The episode starts with Gizmoduck battling the evil robot from last episode. I read on wikipedia that Gizmo's original name was the more generic "Roboduck," which makes the Robocop connection more explicit. After that's over, the episode becomes fairly plotless (but in a good way!), as Gizmoduck becomes a hero to all and Fenton has to figure out how the suit works and like that. The question is: how the heck is he possibly supposed to be leading this double life? Scrooge is okay with his accountant just vanishing now that he has a sweet new security officer? I imagine things would've gotten awfully hairy if Clark Kent and Superman both had jobs at the Daily Planet.
Fenton's mother seems to be emerging as a rather delightful character. Her saturnine line delivery is comic gold (her only response to her son showing up in his new outfit: "Fenton--did you join a heavy metal band?" a line that works pretty much entirely because of how she says it), and there's a weird moment of pathos when her TV remote causes the suit to come off ("Mama! The remote control! Look what you did!" "Too bad your father didn't see this--he thought I was worthless.").
Anyway, after Gizmo does some day-saving-type activities, the Beagles are feeling frustrated, until the super-smart Megabyte Beagle (you know he's super-smart because he wears a mortarboard cap everywhere for no reason, as geniuses tend to do) breaks out of jail and comes up with a way to control the Gizmo suit from afar. Oh no! What will happen next?!?
Stray Observations
-Scrooge watches the initial fight from a World-War-I-style trench, for some reason.
-"Okay, you leave me no choice--I'll have to push ALL my buttons!"
-Seriously, they couldn't come up with a 'b' name for him? "Braniac Beagle?" I guess in 1989, megabytes as a concept just seemed too cool and sexy not to reference.
-His number is the sixth root of 716 to the sixth power. Cute.
"You wouldna torture innocent people!" "Oh yeah? We'll make 'em listen to bagpipe music!" "Oh, this is worse than the terrorists who held the city attorney hostage with an accordion!" Seriously, the only people who think bagpipe and accordion music is automatically bad are either completely tone-deaf or lazy hacks who don't know anything about either instrument but are eager to pile on for the sake of dumb jokes because they have the vague sense that it's the "cool" thing to do.
-Brief, non-speaking appearance by Doofus. I hadn't even noticed his recent absence, which gives you an accurate picture of how much I'm into the character.
I told you that Fenton's mother would become increasingly enjoyable.
ReplyDeleteThe one problem I had is that the Gizmosuit attracts the medal he gets. (Really? A base metal medal? That was O.K. in WWII during rationing, but it was peacetime when the episode was made). Why aren't more metal objects attracted to the magnets in the Gizmosuit? Do they only target awards?
The woman who did Mrs. Crackshell's voice was Kathleen Freeman, a wonderful character actress whose career spanned decades on the stage, on film, on TV, ect., and included working with everyone from Lucille Ball to Eddie Murphy. Just check out her imdb listings...http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0293466/
ReplyDeleteIn fact, it appears that she worked right up until her death in 2001 to the point that she still had voicework airing posthumously.