Enjoyable episode. Scrooge is very much relegated to the side plot, but David Tennant still gets to throw out a few zingers, and the main story with Huey and Dewey is plenty of fun.
Scrooge (and fellow curmudgeonly Scottish billionaire Flintheart Glomgold) are disgusted to learn that tech mogul Mark Beaks is hot on the heels of becoming the newest Duckburg billionaire. While they scheme for a way to keep him out of their (literal) billionaires’ club, Huey and Dewey compete for the same internship spot at Beaks’s company.
Mark Beaks is much in the vein of a Mark Zuckerberg/Steve Jobs/etc., and the episode does a nice job skewering Silicon Valley and “hip young CEO!” tech-company culture. At his headquarters, there are slides instead of stairs, work surfaces are made of candy, and there are trampolines of varying levels of bounciness. Meanwhile, Mark himself is a casually-attired, slang-using boss, armed with a cache of “back-up phones” so he can keep posting on social media regardless of the situation. It’s an easy parody, but it gets the job done in a kid-friendly way.
Huey and Dewey’s conflict here feels reasonable for both characters. Nerdy, cross-all-the-Ts Huey idolizes Mark, contentedly sighing that the man smells like ingenuity, while Dewey is more impressed about the almost-billionaire angle. It’s not until he sees all the fun perks at the office that Dewey becomes genuinely interested in the internship, at which point it turns into a fight between his slapdash improvisation and Huey’s by-the-book precision. I like Huey taking a pragmatic approach to all of the fun features at Mark’s office. “You’re doing it wrong!” he insists when Dewey whizzes happily down the slide. “This is supposed to be efficient, not fun. Whee.”
While Mark spends most of his time in the A-plot with the boys, it’s also kind of interesting to get the contrast between the old-fashioned billionaires of Scrooge and Glomgold’s ilk and the newer style of the tech billionaire. There are definite differences between them, and it’s interesting to think about how the image of a billionaire has changed over the decades.
Not as much for Scrooge this week. Mostly, he and Glomgold are used for short comedic cuts away from the main antics at Mark’s headquarters, with Scrooge poking exasperated holes in Glomgold’s needlessly-complicated, blatantly-Bond-villain-esque plans for ridding them of Mark.
As
always, Tennant brings the fun with his performance. I love him interrupting
one of the many phases of Glomgold’s plan to demand, “Where did the sharks come
from?” (to which Glomgold simply responds, “I’ve got a great shark guy.”) It
also delights me that he describes a staring contest as “a vision-based battle
of wills.” Luckily, the show on the whole is enjoyable enough that even when an
episode is lite on Scrooge, I still have a good time.
No comments:
Post a Comment