added depth to goofy’s character while for Donald ?!!! At the end of the day, Donald is the main character of the ducks and I don’t see why would a character that took his role be added in other stories. Especially the comics where Donald and the boys relationship is very important . The only comics I’ve seen della in ( I think it was the Dutch comics ) shorts when she and Donald were kids . Another one when they were adult was when the boys asked about their parents though they appreciate Donald as a parent, prefer him and said they want to be with him ( he literally raised them so … )
It was only necessary to introduce Della as a mysterious character, and her return to Earth to mark the end of the series, since mostly the series focused on the mystery of Della Duck. Yes, I agree, Della had a lot of good Donald personalities, but their relationships didn't work, they were terrible. Although as kids they worked fine, so I'd say it has more to do with the voice actor's relationship with the famous actress.
But the problem was not only that, practically Donald Duck had the only purpose of taking care of his boys and protecting his family because all his personalities were taken from him especially badly and given to his sister and his nephews. That's why I didn't even like the moments when Donald keeps getting hurt and then tells me that Donald has bad luck because that's his trait. Literal ignorance of Donald Duck. Donald Duck only gets bad luck when he does something wrong and acts like a jerk. What happened in Ducktales 2017 just shows that they didn't learn anything from old cartoons or comics. And his purpose in taking care of his family disappeared when his sister returned. Frankly, Donald is better off with Daisy and his two adopted daughters and his best friends Jose and Panchito because he got nothing from his family. But that's just my view.
So, if they want to seriously introduce Donald's sister next time, let them do it in such a way that they don't take Donald Duck's personality. And yes, it's really a shame that the opportunity for Donald Duck to shine in Ducktales 2017 was missed. Luckily there is The Legend of The Three Caballeros, but unfortunately Disney's poor treatment of that series means we won't be able to see that second season.
Although I would really like to see an animated movie and series about Donald Duck's relationship with his nephews, but in the true way it is depicted in the comics. But unfortunately we only have some moments from the OG Ducktales, Mickey's Once Upon A Christmas and certainly the Quack Pack that showed the family relationships of Donald with his nephews, but not enough.
I would have like it if Disney would do a series about Donald Duck based on the comics and Donald of course being the main character as he has a lot of relationships and more potential to do a lot of stories from normal life to adventures and they could use the chance to do spin off shows about duck avenger ( both classic avenger and pk ) and double duck .
Since this thread has resurfaced, this is as good a time as any to add a few thoughts to my prior analysis of the show, prompted by my stumbling across a new nugget of information. I’ve been conducting some research on the Warner Brothers DC Comics shows of the 90s and early 00s (the ones overseen by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini), and have realized that Angones made yet another borrowing from those superhero series—specifically, from Batman Beyond, the last of Timm/Dini's 1990s efforts; unlike the earlier Batman and Superman shows from the same crew, I had little to no familiarity with Beyond up till now, which is why I only just now made this connection. Anyway, Batman Beyond featured a retired, reclusive, and elderly Bruce Wayne acting as mentor to a new teenaged Batman named Terry McGinnis, who ostensibly had no personal connection to Wayne but who became a surrogate son to him, and who was ultimately revealed to actually be Bruce’s biological son, via some biotechnical skullduggery executed by Amanda Waller’s shadowy spy organization. This is clearly where Angones derived his dreadful idea of making his version of Webby into Scrooge’s genetically-engineered “daughter”, courtesy of FOWL’s machinations.
I have no strong feelings either way about the Terry McGinnis reveal; that kind of thing is par for the course in superhero sagas. However, the fact that such outrageous gimmickry is so common in the superhero genre is one of the reasons why, enjoyable though superhero stories often are, I don’t derive the same satisfaction from them that I do from the more human and less gimmicky world of the Ducks. Thus, I have the strongest of negative feelings about the incursion of this borrowed Batman Beyond gimmickry into Angones’ Duckburg. The Webby revelation, of course, was only the last in a long line of borrowed superhero gimmicks that pervaded New Ducktales, most of them already noted on this thread—Goldie’s transformation into a knockoff of Catwoman (sexy thieving love-interest/adversary), the development of Mark Beaks into an imitation Lex Luthor (villainous billionaire out to defeat/control the resident superhero), the introduction of the Lunaris and Penumbra characters (blatant knockoffs of superhero-comics characters like Darkseid and Nebula), the depiction of FOWL as a version of HYDRA from the Winter Soldier movie, and, of course, the transformation of Scrooge himself into a superheroic figure with impossible physical prowess and a supernaturally-extended lifespan.
Most of the New Ducktales superhero borrowings were very poorly handled by Angones’ crew—for example, the Timm/Dini Catwoman was a much more sympathetic and complex character than Angones’ appalling Goldie ever was—but even had the production staff done a better job with implementing the borrowed superheroic gimmicks, the mere act of incorporating them would still have been a betrayal of the Ducks’ world. Contrary to the assertions of some of the more vehement devotees of either school of storytelling, it’s quite possible to enjoy both Duck stories and superhero stories (even Rosa, who's usually vehement about his distaste for superheroes, has admitted a fondness for the 1950s Superman comics), but one doesn’t derive the same kind of enjoyment from the two different kinds of stories. We don’t go to Duckburg for pursuits of mad master criminals or slugfests with supervillains, and we don’t go to Gotham City or Metropolis for character-driven comedies or far-flung treasure hunts. The regrettable TV Tropes website has given rise to an unfortunately influential view that all stories are merely an assembly of parts that can be utilized, in various combinations, for any “universe” and any set of characters; this attitude entirely ignores the importance of tone, atmosphere, and, for want of a better word, ambiance, in storytelling.
I think the best way I can describe the importance of ambiance in a story is to have recourse to C. S. Lewis--who, in his essay “On Stories” talks at length about a discussion with an American student of his who enthused about a suspenseful sequence in a James Fenimore Cooper novel. Lewis was shocked that the student’s enthusiasm for the scene was simply based on its excitement value, not on the evocative “Red Indian” ambiance that came with it, which was what intrigued Lewis: “In such a scene as my friend had described, take away the feathers, the high cheek-bones, the whiskered trousers, substitute a pistol for a tomahawk, and what would be left? For I wanted not the momentary suspense but that whole world to which it belonged—the snow and the snow-shoes, beavers and canoes, war-paths and wigwams, and Hiawatha names.” Lewis then goes on to make the same point in regard to fairy-tales: “Jack the Giant-Killer, is not, in essence, simply the story of a clever hero surmounting danger. It is in essence the story of such a hero surmounting danger from giants. It is quite easy to contrive a story in which, though the enemies are of normal size, the odds against Jack are equally great. But it will be quite a different story. The whole quality of the imaginative response is determined by the fact that the enemies are giants. That heaviness, that monstrosity, that uncouthness, hangs over the whole thing. Turn it into music and you will feel the difference at once. If your villain is a giant your orchestra will proclaim his entrance in one way; if he is any other kind of villain, in another.”
To echo Lewis’ words, what I want—and, I believe, what most of the critics of New Ducktales want, when it comes to Duck stories, is not just the momentary suspense or excitement of watching Scrooge and his kinfolks go on adventures or fight villains, but the whole world to which Scrooge’s comic-book adventures belonged—that Barksian world of ancient unsuspected treasure vaults, suddenly discovered clues out of remote history, comically exaggerated wealth, comically elaborate burglary devices, an omniscient scouting handbook, humorously impractical inventions. When you change Scrooge’s goals and challenges from protecting his wealth and hunting more wealth to saving the world from supervillains, and when you change his antagonists from greedy and comically fallible sorceresses and cheerfully ingenious burglars to murderous dark enchantresses, lunar invaders, and super-spy organizations, the whole “quality of the imaginative response” becomes different, and we’re no longer in the Ducks’ world, but in the world of superheroes. That world, with its apocalyptic threats, superhuman feats, pseudoscientific gadgetry, and disregard of the general laws of mortality, can be used for effective storytelling (at least in other hands than Angones'), but any story told about that world will be “quite a different story,” when compared to a story told about the Ducks’ world. You can’t reduce the essence of the Ducks to something as generic as “adventure” and excitement; to really preserve the characters’ essence in any screen adaptation, their accompanying world needs to be recreated as well, not simply replaced with another and entirely different world.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Jun 23, 2023 23:44:37 GMT
The critiques pile on, and I've yet, years on now, to find both the emotional energy and the time to write my Great If Nuanced Defence Of DuckTales 2017. But I've got a few off-the-cuff thoughts on this latest message, so please accept a few lengthy but improvised musings.
One thing I will do from the off is protest against the conflation of “the Barksian Ducks' world” with “the Ducks' world”. The Barksian ambience is a specific thing, and I do wish we'd get an adaption that truly captured it one of those days; but it is not the whole of the Disney Comics toybox by any means. There are of course your Darkwing Ducks and the like, or even just the Duck Avenger and his ilk; but even going off into those explicitly superheroic things, the wider world of Disney comics has long featured galactic conquerors (Lunaris is a Rebo substitute as much as anything; an inferior one, of course), grandiose supervillains or mad scientists (the Phantom Blot as generally imagined in European stories is the obvious example but we could be here all night listing one-off examples of the form, going all the way back to yer Doctors Ecks/Doublecks/Triplecks or Vulters in Gottfredson), not to mention a plethora of much more overtly magical characters than Barks's amateur-sorceress Magica. I do not think there is a single element in the entire DT17 show that I would blink at if it were the subject of a random story in the latest Super Picsou Géant. Alien invaders? Magical clones? Supervillainous spy organisation? Bring it on. Even though I'm sure Mark Beaks in the show was substantially influenced by Lex Luthor, he also increasingly turned into a reinventing-the-wheel doppelganger of good old Emil Eagle.
No, more than the individual ingredients themselves, it was in the presentation that DT17 strayed from something that ‘feels’ like the default world of Disney Comics as it has existed in my head since childhood (and to be sure, it did). You're getting somewhere in stressing "ambience" over substance, but you don't go far enough: I think it's *purely* in the presentation, not in the facts. It's the accumulation, the juxtaposition. It's the final frame of the Season 2 finale or the notorious falling-through-the-sky Season 3 poster where ghosts and robots and witches and tiny talking rodents sit side-by-side, undeniably part of the same wider world.
To look at it from another angle, some of this comes from a sort of Wiki-based thinking that follows on from Rosa, and tries to take seriously that the Ducks have had all these adventures in one lifetime. There is a kind of loose reset-button timelessness to the printed Duckburg or Mouseton. When Scrooge finds Harpies or the Philosopher's Stone, it's not the first time he's encountered the supernatural, but crucially, neither is it the seven-hundredth. Donald has been fired from many odd jobs, but not literal thousands of them. Etc. etc. There is an illusion of continuity, and it is well-known that my brain has always liked to push it further than the stories do, and genuinely try to account for things like the ever-expanding Duck family tree or the dozens of contradictory Atlantises; but that game is only fun because it's not something the stories themselves do. After a season's worth of Duck stories, Donald Duck really ought to be a celebrity who's hailed as “one of the greatest adventurers in the world”; but you shouldn't write him that way. No one stops Tintin in the street for his autograph; nobody has ever heard of Inspector Columbo on the news, no matter how many picturesque high-profile murders he's solved. It's the snake eating its own tail.
But DT17 bit that bullet right from the off, and I think that bullet got stuck in its throat.
And mind you, I think it did so knowingly. Part of this was the necessity of a more serialised format where Episode 3 really must substantially have happened to the characters as of Episode 28. And beyond that, it didn't just feel like there was no choice but to make the world Weird because Continuity Said So; they were after all a reboot. They wanted to replicate the energy of Gravity Falls or a number of comics and webcomics that take place in an unapologetically Weird World; one that's deceptively mundane at first glance but where your neighbour is a robot and there's a living statue of a horse working as an intern for your uncle's company. The fact of the matter is that it's an energy I like in its own right (although it can be a refuge of self-indulgent scoundrels). It simply isn't quiiite how the average Disney Comic pitches itself, even when Rebo and Witch Hazel are on the table. And so there's a strange disconnect at seeing some round pegs contorted around to fit into that square hole, even though there's nothing wrong with squares. Sometimes the reimagined character is (I will insist) perfectly fine, and just jars when compared to the memory of the original; Magica, for example; Gyro to a degree. Other times, as with Scrooge (unfortunately enough), too much is banked on the supposed mythic power of an iconography that's at odds with the completely new substance under the surface, and so it never quite coheres.
Where I will unreservedly agree that there was unwarranted borrowing from superhero tropes, it was definitely in the emphasis on physical fights. I do get it, I really do; working in TV, they wanted high-octane climaxes, so every villain had to somehow become a physical threat to be defeated, and in turn, heroes had to by definition be improbably good at hand-to-hand combat to match. But that is on no level what Disney Comics have ever been about — even the explicitly superheroey ones. Darkwing Duck and the Duck Avenger win through guile and gadgetry, not through physically tossing their enemies about; even Super Goof's super-strength is, in the manner of the Christopher Reeves Superman, usually exercised on mundane pieces of the environment, not in throwing down against other super-strong folks. I don't mind the occasional Barks-Rosa riff on the Young Scrooge having been improbably good at Asterixian brawls, but still, only in moderation. Kung-Fu Webby was at least designed with this in mind, but Scrooge, Donald and Della fighting off Eggheads was just embarrassing.
…Rereading all the above, I find that I come out sounding like I'm saying “well, I disagree with you on what it does wrong, but it certainly does something wrong", which may puzzle people who have forgotten where I generally stand on the show, and are therefore scratching their heads about my “I wish I could articulate by Great Defence better” opener. So without elaborating overmuch, I'll restate my general view: considered as an original show, I thought DuckTales 2017 was very good. I find its jokes funny, its visuals memorable, its characters generally lovable, its voice cast stellar. Not perfect — it struggled with an overlarge cast, and Scrooge never entirely worked — but by and large a success at the sheer business of entertainment. Probably a lesser sibling to even a close Disney relative like The Owl House (not to mention Infinity Train), but still something which takes its rightful place as one of the great shows of that little 2010s golden age of American TV animation. The problem simply comes from the fact that, despite a clear fannish interest in the source material it drew from, it used that source material more as an endless source of names and iconography to riff on, than as something to translate — or even really as something to whose preexisting fans they should try and appeal, provided they don't happen to be fans with the exact same fannish tastes as the showrunners.
And in a way perhaps that's the greatest superhero influence of all, at a meta level. Superhero fandoms are quite used to adaptations that just borrow the names and basic looks of characters, and then pitch their own things with different ambiences, tones, worldbuilding, pacing, you name it. No one blinks an eye if the new Batman thing decides that the Joker is yet again completely different; Gotham is reducible to a finite number of visual archetypes and attached names, and every new storyteller is free to attach those ingredients to what tone and storyline they want. Long-term fans may notice and enjoy specific echoes between one telling and another, but none should be taken as a given. I think DT17 often approached its task like that. “So, richest-duck-in-the-world adventurer called Scrooge McDuck; he looks like this. His sort-of-one-true-love-but-it's-complicated whom he met in the Klondike Gold Rush, called Goldie O'Gilt; she looks like this. What can we come up with based on that brief and that brief alone? [having come up with their own story] Right, and now let's throw in a couple of allusions to other possible tellings of this story, as a tip of the hat to the past. Let's say… 'a mammoth in White Agony Creek’? But let's change the context a bit, of course…"
And that approach is neither good or bad, I would say (though it does continue to rob us of a ‘straight’ Disney Comics-based show which I really think would work). It's what it means for these things to be modern myths, after all; very broad shapes and sets of symbols, to be retold and altered endlessly. Few modern stories about King Arthur and Merlin have much to do with Chrétien de Troyes or Mallory beyond some names and some very broad story directions, but they still get to trade on the mythic power of doing A King Arthur Retelling, and that's okay. But it's just not something we're used to in Duck-dom, when all those hundreds of authors since the 1930s have by and large all been playing in the same illusorily-continuous sandbox, as opposed to reboots inherently being the name of the game.
Excellent nuanced defense, MacDuck, which I'm very pleased to read. So glad we haven't alienated you from Feathery entirely by ragging on DT17. I am willing to accept most of what you say, including that considered as an original show, DT17 was very good and entertaining. It makes sense to me what you say about the superhero narrative expectation that one takes the name/appearance and does something quite different with it, over and over. So on that meta-narrative level, that pattern may be the way DT17 was most influenced by superhero storytelling.
Naturally, as you might grant, this still means that DT17 dashed my hopes and irritated me until I gave up on it. I was not willing as you were to let it use the names/shells of characters I love and go somewhere entirely else with them. Also, I often found the tone off-putting. I think it's possible that I would have been less annoyed overall if Angones & Co. hadn't intentionally raised my hopes. If, for just one instance, he had responded to the fan query about Junior Woodchucks by simply saying that *one* of the triplets would be into Woodchucking. If I had been more prepared for the way the show was going to go, I would not have felt as if I had been strung along. And I do think, in this same vein, that Angones' own tone in his tweets helped sour me on the show. Though it was the immortality of Scrooge and his parents that was (ironically) the nail in the coffin for me. Plus the reveal of Lena's origin. All long before the reveal of Webby's origin.
I completely agree with what you say about the difference between serialized shows and the eternal reset of the comics. A show would in any case have to deal with the accumulation of adventures and (to the degree they included) supernatural elements, in a way that the comics do not. Legend of the Three Caballeros, which I like a great deal, avoids this problem because the adventures are all outside the normal Duckburg life of Donald and April, May and June. Nobody in Duckburg has to start reacting to Donald as a Great Adventurer!
Matilda, thanks for the kind words about my previous post; I was concerned it might feel a bit like beating the proverbial dead horse, but my recent explorations of superhero TV animation helped me to crystalize my thoughts about New Ducktales' superhero influences more clearly than before, so I wanted to see if I could share some of that additional clarity.
Scrooge MacDuck, thank you for the in-depth and well-written rejoinder. It's fascinating to me that I actually agree with 90% of what you say about the show; we just differ strongly when it comes to conclusions. I do realize that my view of the Duckworld is much more Barks-centric than that of many non-American fans might be; unlike the Disney Duck comics cultures of Brazil or Italy, the American Duck comics culture pretty much begins and ends with Barks; the most successful post-Barks American creator, Rosa, pretty much defined himself by his adherence to the Barks canon. I do think it's fair, however, to critique Angones' Duckburg for missing the ambiance of Barks' Duckburg, since Angones and his team repeatedly invoked Barks and Rosa and spun the show as part of the Barks tradition, both in interviews and Internet comments and in the incessant references to Barks and Rosa scattered throughout the show. As Matilda puts it, the show continually "strung along" devotees of the traditional Barksian Duck stories with references like this; there were no comparable invocations of Italian or other non-American Duck comics, and I think the sci-fi and fantasy trappings which you reference as points of similarity between the show and Euro comics such as Super Picsou Géant are more a case of parallel evolution than a homage to other countries' Duck comics; superheroes and supervillains have become so culturally dominant worldwide that it's no surprise they pop up in both European Disney comics and in American Disney TV shows. Angones didn't have to go to Rebo as inspiration for Lunaris when he already had a surfeit of American non-Disney characters like Darkseid, Thanos, Mongul, Ronan, and so forth to draw on. Incidentally, while I don't find the more fantastical, sci-fi-heavy Euro-Disney comics stories--like the Rebo tales--as obnoxious as I do New Ducktales, I do find many of them similarly alien and lacking in the more humorously human Barks-style ambiance I prefer in a Duck story.
You make a good point about how New Ducktales departs from the tradition of Disney superheroics, as epitomized by characters like Super Goof and Darkwing Duck, in favor of a more traditional zap/pow/bash/smash style of superhero action. As I previously mentioned in this thread, I feel Angones also missed the original satirical aspects of both Darkwing and Gizmoduck by treating the superhero aspects of their personas more reverently than they were ever treated in their earlier incarnations (Darkwing was still played humorously, but the joke in Angones' version became the efforts of the fallible "nerd" Drake to imitate a Totally Awesome Superhero, whereas in the original version the joke was the inherent absurdity of Drake's superhero persona itself).
I agree that the problem of the characters' lengthy past history is bound to crop up in an ongoing series--at least in today's type of television series, which insists on multi-episode arcs with fewer stand-alone outings, as opposed to older shows where most episodes were pretty self-contained. Still, I think there were better ways to address this issue than the way the New Ducktales team did; for example, they didn't need to burden both Scrooge and Donald with such a massive weight of past Epic Adventure right out of the gate; it would have been sufficient to imitate Rosa's L&T Chapter 12 and make allusions to Scrooge's past exploits while having both Donald and the boys meet him for the first time. Also, as I've argued ad nauseum in past pages, there was no need to make the Duck's adventures, both past and present, so earth-shatteringly over-the-top as to make them celebrities throughout this world and multiple supernatural worlds. Rosa has his Ducks carry a lot more of the weight of their past adventures around in his stories than Barks ever did, but, despite his tendency to somewhat overplay Scrooge's awesomeness, he never makes the Ducks the center of the known universe the way Angones does--even Rosa would never have had Scrooge be the annual savior of the Earth (via his participation in the Ragnarok wrestling tournament).
Finally, I agree that the "shapes and sets of symbols" approach to character depictions is a common one in superhero comics, but it's another element of superhero storytelling that, to me, diminishes the appeal of most superheroes for me. I prefer characters that are actually consistent, recognizable personalities, not just a set of costumes and powers that can be radically reconfigured as they pass through the hands of different creators; trying to find any consistency, from a characterization standpoint, in long-running multi-creator superhero comics series (such as the X-Men) can induce whiplash; just try reading the "fictional character biography" section for any prominent superhero on Wikipedia. The Ducks have retained much greater consistency of characterization through the years (as frustrating as Disney's oversight of their license can be, we probably have that oversight partly to thank for that consistency), and I think it's a diminishment of the specific appeal of the Ducks to jettison so much of that established characterization for superhero-style reinventions--as well as somewhat creatively disingenuous to lean so heavily into the established Duck lore for marketing purposes while so thoroughly disregarding when it comes to substantive storytelling. That disingenuousness is, for me, the number one factor that prevents me from doing New Ducktales the courtesy of judging it as a separate creation; it repeatedly invites judgment as part of a prior tradition, even while it ignores that tradition.
Post by donalddisneyfan on Jun 25, 2023 7:46:42 GMT
I respect opinions and all as a fan of the show myself, but there's one thing I wanna add.
I am surprised Matt Youngberg isn't mentioned seeing how he has just as much authority on the show as Frank Angones as the co-creator.
Heck maybe the superhero stuff one mentions is from Youngberg too and his experience in past shows with how he was one of the showrunners for Ben 10 Omniverse and Transformers Animated plus directing episodes of Teen Titans, The Batman, and Ben 10 Ultimate Alien. Youngberg's first animation job was even as a storyboard artist for the mentioned Batman Beyond and also for Justice League Unlimited.
Not a critique or a defense, just an interesting observation.
I think Youngberg was mentioned less often because Angones was active on the Internet. He was asked a lot of questions on Tumblr and he answered. Therefore, Angones is more famous.
I do realize that my view of the Duckworld is much more Barks-centric than that of many non-American fans might be; unlike the Disney Duck comics cultures of Brazil or Italy, the American Duck comics culture pretty much begins and ends with Barks; the most successful post-Barks American creator, Rosa, pretty much defined himself by his adherence to the Barks canon.
That was undoubtably the case twenty years ago, even ten, perhaps; but I think a more holistic view has resulted over the past ten years or so from the combination of the Internet allowing places like, well, this very Forum to thrive, and of the push for localisations of non-American/Scandinavian tales in IDW's monthlies (cries) and of course the ever-superb Disney Masters.
I do think it's fair, however, to critique Angones' Duckburg for missing the ambiance of Barks' Duckburg, since Angones and his team repeatedly invoked Barks and Rosa and spun the show as part of the Barks tradition, both in interviews and Internet comments and in the incessant references to Barks and Rosa scattered throughout the show. As Matilda puts it, the show continually "strung along" devotees of the traditional Barksian Duck stories with references like this; there were no comparable invocations of Italian or other non-American Duck comics, and I think the sci-fi and fantasy trappings which you reference as points of similarity between the show and Euro comics such as Super Picsou Géant are more a case of parallel evolution than a homage to other countries' Duck comics; superheroes and supervillains have become so culturally dominant worldwide that it's no surprise they pop up in both European Disney comics and in American Disney TV shows.
I do think the early marketing that promised some Barks-Rosa modernisaiton was unsporting. But spin will spin — even if a marketing strategy was misjudged to the point of being ethically culpable, I am unwilling to hold that over the show.
Moreover, while they didn't often invoke the European comics directly (though let me remind you that the entire notion of Della The Astronaut derived from a Dutch tale!), they were certainly open about wanting their show to be as much a homage to The Disney Afternoon Universe — the '87 DuckTales, Darkwing Duck and TaleSpin and so on — as to the comics, and that gets you to about the same place, since those shows certainly had a more elastic reality than Barks. And although much digital ink has been spilled about the damaging consequences of trying to do DuckTales when what you really wanted to do was Darkwing Duck, all along, nor can I, at a basic level, find it in my heart to begrudge people who grew up with both shows in tandem for viewing them as inherently and uncomplicatedly a package-deal.
Oh, you could certainly watch DuckTales Classic without Darkwing Duck, and never give a second thought to that Other Show which has similar character designs and an apparent shared universe, but a much more fantastical reality; sure. (I suppose to go back to superheroes this would be the equivalent of people who would rather not think about the low-sci-fi noir setting of Gotham coexisting with Superman and The Sandman and all the other grand cosmic stuff.) But equally, if you grew up watching both in tandem, thinking of it as trivially obvious that Launchpad was splitting his time between these two sets of adventures somehow, then it seems to me only natural that you would think nothing of all kinds of wild things happening in Duckburg too now and then.
Though in any case my point was less about “the DT17 crew were entirely habilitated to include such elements because they exist in some of the comics, technically”, and more “objectively a number of comics have included such elements without feeling like complete departures from What Disney Comics Are in the same way; so DT17's fault/peculiarity must be elsewhere than in the inclusion of these elements, per se”. (I'm not asking you to like Rebo, although if you don't like Eega Beeva we're going to have a problem. I kid, I kid. My point is that Rebo does not feel like Lunaris, ergo Lunaris's problem cannot be, per se, that he is an alien conqueror villain who shouldn't be going around getting defeated by Donald Duck.)
Finally, I agree that the "shapes and sets of symbols" approach to character depictions is a common one in superhero comics, but it's another element of superhero storytelling that, to me, diminishes the appeal of most superheroes for me. I prefer characters that are actually consistent, recognizable personalities, not just a set of costumes and powers that can be radically reconfigured as they pass through the hands of different creators; trying to find any consistency, from a characterization standpoint, in long-running multi-creator superhero comics series (such as the X-Men) can induce whiplash; just try reading the "fictional character biography" section for any prominent superhero on Wikipedia.
Well, granted; but that is a slightly different issue, since the whiplash in those cases is induced by the fact that those runs are in theory meant to exist in a single continuity. I wasn't referring to changing creative teams on the prime comics, but rather on the way adaptations are done; the Timm/Dini shows, the film adaptations, the video games even. Not to mention those comics which are explicitly new continuities (e.g. Marvel's “Ultimates” thing). Again I find the myth-and-folklore comparison instructive. Merlin in La Morte d'Arthur is not Merlin in The Sword in the Stone is not Merlin in Excalibur is not Merlin in, er, Merlin; and once you get in the right frame of mind I don't think this is unduly distracting or cheapening.
I think Youngberg was mentioned less often because Angones was active on the Internet. He was asked a lot of questions on Tumblr and he answered. Therefore, Angones is more famous.
Yes, I've fallen into using "Angones" as a shorthand term for the assorted production staff of New Ducktales mainly because of the way Angones basically made himself the public face of the show in interviews and on Tumblr. Youngberg is probably also responsible for many of the show's creative choices, and it's interesting to learn of his superhero background--not exactly the work history I'd have looked for in hiring someone for a major creative role on a Duck show.
To Scrooge MacDuck: in re your additional remarks, I actually agree 100% with this sentence: “objectively a number of comics have included such elements without feeling like complete departures from What Disney Comics Are in the same way; so DT17's fault/peculiarity must be elsewhere than in the inclusion of these elements, per se”. Again, it's just that I come down heavily on the "fault" slide of your slash-mark, while you seem to land on the more forgiving "peculiarity" side. My previously posts on this thread made my argument as to the faults pretty exhaustively, so I won't repeat them here. However, to briefly follow up on your point about how Rebo does not feel like Lunaris--I found the Rebo stories I've read (the two reprinted in "Uncle Scrooge's Money Rocket") to be weird and disjointed, like a lot of Italian Duck stories, but Rebo at least was an appropriately humorous antagonist, a very Disneyesque riff on the Space Tyrant villain archetype, rather than a basically humorless iteration of the archetype more or less lifted wholesale from the superhero world, ala Lunaris.
Also, I can't resist adding that I do have my issues with Eega Beeva; the nearly limitless and arbitrary nature of his powers make the Walsh daily-strip serials with the character generally uninteresting to me (although the Rhyming Man saga was enjoyable). I also think he wrecks "The Blot's Double Mystery", shattering the brooding mystery atmosphere when he makes his Deus ex Machina entrance and essentially making Mickey a supporting character in his own story. I do like what Casty did with him in the "Plan Dine from Outer Space" story--using him as Mickey's co-hero in an outer-space story, effectively the connecting link between Mickey and the space aliens, seems a clever way to prevent the character's weirdness from sticking out as much as it would in an earthbound setting.
Returning to your comments on New Ducktales, one of the reasons I'm not terribly bothered by the varying-from-the-source adaptations of the DC and Marvel characters--like the Timm/Dini shows or some of the MCU movies--is that there really is no authoritative "source" for the superhero characters; Batman's comics universe, for example, has changed its tone and ambiance so many times over the years (from pulp-Gothic to Dick Tracy-ish stylization to candy-colored sci-fi antics to Marvel-esque dramatics to Frank Miller/Alan Moore "edginess") that one can point to comic-book sources to support the tone of most adaptations. The Ducks and their world have been much more consistent on the comics page over the years, and thus I think taking the same "shapes and symbols" approach to adapting their world strips that world of its essence much more than a similar approach does to superhero stories.
I liked the development of Daisy and Donald's relationship. It is much more healthy in this cartoon series than it was in the comics. Also liked Webby's development.
Also enjoyed the fact that each of the nephews had a separate personality now. Didn't like, however, that Louie's personality was close to being someone that would steal Uncle Scrooge's Money Bin.
Gyro was heavily out of character. I need to admit nonetheless that in the cartoon series he is more like most of the top-scientists I have met. 🤣
Returning to your comments on New Ducktales, one of the reasons I'm not terribly bothered by the varying-from-the-source adaptations of the DC and Marvel characters--like the Timm/Dini shows or some of the MCU movies--is that there really is no authoritative "source" for the superhero characters; Batman's comics universe, for example, has changed its tone and ambiance so many times over the years (from pulp-Gothic to Dick Tracy-ish stylization to candy-colored sci-fi antics to Marvel-esque dramatics to Frank Miller/Alan Moore "edginess") that one can point to comic-book sources to support the tone of most adaptations. The Ducks and their world have been much more consistent on the comics page over the years, and thus I think taking the same "shapes and symbols" approach to adapting their world strips that world of its essence much more than a similar approach does to superhero stories.
So far, yes. But where you see in aberration in DT17 I see the inevitable beginning of something new. It has to start somewhere. I do think for the better part of, oh, three hundred years, the Arthurian mythos was perceived as one thing; different poets' renditions might contradict one another in the particulars, tones might differ, but no more than a Scarpa tale will differ from a Barks classic. Eventually somebody had to be the first to tell a King Arthur story that kept only the bare bones — I wonder who it was. Perhaps in their day that first "aberrant" poet was reviled for missing the point entirely. But that would seem rather small-minded in hindsight.
Want something more modern? Well, take Sherlock Holmes. Someone had to do the first "non-Doylish" Sherlock (and I don't mean the William Gillette play); I think an argument could be made it was the Rathbone films, actually. At some point Sherlock Holmes slipped from a specific literary conceit, inextricable from a particular tone and style and genre, to one of the great archetypes — as familiar as Santa Claus or Hercules. And I suppose there are Doyle diehards even now who find this irritating; I will not deny that it can be a breath of fresh air to go back to the text now and again. But it's the way of the world.
We live in strange times; it's hard to speak about how the world will think of Scrooge McDuck in 2123 without feeling like I've gone loopy. But still — powers willing, I think it is entirely possible that all of us in this thread will live to see Scrooge falling into the public domain; certainly we shall see it happening to Donald. (Mickey's just around the corner, don't you know…) Even setting aside the specifics of copyright law, we shall soon live in a world where these stories and characters are a century old, and I cannot help but think that this… changes things. It puzzles me at time, this thought, even though I'm on the younger side. Perhaps because that was how the blurbs in the magazines and collections presented things, it still seems to me on some daft emotional level that Barks was "last generation" and that Rosa is "modern". What do you mean, he hasn't been working for twenty years? Madness.
But the point is, I cannot help but think that fanciful/shapes-and-symbols adaptations will accumulate in decades to come; that DT17 is in this respect merely the slightly-early forerunner of an inevitability. We haven't seen very many iterations, so the first big "weird" one after The Original seems wrong and arbitrary. But soon (in the grand scheme of literary history, at any rate; not necessarily soon in human terms) there will be five, twenty, a hundred Duckburgs; and DT17 will feel positively old-fashioned in many a respect.