Sunday, August 7, 2011

Ducktales, Season One, Episode Fifty-Nine: "Ducky Horror Picture Show"

And we're back.

Um...so Scrooge has an old convention center he's fixing up, and a convention of people who turn out to be movie monsters want to use it to hold their annual meeting. There's the usual "do you believe in monsters?" "Oh, there's no such thing as monsters!" song and dance, and then, a third of the way in, they go to stay in Scrooge's "hotel," which turns out to just be his mansion, because the writer is a hack of the first order and didn't CARE if it made sense. Also, because to this point there wasn't really much of a plot, per se, and it was felt there had to be SOME conflict (conflict=the monsters fuck up his house). Then the episode sort of gets bored with this, so the monsters leave and hold a monster-rights demonstration, which is resolved when it turns out that kids LOVE monsters, so evidently they have nothing more to demonstrate for! Instead, they engage in a monster-minstrel-show for the kids. It's clear that the author didn't think about what this "demonstration" actually meant, and so saw no problem in resolving it in this pat, not-really-much-of-a-resolution way. Blah.

Seriously, man, this episode is the sort of half-assed bullshit that makes the instantly-infamous third issue of Boom's Ducktales comic look like a perfectly accurate translation of the show itself. The episode is nothing but a lazy cavalcade of stupid monster-related jokes with very little plot holding it together, none of it worthy of existing. Seriously, man, fuck THIS episode. Let's hope the next one is able to at least close out the season on a half-way respectable note.

Stray Observations

-Okay, I'll admit I kind of liked the sad-sack, Steve-Buscemi-esque human (duck) form of the werewolf. But that's all.

-"Ping Pong:" he's like King Kong, but he has a giant ping-pong paddle. See? This is what happens when you let six-year-olds write Ducktales episodes.

2 comments:

  1. Does anyone wonder if there was any flak for referencing a clearly adults-only movie in the title of this episode?

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  2. Well...they previously referenced a novel in which a guy has sex with his own clone. Also, there's this rather unfortunate comic. Basically, the powers that be seem to be okay with somewhat risque title references. Just another aspect of Disney's schizophrenic attitude toward acceptable versus non-acceptable content.

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