It is the twenty-fifth anniversary of DuckTales. This anniversary
has given comic blogs that I read the opportunity to celebrate the series,
often in great detail. For me, the
problem is that DT and I had a very
complicated relationship.
DuckTales was
released in 1987 near the height of Gladstone’s spectacular reissuing of Disney
comic books in the United States. The
last remnants of Western Publishing—Whitman—had officially held the license in
the early 1980s, but had basically given up by the late 1970s. The final Whitman issues remain rare because their
distribution was skewed. Gladstone,
though, marketed kids’ comics to fans, most of whom were adults.
I was not an adult in 1987.
I turned 15 that year. (God, I’m
old.) I had always loved Disney’s ducks,
and I had been inhaling the stories printed by Gladstone and learning about the
Good Duck Man, Carl Barks. I was excited
to hear of an animated series allegedly based on Barks’s classic Uncle Scrooge
comic books.
Notice that key word: allegedly. Frankly, Disney has never known what to do
with the ducks. This was never more true
than with DT. Scrooge McDuck is arguably Carl Barks’s
greatest creation, but he did something else equally important: he transformed
Donald Duck from an incomprehensible hothead popularized in early shorts to an
Everyduck. Donald remained angry and
opinionated—those are some of the traits from which great comedy comes—but he
was far more rounded than the persona of the screen. Disney, though, never realized that.
DT’s greatest
mistake—and that’s saying something, because there were many!—was jettisoning
Donald. They had him join the navy. After all, since he wears a sailor suit, he
must dream of joining. Gladstone in one
or another letters column argued that Donald would’ve overshadowed Uncle
Scrooge. I disagreed then, and I
disagree now. Scrooge without Donald is like
Laurel without Hardy. Besides this, the
Donald Duck created by Barks would never abandon his nephews like that. Oh, he might for a week or a month—Donald remains
selfish—but his better nature would return.
Even worse, to take Donald’s place, Disney felt it necessary
to create one of the most obnoxious animation characters ever: Launchpad
McQuack. Launchpad was an incompetent
and stupid pilot. Stupidity can be comic
gold if done correctly, but it is almost never done correctly. Launchpad annoyed me. He still does. The other new characters introduced were
similarly problematic. Of particular
obnoxiousness was Webby, a preteen duckling who was the niece of Scrooge’s
housekeeper (another needless addition).
One might applaud Disney for trying to add female characters to an
animated world that has long been male dominated to the point of misogyny. But there were female characters who could easily
have been coopted for this idea: Daisy’s nieces, April, May, and June. For that matter, Daisy herself would have
been a fine addition to DT.
I will say that seeing Barks’s “Land Beneath the Ground”
animated was and is a remarkable experience.
It’s one of the few episodes that I have fond memories of. For the most part, though, DT shits on Barks’s legacy. It could have been golden, but it, instead,
was, well, shit. It was pretty, though. Barks famously refused comment on the show except to say that the backgrounds were lush like classic Disney animation. That's true--and that was Disney's modus operandi: pretty on the outside and empty (at best) on the inside. That philosophy would be transferred to comic books when they foolishly took the license away from Gladstone a few years later, but that's another post.
