Ducktales, Season Three, Episode Sixteen: "Attack of the Fifty-Foot Webby"

See? You guys can correctly hyphenate your titles if you're serious about it. Of course, you can also make titles that sound very much as though the show is reaching the end of its creative rope. But hey--looks can be deceiving, right? Let's see.

I cannot help but note that this is the second of Webby's uncommon starring roles in a row where the idea is that nobody pays attention to her. This seems like an indication that, consciously or not, the writers are acknowledging the character's fundamental superfluousness to the show. She was clearly created with an eye towards reaching a female demographic, but the fact that she's so totally marginal seems to me like a bigger slap in the face to said demographic than just not having her at all would've been.

Be that as it may, that's the way it is, and it's actually kinda stupid, the extent to which everyone exaggeratedly fails to notice Webby all the time. Subtlety: this episode can't haz it. And they keep talking about her being "small." Dudes: she's the exact same size as the nephews. Unless they were speaking figuratively, in which case I guess I can't argue with them...

In spite of the title, this is a King Kong spoof with nothing but the title to do with Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman (I assume, anyway--never seen the film; going solely off the wikipedia article). Scrooge is off to find a giant "long-tailed gorilla" as a tourist thing, and I have to give the episode at least a little credit: I was all ready to shout "GORILLAS DON'T HAVE TAILS," but the show ultimately acknowledges that he's not actually a gorilla but a giant monkey--though why anyone would ever have thought he looked anything like a gorilla is a mystery.

Anyway, it turns out he's big thanks to Magic Water, and, well, what do you think happens? And while Scrooge is waiting for the doctor (who should have been but isn't played by Ludwig Von Drake) to cook up a shrinking solution, an evil circus-dude tries to capture her and stuff. And then there's a sort of cute reversal, in which giant-Webby climbs to the top of a skyscraper holding the ape, and that's about that.

Meh. I suppose this isn't terrible, apart from the artlessness with which it pushes its dopey "theme," but once again, Webby doesn't do much to distinguish herself. "I've brought everything I need: my quackypatch doll, extra hair ribbons, and a canteen of cocoa!" Yeah. Way to confirm you're anything but a lazy, token-y stereotype.

Stray Observations

-Giant Webby is way huger than Giant Monkey. I suppose the idea is that she's the same size in relation to it as she would be if they were both regular-sized, but in that case, that's one minuscule monkey.