Ducktales, Season One, Episode Fifty: "Dime Enough for Luck"

A Ducktales episode named after a novel in which a guy has sex with his clone? I'd buy that for a dollar!

So yeah, here's Gladstone. What's he like? Well…not much, really. He's very much toned down from the original Barksian version--he has an enthusiastically youthful, slightly smarmy-sounding voice that makes him sound like a guy in a beer commercial or something, which doesn't really comport with what I would have imagined the character sounding like; and he's only very mildly obnoxious, and not malevolent at all. Ultimately, he doesn't make much of a splash.

Anyway, the idea is that Magica hypnotizes him and uses him to get at Scrooge's dime, and having done this, "because [he] used [his] luck for wicked purpose," he suddenly has BAD luck, which seems like a highly dubious extrapolation of how the character works, and anyway, how would Magica possibly KNOW this? But they get the dime back anyway, Scrooge figuring how to make Gladstone's bad luck work in their favor.

I dunno…I certainly HOPE I'm not just losing whatever taste I had for this show, because the last handful of episodes have all struck me as really mediocre, and this is no exception. There's just not much exciting here, and it endorses more clearly than anything else I can remember the idea that the dime does indeed grant Scrooge "luck," occasional boilerplate to the contrary notwithstanding. And the idea that the dime could just disappear from his bin, and he wouldn't even notice until Gladstone fessed up? I do not think so.

Seriously, Ducktales, I need you to get better in a hurry. I'm starting to lose faith.

Stray Observations

-Gladstone falls into a sewer, but this is "lucky" because he finds a dollar bill? Even if the alternative WAS getting splashed with water, that is not a tradeoff that *I* would find particularly fortunate.

-One of the traps that Scrooge has installed in his bin involves--with no advance warning--a huge piston coming out of the ceiling and just smashing the SHIT out of the floor. It's true that Barks was known to depict baroque, cartoony traps in the bin, but I don't think he ever drew anything that would both be totally unexpected and instantly, unambiguously fatal to anyone running afoul of it. The problems--both legal and practical--of a system like this are certainly so obvious as to go unstated.

-When Gladstone's going through the laser, supposedly avoiding it, he TOTALLY touches it, on multiple occasions. It's not even slightly subtle. What is this?

-"It [Scrooge's dime] will control all other dimes in the world, not to mention dollars!" Not totally sure what this means, but it's the clearest--only, as far as I can recall--statement from Magica about what she actually expects to accomplish with the dime.