pubs
After the establishment of Rosa, the Duck annals have begun to resemble Tolkien. A prurient quote from Rosa:
What Dell licensed from the Disney corporation was the name Donald Duck. [At that time,] Donald was [...] actually like an actor. He was a different character in each cartoon. A comic book has to be based on an actual character with a history. So Carl Barks took the name Donald Duck and created a… well, a character, that didn’t even look exactly like the Disney Donald Duck. [...] But, he created an entire history around this duck; a family, Uncle $crooge, Duckburg, Gladstone Gander, etc. These were all creations of Carl Barks. This is the universe that all the other duck writers and artists based their stories on.
And now Rosa, with his nerdlike extrapolative tendencies, has become the new standard. And it’s getting a little insane. (In the best way.)
I really need to read those last dozen or so Rosa stories. I’ve not seen any of his work since toward the end of the second Gladstone era. I tried to subscribe to Gemstone’s new Scrooge book. Their site rejected my propositions, however. I will try again later.
Shoot, and here I was thinking that Ducktales was way too creative to be the brainchild of the TV department of Disney…
Well, they brought us Chip and Dale as well as Darkwing Duck.. so I’ll leave them with some credit.
DuckTales was Disney finally acknowledging Barks’s work after fifty years or so, and trying to do something constructive with it. The best that Disney had done previous to this series was to animate Scrooge twice; once, in a silly old ’60s special on money for ABC’s The Magical World of Disney, and then again in Mickey’s Christmas Carol.
When the series came out, it did so with something of a bang. Disney realized how many people had been waiting for decades to see Barks’s adventure stories exploited, so they made something of an event around it. You recall what Sega did with Sonic Adventure, with the enigmatic grinning logo pasted around for some while before the game launched. Similar deal here.
It was especially big because this was one of Disney’s first real forays into TV animation. The only previous attempt had been The Gummi Bears, from several years before.
I drank in DuckTales for the first several years, until it began to just repeat itself. I taped almost every episode at one point (then later taped over them). It’s becaue I had been reading Barks for my entire life at that point, and it was so interesting to see an animated version of the comics — sort of.
DuckTales makes a lot of alterations for the inane, and confuses a lot of points. They think that Flintheart is a Scot who lives in Duckburg rather than a Boer who lives in South Africa. The Beagle Boys each have distinct names, personalities, and visages, quite against their very point (whereby they are wholly interchangable save their number plates and 176-167′s love for prunes (176-167 was turned into the fat one in the cartoon, so I guess Disney was paying some attention to the finer details)). Instead of a cool seductress, Magica was an old hag. There was not near enough of Gladstone, but then I guess considering the lack of Donald, that is explicable.
Although a queer detail (and probably the most significant divergence from Barks’s universe), I suppose the Donald thing was unavoidable. As far as I can see, the main reason he wasn’t in the show (save the occasional guest appearance) was because in the Barks/Rosa universe, Donald speaks like a normal human being, quite contrary to Disney’s squawkbox. It would be annoying to drag someone so unintelligible around on an adventure, so they coined another couple of characters to fill his place. These are the successful new characters, I figure, because they fill an existing void: Launchpad McQuack and, later, Fenton Crackshell.
There is also the factor that Donald is not supposed to be a real, developed character and that the Barks/Rosa Donald is so substantially different from the Disney one that Disney did not feel it appropriate to tamper with their icon in an animated format. God forbid he develop a real personality. What then?!
The less successful characters that Disney threw into the series are what made, and make, it occasionally a chore: Webbegail (a melange of April, May, and June), who exists basically to have a far-too-cute girl to get everyone into trouble and to give cute little girl feedback; her nanny, who exists for comic relief; Doofus, the fat Junior Woodchuck, who exists to… be fat…
These were not inspired. They did not fill any holes. They did not flesh anything out. They were not needed. Yet, there they were. So too, later, was Bubba Duck. (argh.)
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Still. The show did get a lot right, most importantly the character of Scrooge. His depiction is almost note-perfect, and his voice actor (whose name I forget right off) will forever be associated with the character in my mind. He just brought so much subtlety to the role. He filled it out.
And I think that’s why the show was the success that it was. If you understand Scrooge (which is not an easy task), the rest is all downhill. You can mess a lot up, and still retain your focus.
I also like the new voices for HD&L; they sound ducky, yet comprehensible. Their characters are also pretty close to Barks’s concept (although for some reason, Disney decided to officially switch Dewey and Louie’s colors for the purpose of the series, thoroughly confusing me until the standard was established in the comics also and was explained as such).
The show needed more long, multi-part serials. A shame it devolved into sitcom material; there was so much source to draw from (and for a while, they did draw from it).
I wonder if the series has been compiled on DVD.