I think this is the only Halloween episode DuckTales has done, which is a little surprising. It’s a holiday that feels right up their alley, and the episode certainly bears that out. I always appreciate a good Halloween episode, and this one is a lot of fun!
Huey has the perfect Halloween night planned for his brothers and Webby, with a map drawn out to hit all the best houses. But Louie has a different plan: legend has it that a haunted house in town has a massive candy haul inside. In lieu of trick-or-treating, he proposes one gigantic score. Meanwhile, Della and Donald go to help Launchpad handle trick-or-treaters but are surprised to discover just how seriously he takes Halloween.
Obviously, one of the best things about a Halloween episode is seeing the different characters’ costumes. Huey has a detailed Gizmo Duck costume, while Dewey is more low-effort but creative as “a pirate on vacation.” Webby has the costume no one recognizes, a 17th-century monster, and she also holds to the tradition that people are supposed to dress up as monsters on Halloween in order to disguise themselves from the real ones that roam the Earth that night. Louie has the lazy barely-even-a-costume—he’s going as Huey, but the only lip service he pays to that is swiping Huey’s hat and doing a rather meanspirited impression of his brother. Donald and Della have team-up costumes, with Donald as an angel and Della as a devil.
We saw an episode with a strong Louie-Dewey conflict earlier in the episode, and now we have Huey and Louie butting heads. The argument is in character for both of them—Huey has planned everything out meticulously and is now thrown for a loop by Louie, who’s essentially trying to hack Halloween and get them “a lifetime supply of candy” with the least possible effort. So while Huey repeatedly tries to get them to abandon the haunted-house quest, Louie is so focused on the prospective candy haul that for once he’s the one urging the others forward on the spooky adventure. Before long, they’re of course being chased by creepy clowns and walking ventriloquist dummies. In a great moment, Louie directs them through another door, exclaiming, “It can’t be any worse than in here!” When the door leads them directly out to a cemetery, complete with eerie fog, Huey cries, “Why would you ever say that?!?”
Some fun Easter eggs in the guest stars here. Over at the haunted house, we have famous “creature” actor Doug Jones as a wereduck, Selma Blair as a witch, and James Marsters (Spike!) as a vampire. And again, this is primarily a Huey-Louie storyline, but I love this entertaining exchange between Dewey and Louie, after Louie proposes getting all the candy they could want from a single location:
· Dewey: “We’re going to the candy store?”
· Louie: “What? No, it’s nighttime, candy stores are closed.”
· Dewey: “We’re gonna rob a candy store???”
· (Louie shakes his head in annoyance)
The Della-Donald-Launchpad story is really fun too. It turns out that Launchpad thinks everyone’s costumes are real, and every October 31st, he barricades himself in his home to ward off the monstrous “Hungries” who come to his door. Della, predictably, is all about this, while Donald immediately thinks of the ways this could go badly.
Scrooge doesn’t have a big role in this episode, but I still like his appearance. Unsurprisingly, he has a very miserly attitude about trick-or-treaters coming to the mansion, bellowing, “There will be no Halloween handouts here!” However, we learn that he’s super into going trick-or-treating himself, so while the other characters handle the A- and B-plots, he sets off to collect more candy than anyone else.
His costume, a skeleton, isn’t particularly inspired, but it looks fantastic. David Tennant nicely plays Scrooge’s relish for Halloween—I especially love the line, “Candy hoarder, eh? It won’t stop the guileful Guiser of Glasgow.”
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