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djnyr
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3 hours ago That Duckfan likes thisQuotelikePost OptionsPost by djnyr on 3 hours ago
"I come to bury Ducktales 2017, not to praise it."
#8—Family is the Greatest Adventure
This will be my last entry on the storytelling aspects of New Ducktales (I plan to follow it with entries on animation and voice work, and then a short epilogue). I think it’s appropriate to conclude an overview of the show’s writing by addressing its handling of its two professed central themes, Adventure and Family.
A. Expected Journeys
Angones and his crew, beginning with the original New Ducktales “First Look” teaser (“Uncharted territories! Bold new discoveries!”), hawked the show’s adventurousness for all it was worth. However, just as the supernatural elements of the series were ruined by being made utterly mundane, the showrunners also foreclosed the possibility of any genuinely exciting Barks-style treasure hunts by treating adventuring as basically the entire Duck family’s principal pastime rather than true trips off the beaten path. Where normal families would go on hikes or a trip to the zoo, the Ducks jaunt off to foreign lands or mystical alternate dimensions—which, just like their easy familiarity with the supernatural world, makes them a lot less relatable, as well as making adventure seem utterly mundane.
In Barks, by contrast, even Scrooge doesn’t usually plan and organize treasure-seeking expeditions from the ground up (as previously discussed in this thread); in “Mines of King Solomon” and “Seven Cities of Cibola,” probably the two quintessential Barks treasure-hunt stories, he stumbles onto the trail of fabled lost treasures while engaged in more ordinary business ventures. “The Philosopher’s Stone” is one of the only Barks treasure-hunt stories where Scrooge, right from the beginning, has a clear idea of exactly what he’s looking for when he sets out on his quest—and even there, the story is filled with unpredictability and changes of scene as the Ducks chase new clues around the map (“Call the wild goose! We’re on our way again!”)
It’s the unpredictability factor that makes for the best treasure hunts, expeditions, and quests—the puzzling clues that lead adventurous but ordinary people to odd and dangerous places and encounters with ancient or outlandish folk, the feeling that “still round the corner there may wait a new door or a secret gate.” The Original Ducktales pilot, “Treasure of the Golden Suns” also had a touch of this element, with small clues gradually snowballing into revelations of the extent of the treasure Scrooge is searching, and the history of that treasure. I think the single best term to describe this quality of adventurous unpredictability is Tolkien’s phrase “Unexpected Journey;” most of the foundational adventure stories of modern Western literature—King Solomon’s Mines, Treasure Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World—possess it to some degree or another.
However, there are almost no Unexpected Journeys in New Ducktales, and little real sense of exploring uncharted territory, solving ancient riddles, or encountering unknown civilizations. Angones’ Scrooge has been everywhere and seen everything, and has some kind of past connection with nearly every strange or exotic place visited or referenced in the course of the show, from Mount Neverrest to the mystical realm of “Goathoo.” Even when the Ducks encounter something that’s not old news to Scrooge, any sense of discovery is destroyed by the Angones crew’s unwillingness or inability to even try to imagine what ancient or alien worlds might really be like. Atlantis, in the pilot episode, is just a generic booby-trapped lost city set for the characters to clown around in while establishing their “personalities”; the “Living Mummies of Toth-Ra” are embarrassing ninnies defined by an obsession with burritos, and are denied any of the dignity given to similar time-frozen ancient Egyptians in Barks’ “Mummy’s Ring” and Original Ducktales’ “Sphinx for the Memories;” the Moonlanders, as noted in previous posts, are a bunch of sitcom suburbanites led by a couple of escapees from a superhero comic.
All that said, and as much as I dislike Angones’ Della, I will admit that “Whatever Happened to Della Duck” was one of the few episodes that actually took classic-style adventure somewhat seriously—by taking a traditional subcategory of unexpected journey, the “quest to survive in a strange and hostile environment” saga that used to be known as a “Robinsonade”, and developing it at some length, instead of treating it like a careless toss-off or completely subverting it. I would give Angones a lot more credit for Della’s Crusoe-like adventure, however, if The Martian hadn’t come out in 2015; the video diaries in “Whatever Happened…” in particular made it fairly clear that Angones, in crafting Della’s space-Robinsonade, wasn’t really trying to approach a classic adventure trope with greater seriousness than usual, but merely engaging in another knock-off of a recent popular movie (just as he repeatedly homaged/ripped-off the Marvel movies). And, in any case, Angones couldn’t even carry the Robinsonade for a full episode without bringing in the Moonlanders and thus escaping back to the comfort of more modern tropes.
Ultimately, for all New Ducktales’ yammering about “adventure is in [the Ducks’] blood”, and its attempt to frame its Ultimate Showdown as a clash between the philosophies of Adventure and Unadventurousness, one never got the sense that any of the writers were really interested in exploration, discovery, undiscovered wonders, or the treasures of the past for their own sake, but instead were only interested in such things in so far as they could be used as a vehicle for jokes, action setpieces, pop-culture riffs--and character interactions, which leads into the next section.
B. Duck Family Values
New Ducktales regularly made perfunctory use of journeys and quests simply in order to have an excuse to have the members of the Duck family bounce off of each other, as in “Last Crash of the Sunchaser” or “Golden Armory of Cornelius Coot”; the latter actually did have some good historical-treasure-hunt elements, but was finally smothered by the heavy-handed “Webby wants to be awesome like Della” character-based subplot.
This continual use of adventure simply to throw the characters together would perhaps be more excusable if those characters were more appealing or if their family dynamic was more believable. I’ve devoted the first six sections of this dissection to analyzing just why those characters were unappealing and their dynamic unbelievable, so I won’t belabor my points too much further here. Suffice it to say that the sentimental and dramatic things we were told about the Duck family in this show were continually belied by what we were really shown.
We were supposed to believe that Donald and Beakley were defined by their protectiveness of the Nephews and Webby, respectively, but saw those kids spend most of their time with Scrooge instead of with these supposed parental figures, and the alleged family bonds were only allowed to surface when it was time to manufacture sentiment or drama. We were asked to empathize with Della as a loving parent separated from her kids, and get misty-eyed about her lonely little Moon lullaby—but were shown a reckless narcissist who abandoned those kids for a life-risking joyride. We were supposed to believe that Launchpad was simple but noble, someone that conventionally smarter characters could learn a few things from, but were shown someone so unfathomably dumb that he could only be considered a grave danger to himself and others. We were asked to regard Scrooge and Goldie as a charming on-again-off-again romantic pair of daring equals, but were shown a toxic relationship between an honest man and a pathologically selfish, greedy, and treacherous woman. We were shown what was supposed to be a tragic family rift between Scrooge, Donald and the Nephews, but which actually came off as a ridiculously contrived conflict. We were told much about the glories of Clan McDuck, but were shown a squabbling cartoonish, dysfunctional collection of sitcom kinfolks.
Above all, we were told, ad nauseum, that all these characters, and others, had a deep familial love for each other—but their interactions were almost always marked by insults, mockery, bickering, lying, and one-upmanship that was obviously supposed to be hip, cool and funny, but instead came off as off-putting and unpleasant. Barks’ character interactions could of course be quite sharply cynical, but his cynicism was a darkly humorous commentary on the flaws of human nature; he also knew the highs and lows of his characters, and of human nature, so well that he could also effortlessly and convincingly switch from cynicism to sentiment without mawkishness or awkwardness.
New Ducktales, on the other hand, had such a consistently glib, snarky and surface-level take on its characters that it couldn’t transition to sentiment or point a moral without feeling very insincere, even though it tried to give at least one character some “lesson” or other moment of “growth” in nearly every episode. These lessons (like Louie’s supposed schooling in humility in “Richest Duck in the World,” the jaw-droppingly stupid “Everyone needs to pay more attention to Dewey” arc in “Sky Pirates in the Sky”, or Scrooge’s apology to his rogue’s gallery in “Life and Crimes of Scrooge McDuck”) came off as more painful and forced than even the most clumsy moments in Original Ducktales--where exercises in sentiment sometimes felt like heavy-handed underlining of the show’s theme, but never felt like attempts to introduce themes entirely antithetical to the show’s overall tone.
The sheer dissonance between New Ducktales’ overall tone (with its “humorously” abrasive character interactions and wonder-stale protagonists) and its harped-on theme of Family Adventure! (TM) is so strong throughout the show’s run that my reaction to Huey’s climactic proclamation of the Moral of the Show—“Family is the Greatest Adventure of All!”—that my reaction is pretty much that of Bradford’s: “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” No matter how dramatically it's pronounced, that moral doesn’t really jibe with anything that we’ve actually seen over the course of the show's three seasons.
djnyr
Bigger Duckling
**
djnyr Avatar
Posts: 156Male
3 hours ago That Duckfan likes thisQuotelikePost OptionsPost by djnyr on 3 hours ago
"I come to bury Ducktales 2017, not to praise it."
#8—Family is the Greatest Adventure
This will be my last entry on the storytelling aspects of New Ducktales (I plan to follow it with entries on animation and voice work, and then a short epilogue). I think it’s appropriate to conclude an overview of the show’s writing by addressing its handling of its two professed central themes, Adventure and Family.
A. Expected Journeys
Angones and his crew, beginning with the original New Ducktales “First Look” teaser (“Uncharted territories! Bold new discoveries!”), hawked the show’s adventurousness for all it was worth. However, just as the supernatural elements of the series were ruined by being made utterly mundane, the showrunners also foreclosed the possibility of any genuinely exciting Barks-style treasure hunts by treating adventuring as basically the entire Duck family’s principal pastime rather than true trips off the beaten path. Where normal families would go on hikes or a trip to the zoo, the Ducks jaunt off to foreign lands or mystical alternate dimensions—which, just like their easy familiarity with the supernatural world, makes them a lot less relatable, as well as making adventure seem utterly mundane.
In Barks, by contrast, even Scrooge doesn’t usually plan and organize treasure-seeking expeditions from the ground up (as previously discussed in this thread); in “Mines of King Solomon” and “Seven Cities of Cibola,” probably the two quintessential Barks treasure-hunt stories, he stumbles onto the trail of fabled lost treasures while engaged in more ordinary business ventures. “The Philosopher’s Stone” is one of the only Barks treasure-hunt stories where Scrooge, right from the beginning, has a clear idea of exactly what he’s looking for when he sets out on his quest—and even there, the story is filled with unpredictability and changes of scene as the Ducks chase new clues around the map (“Call the wild goose! We’re on our way again!”)
It’s the unpredictability factor that makes for the best treasure hunts, expeditions, and quests—the puzzling clues that lead adventurous but ordinary people to odd and dangerous places and encounters with ancient or outlandish folk, the feeling that “still round the corner there may wait a new door or a secret gate.” The Original Ducktales pilot, “Treasure of the Golden Suns” also had a touch of this element, with small clues gradually snowballing into revelations of the extent of the treasure Scrooge is searching, and the history of that treasure. I think the single best term to describe this quality of adventurous unpredictability is Tolkien’s phrase “Unexpected Journey;” most of the foundational adventure stories of modern Western literature—King Solomon’s Mines, Treasure Island, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Lost World—possess it to some degree or another.
However, there are almost no Unexpected Journeys in New Ducktales, and little real sense of exploring uncharted territory, solving ancient riddles, or encountering unknown civilizations. Angones’ Scrooge has been everywhere and seen everything, and has some kind of past connection with nearly every strange or exotic place visited or referenced in the course of the show, from Mount Neverrest to the mystical realm of “Goathoo.” Even when the Ducks encounter something that’s not old news to Scrooge, any sense of discovery is destroyed by the Angones crew’s unwillingness or inability to even try to imagine what ancient or alien worlds might really be like. Atlantis, in the pilot episode, is just a generic booby-trapped lost city set for the characters to clown around in while establishing their “personalities”; the “Living Mummies of Toth-Ra” are embarrassing ninnies defined by an obsession with burritos, and are denied any of the dignity given to similar time-frozen ancient Egyptians in Barks’ “Mummy’s Ring” and Original Ducktales’ “Sphinx for the Memories;” the Moonlanders, as noted in previous posts, are a bunch of sitcom suburbanites led by a couple of escapees from a superhero comic.
All that said, and as much as I dislike Angones’ Della, I will admit that “Whatever Happened to Della Duck” was one of the few episodes that actually took classic-style adventure somewhat seriously—by taking a traditional subcategory of unexpected journey, the “quest to survive in a strange and hostile environment” saga that used to be known as a “Robinsonade”, and developing it at some length, instead of treating it like a careless toss-off or completely subverting it. I would give Angones a lot more credit for Della’s Crusoe-like adventure, however, if The Martian hadn’t come out in 2015; the video diaries in “Whatever Happened…” in particular made it fairly clear that Angones, in crafting Della’s space-Robinsonade, wasn’t really trying to approach a classic adventure trope with greater seriousness than usual, but merely engaging in another knock-off of a recent popular movie (just as he repeatedly homaged/ripped-off the Marvel movies). And, in any case, Angones couldn’t even carry the Robinsonade for a full episode without bringing in the Moonlanders and thus escaping back to the comfort of more modern tropes.
Ultimately, for all New Ducktales’ yammering about “adventure is in [the Ducks’] blood”, and its attempt to frame its Ultimate Showdown as a clash between the philosophies of Adventure and Unadventurousness, one never got the sense that any of the writers were really interested in exploration, discovery, undiscovered wonders, or the treasures of the past for their own sake, but instead were only interested in such things in so far as they could be used as a vehicle for jokes, action setpieces, pop-culture riffs--and character interactions, which leads into the next section.
B. Duck Family Values
New Ducktales regularly made perfunctory use of journeys and quests simply in order to have an excuse to have the members of the Duck family bounce off of each other, as in “Last Crash of the Sunchaser” or “Golden Armory of Cornelius Coot”; the latter actually did have some good historical-treasure-hunt elements, but was finally smothered by the heavy-handed “Webby wants to be awesome like Della” character-based subplot.
This continual use of adventure simply to throw the characters together would perhaps be more excusable if those characters were more appealing or if their family dynamic was more believable. I’ve devoted the first six sections of this dissection to analyzing just why those characters were unappealing and their dynamic unbelievable, so I won’t belabor my points too much further here. Suffice it to say that the sentimental and dramatic things we were told about the Duck family in this show were continually belied by what we were really shown.
We were supposed to believe that Donald and Beakley were defined by their protectiveness of the Nephews and Webby, respectively, but saw those kids spend most of their time with Scrooge instead of with these supposed parental figures, and the alleged family bonds were only allowed to surface when it was time to manufacture sentiment or drama. We were asked to empathize with Della as a loving parent separated from her kids, and get misty-eyed about her lonely little Moon lullaby—but were shown a reckless narcissist who abandoned those kids for a life-risking joyride. We were supposed to believe that Launchpad was simple but noble, someone that conventionally smarter characters could learn a few things from, but were shown someone so unfathomably dumb that he could only be considered a grave danger to himself and others. We were asked to regard Scrooge and Goldie as a charming on-again-off-again romantic pair of daring equals, but were shown a toxic relationship between an honest man and a pathologically selfish, greedy, and treacherous woman. We were shown what was supposed to be a tragic family rift between Scrooge, Donald and the Nephews, but which actually came off as a ridiculously contrived conflict. We were told much about the glories of Clan McDuck, but were shown a squabbling cartoonish, dysfunctional collection of sitcom kinfolks.
Above all, we were told, ad nauseum, that all these characters, and others, had a deep familial love for each other—but their interactions were almost always marked by insults, mockery, bickering, lying, and one-upmanship that was obviously supposed to be hip, cool and funny, but instead came off as off-putting and unpleasant. Barks’ character interactions could of course be quite sharply cynical, but his cynicism was a darkly humorous commentary on the flaws of human nature; he also knew the highs and lows of his characters, and of human nature, so well that he could also effortlessly and convincingly switch from cynicism to sentiment without mawkishness or awkwardness.
New Ducktales, on the other hand, had such a consistently glib, snarky and surface-level take on its characters that it couldn’t transition to sentiment or point a moral without feeling very insincere, even though it tried to give at least one character some “lesson” or other moment of “growth” in nearly every episode. These lessons (like Louie’s supposed schooling in humility in “Richest Duck in the World,” the jaw-droppingly stupid “Everyone needs to pay more attention to Dewey” arc in “Sky Pirates in the Sky”, or Scrooge’s apology to his rogue’s gallery in “Life and Crimes of Scrooge McDuck”) came off as more painful and forced than even the most clumsy moments in Original Ducktales--where exercises in sentiment sometimes felt like heavy-handed underlining of the show’s theme, but never felt like attempts to introduce themes entirely antithetical to the show’s overall tone.
The sheer dissonance between New Ducktales’ overall tone (with its “humorously” abrasive character interactions and wonder-stale protagonists) and its harped-on theme of Family Adventure! (TM) is so strong throughout the show’s run that my reaction to Huey’s climactic proclamation of the Moral of the Show—“Family is the Greatest Adventure of All!”—that my reaction is pretty much that of Bradford’s: “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” No matter how dramatically it's pronounced, that moral doesn’t really jibe with anything that we’ve actually seen over the course of the show's three seasons.