Friday, November 11, 2011

Darkwing Duck, Season One, Episode Twelve: "Easy Come, Easy Grows"

Seriously, what's the deal with "grows," plural? If there's a salient reason why this is better than the more natural-sounding singular would be, I'm not getting it.

This episode begins with vaults disappearing from banks; it then moves on to the seemingly unrelated notion of money growing on trees; this comes up when, paranoid about the rash of thefts, Herb Muddlefoot buries the family savings in the backyard (everyone in this world seem to store their money in home vaults and moneybags and the like). Gosalyn and Honker discover it--I like stuff focusing on the kids--but after their inevitable overreach, Drake takes over, instantly turning into a yuppie douchebag after this sudden windfall. There's a bit where he towers over the money, limned in green light like some sort of demon, which is entertainingly strange.

But this doesn't last, as the cops bust him regarding the issue of all the bills having the same serial number--an issue which if often ignored in things like this. It turns out that the counterfeit bills sprout and develop motility--but if it's ever indicated how Herb got one of them to start the process in the first place, I missed it.

Anyway, as you'd expect, Bushroot is behind this; he uses the fake money to steal real money 'cause the fake stuff turns to dust and really, people, this whole plot is needlessly complicated in the extreme, and I don't imagine it would make a whole lot of sense if you tried to sit down and diagram it. Nice to see Bushroot again, though. In spite of his occasional murderousness, I find he's more sympathetic than not. All he wants to do is help out his plant pals/pets. It's kinda sweet.

Stray Observations

-Not that I've been keeping track, but it struck me as vaguely surprising that you can apparently use a phrase like "this really blows" in a show like this.

-Maybe the most baroque close-escape ever--our heroes are wrapped up in vines and trapped, but DW saves the day by plucking a trumpet away from a flower and playing snake-charming music, causing the vines to do snake-type dances and release them. Yup.

-Oh, and it's surprisingly gruesome for the show to end with Bushroot and his tree allies getting fed through a industrial wood chipper. Sure, he regenerates as a little seedling, but the trees appear to die horrible deaths.

4 comments:

  1. Drake towering over the money tree was a homage to the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence in Fantasia.

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  2. -- -Not that I've been keeping track, but it struck me as vaguely surprising that you can apparently use a phrase like "this really blows" in a show like this.--

    Not really. One of the Quack Pack nephews said that "this bites" in Transmission Impossible.

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  3. Fantasia it is. Thanks--shoulda caught that. That movie (obviously) didn't make a huge impression on me, but I still should've recognized it as a reference to SOMETHING. But this is the kind of thing you have to expect when you patronize cheap, non-union Disney blogs.

    I find "blows" a bit more suggestive than "bites." Also, as I understand it, Quack Pack is going for a kind of nineties "extremeness" that DW isn't.

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  4. Herb burying his money reminds me of Mrs. Crackshell's favorite way of storing her savings– burying them in the backyard in old mayonnaise jars.

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