*Episode premise spoilers.*
Lots of meta going on here, on multiple levels, which is fun. I watched a lot of these various anthropomorphized animal Disney cartoons as a kid, although I don’t have many distinct memories of Darkwing Duck. Even so, I found plenty to enjoy about this episode.
Dewey tags along to help Launchpad meet his hero: Jim Starling, the original star of Darkwing Duck. While there, they hear the news that the show is getting a big-budget movie reboot. Eager to help, Launchpad chauffeurs Starling to the studio as he prepares for his big comeback. The only problem? They’ve recast him.
The series has referenced Darkwing Duck a few times as an in-universe TV show, but until now, it’s mostly been confined to short scenes of characters watching an old episode. This is the first time any of the regulars have interacted with an “actor” from the show, and there are some good cheeky digs about reboots. Launchpad all-out exclaims, “Oh, cool! A big-budget reboot of a thing I loved as a kid! Those are always great!” Edgar Wright guest stars as an auteur with a gritty Dark Knight-esque vision for the reboot, and the trailer for his movie is an absolute hoot. There are, not one, but two slow-motion shots of a string of pearls hitting the ground! I can’t.
Dewey’s reaction to the footage brings in another angle: who are these reboots for? For the most part, Hollywood has offered up “darker,” more “elevated” projects designed to appeal to the adults who loved these properties as children. But this can leave present-day kids who might otherwise have become new fans out of the action. Scrooge, who owns the studio, decides it’s better to market to the kids and saddles the pretentious director with Dewey. This leads to some great fun, including this delightful exchange: the director, looking around the set in horror, asks, “What did you do to my psychological masterpiece?” Dewey replies coolly, “I added chainsaw jugglers. You’re welcome.”
And of course, we look at the age-old question of doing a continuation with the original stars versus a reboot with new ones. In-universe, the show goes the latter route, and Starling is eager for Launchpad to help him boot out the interloper in his role. In actuality, DuckTales takes the former approach, with Jim Cummings (the voice of Darkwing Duck in the original cartoon) as Starling. I get the instinct—besides Darkwing Duck, Cummings has voiced frillions of memorable animated characters over his long career—but this episode had the misfortune to first air about two weeks after the allegations against Cummings were made public.
In case you’re wondering what Scrooge is doing with a movie studio, he initially bought it to make workplace safety videos. The walls of the studio are lined with posters for such gems as Emergency Evacuations: Save the Money First!!!, which I love. He greenlights the Darkwing Duck film on the promise that it’ll make him a truckload of money, and when the production starts going over budget, he decides to get involved. His biggest pitch? An insistence that the villain literally twirl his mustache, a fun running gag with a good payoff.
Here are a couple of choice line readings from David Tennant:
· Other notes he offers on the film include asserting, “The movie should be in color. Color’s all the rage these days!” He’s a swashbuckling adventurer, but he’s such an old man.
· When Dewey realizes just who the studio exec is, he bursts into Scrooge’s office demanding, “You have a movie studio that could fulfill a starry-eyed boy’s cinematic dreams? Why didn’t you tell me?!?” Scrooge deadpans in response, “To avoid this exact conversation?”
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