Is, was there a thing last week? Have we hit a drought already? The last one I saw was that mediocre mummy thing.
It’s curious. This started off so well, out of the gate. The Webby/Lena stuff is great, yeah. I kind of like what they’re doing with the Beagle Boys, and the way they handled that one comedy episode about the #1 dime was OK. But… I’m really not getting the adventure here. Aside from the Terry Fermians, little since the pilot has really approached menace or peril or wonder or, you know, anything sincere. Most of this feels like just filler, it seems like now.
Maybe I’m just still on a low after the Mark Beaks episode. I was OK until then.
Yeah I dunno, Gravity Falls it ain’t. It’s pleasant and light, Scrooge is good, Webby is good, I like Lena, I like the red-shirt duck… duckling, Launchpad seems on-point. The pieces are there for some good stuff, but every ep is determined to be very casual, very low-stakes, and more of a farce than an adventure. Which is fine, it’s just weird they play up the whole adventure bit if that’s the route they’re gonna go.
So there’s no way to see this without getting a cable subscription or buying the season on Amazon or somewhwere? I loved the premier. I may not be able to resist dropping the $30 for the season. I can’t stand missing out on this.
Meanwhile, just discovered that Disney has put DuckTales, Rescue Rangers, TaleSpin, Goof Troop, and Gargoyles up on Amazon and other such platforms. Very sad to see Darkwing is not up there, and I wonder if that has something to do with the greater saturation of violence/guns and the weird stuff with Hell in late seasons. Hope it makes it out unedited.
EDIT: And I’d imagine Bonkers will never be released because this is a cruel and careless world.
Well, spoiler, Darkwing is gonna be incorporated into DT2017 at some point, apparently with the intention to backdoor pilot his own revival show. They’ve already established St. Canard across the bay from Duckburg.
And… like, every other Disney Afternoon city as well, in-continuity. Looks like TaleSpin, Goof Troop, and everything else is out there, ready to hook in like an expansion pack. It’s like they’re building a Disney TVAU, rather like the DCAU. All predicated on initial success here, of course.
And, roundly, it has been successful so far. As above, though, I find it odd that every episode is farce. Comedy is important, but so is earnestness.
Ah well. Early days yet. And they are clearly still scene-setting.
Edit: to a point I watched this on-demand on someone else’s cable box, but there is of course the magic of bittorrent.
I am very intrigued about Darkwing Duck (admission: when I was in high school, I ran the most visited Darkwing Duck fansite on the Internet) appearing in DuckTales and am very happy that Jim Cummings is going to be voicing him again. The idea of a full-fledged return to St. Canard is interesting, but I’m somehow much more wary of that idea (for half-formed reasons that I’m sure I could get into, but won’t be able to stop pulling apart if I start).
That’s not terribly surprising that the show leans more heavily on comedy, though I would think these classic Disney properties need to have a bit more sober-faced dramatic/adventure grounding to bounce that off of.
Biggest comic call-back: Donald is the MVP here. He’s genuinely the most interesting character, with the highest stakes and biggest emotional depths. He’s so clearly just hanging together as a person, and most of his character flaws are… you know, psychologically grounded now. Like, you feel for the guy, even and especially when he’s tuned out and handling things terribly.
The one big, super impressive exception to the nothin’-but-lols approach so far is, as I said, the episode with the Terryfermians. I wasn’t looking forward to that at all, but they did something pretty incredible there. It’s basically a horror episode, and it deals so well with so many character and logistical issues. Just super well-written and on-point. Which, despite the unexpected (and super good) handling, in the end manages to somehow also be super faithful to Barks. At least, in concept.
Anyway, yeah. Hoping for more of that. Or at least more of the Gladstone episode, for all of the character plumbing that went on there.
(And the tone of that episode, and handling of a certain well-known Barks villain, bode very well for what you’re concerned about with Darkwing.)
Curious thing there – new episode, yes. But, it’s fourth in the intended run order (counting the pilot as two). It’s meant to come after Daytrip of Doom! (where they introduce the Beagles and Webby gets some development), and before The Great Dime Chase, where we get the #1 dime, Gyro, and some early hints at Gizmoduck.
So now we’ve the first ten episodes all out, but their order is like this:
I notice with the intended run order, we don’t get this weird thing where Scrooge vanishes for a month at a time.
I’ve not watched today’s yet. It’s sittin’ there. Speculating wildly, I wonder if this has some relation to the Barks story about the abominable snowman. Which is… a weird one. Never was quite sure what to make of it.
Yeah. This was a pretty cute one, actually. Way more interesting than I feared, and very different than I expected. If they’re not going to have any peril in this show, this is a nice kind of an adventure to have. Reminds me of Rosa’s more comedic adventure stories, a bit.
Oh, like actually out-out? The way that Steven Universe always materializes where it shouldn’t be before it airs?
A week or two ago, one of the lead people posted something, saying, yeah, sorry about the delay; they’ve been working on something huge, so get ready for that.
In completely unrelated news (ahem) are there any general-purpose torrent sites that actually… work anymore? Sometimes I can still get something out of KAT or TPB, but it’s random.