Iām most of the way through the first season, finally, and am looking forward to being part of the keeping-up-with-DuckTales gang. I like the show but I donāt really entirely love it.
It has some really great episodes and moments. Iām actually pretty into whatās going on with Magica and Lena.
One of my big issues is that I feel like I donāt have a great read on who Scroogeis in this series. Heās been absent from a lot of episodes and even when heās there he seems somehow inconsistently characterized, or just thinly realized.
Scroogeās competition with billionaires seems off somehow. Was Glomgold always this inept? (Did he so frequently resort to outright murder attempts in previous incarnations? Itās been a while since I watched DuckTales 87 and canāt really remember his characterization in the few Barks and Rosa Iāve read.) Mark Beaksā¦ isnāt great, and just doesnāt land as a great rival for Scrooge? At least not yet.
Thereās something off to me about the constant near-death experiences characters undergo with absolutely no recognition that thatās whatās happening. This much danger with weak or no senses of peril feels tonally off, making it hard to feel the thrills of adventure action when there are stakes communicated either in the narrative style or the charactersā reactions. Itās not always like thisāthe Lena/Webby one where they outrun the Beagle Boysā Warriors clans, the hourlong premiere, and the āonly kidā premise I watched last night were a bit better about this.
But itās charming. I do like it. I feel like Iām still fighting to meet the show at its level a bit and still negotiating between old versions of characters and the new ones (mostly struggling here with Scrooge himself, Glomgold, and LaunchpadāI really like what theyāve done with Fenton (even though heās really, really different and barely the same character), the nephews, and Webby).
Btw, do kids like this show?
Hi, SB DuckTales thread. Iām not caught up with DuckTales but I have thoughts and no one else in my life right now cares about what I think about Disney duck shows.
Oh, Iām also really baffled by the repurposing of Doofus as they have here. Nothing about him is the same, so why keep him with his unfortunate name at all?
Oh, Glomgold is outright murderous in the original comics. He only appears in three Barks stories, but becomes more savage with each one. Heās not a comedy character by any means. A line that I always associate with the character:
Must be because he repeats it.
The billionaire competition thing is more of a European comic angle, a dynamic spun out of a single Barks comic about a candy-striped Ruby, which uses a sort of rich fellas society as a story device to get Scrooge out the door. But then it became this thing, in Europe. I dunno.
Thanks for the insight! I want to do a deeper dive on Barksās comics and the duck stories in general at some point.
I guess I donāt have a problem with Glomgold being so murderous, but I still find his portrayal as a pathetic second-banana slapstick fuckup in Neo DuckTales is awkward.
Yeah, I donāt know what to make of that interpretation. I donāt understand why, mostly. If I could get a read on the purpose, I might be fine with it. As it is, it just puzzles me. I do like how theyāre handling the Beagles and Magica, though.
Scrooge does suffer from not being in the show for long stretches of the first season. I guess maybe Tennantās availability was limited? Then he suffers more from the networkās randomization of the running order, which as originally planned does space things out a little better.
I think itās fair to say I like almost everything about DuckTales 2017 (a few weird interpretations aside, as above) except for the actual storytelling, most of the time. There are good episodes, but yes, the sense of peril is rarely there. Thereās little sense of adventure, or threat, or anything really mattering all that much until, suddenly and in the moment, it does. Itād be great if it could find a balance between having comedic episodes (and a light touch during dramatic episodes) and taking serious things seriously.
Wow, todayās ep is a trip. Glomgold turns out to be a combination of Ducktales 87 Glomgold and comics Glomgold in that he is actually South African but he created a Scottish persona just to be more Scottish than Scrooge lol. Keith Ferguson is very amusing at doing both somewhat dodgy accents. Heās a great voice actor
Really fun David Lynch For Kids dream sequence in the middle, too
Although it does remind me of the original Ducktales ep when Scrooge lost his memory and had an American accent. Makes me think he was faking it too hahaha
Episodes with strong A-B plot structure (like āThe Other Bin of Scrooge McDuck!ā) sometimes feel like they would be better served by splitting the plot threads into their own 12-minute Adventure Time-esque shorts.
The Glomgold thing in the recent episode ā yeah. I guess it does have a strange symmetry with the comic origin, even though every single detail is different, including the characterās portrayal?
In the Barks comics we only meet him the three times, and he gets increasingly savage with each appearance. The first time, heās only a slightly nastier mirror of Scrooge. Then he gets increasingly competitive and strange and downright twisted.
Rosa builds on the relationship, and reveals that Scroogeā¦ kind of accidentally set him down this path, when they were both young men. Scrooge never even gave the young Boer a chance to tell him his nameā¦
ā¦ and after a complicated misadventure left him thoroughly pissed off at Scrooge. By the time they meet again, decades later, Scrooge has no memory of Glomgold ā but Glomgold sure remembers him.
The showās version of course works in the shifted (or in Scroogeās case bizarrely not-shifted?) timeline, which allows for heightening the symmetry between them by warping the Burt the Ditch Digger story.
EDIT: Reading this again, my memory is off. Glomgoldās clearly a rotter from panel one. But Scrooge still leaves his mark on the fella.
i kinda prefer the three caballeros characterization on their recent show but this was a very fun episode. very much a classic sitcom kind of plot and it has the exact kind of ending you would want. was nice how donaldās outfit temporary went back to classic blue for the musical number. neat little references to all the original caballeros cartoons too
Iāve never been hugely into these guys, but this was a pretty good use of them. The hackneyed deception plot isā¦ like, I mentally tuned out until that started to fall apart. I donāt deal well with story templates like this, especially played more or less straight, as this does. But they made the characters fit the show, which I was unconvinced they would. So, hey!
Storkules in Duckburg was a lot of fun. It was maybe the most Ducktales '87 feeling ep out of all of the current show. And it turns out when you combine that old goofy but solid 80s story structure with more modern jokes it really works for me, like just plain funnier than usual. The Ghostbusters parody also worked much better for me than the āThe Warriorsā parody.
You know Chris Diamantopoulos is honestly kind of an amazing chameleon of a talent. His Storkules voice is nothing like his Mickey Mouse voice is nothing like his Moe in the three stooges movie which is nothing like Russ Hanneman in Silicon Valley. Like itās one thing to be fooled by a good voice actor but I literally see this dude in tons of different live action roles and donāt recognize him lol
Was I supposed to recognize that rooster(?) with the āQā shirt on? It feels like he is from some other Disney movie or show that Iāve forgotten EDIT: Oh yeah they are from this show the Ottoman Empire dude lol
Going by the clips Iāve seen, the episode itself is also kind of hilarious in that it only very technically isnāt in continuity with Mickeyās Christmas Carol.
