Wednesday, August 15, 2018

New Ducktales, Season One, Episode Twenty: "Sky Pirates in the Sky"


Okay okay, let's try to get back into this. This, of course, is the Tailspin Crossover one. Whoo. Now, I will say some things in its favor: I certainly can't not get into song-and-dance numbers. The ducks watching in bemusement as the pirates took their treasure was undeniably amusing. I also like that the episode was basically just a thing, without trying to unwieldily bang together extra mythology that really has no place anywhere. The fact of the Tailspin-crossoveriness was...I mean, it was fine, I guess, since it's not, as far as I can tell, pretending to be a lead-in to any sort of larger mythology. It's just there. Does it have any reason to be there? No, not really. Is it basically just gesturing emptily and going "hey, here's a thing you remember!"? Of course. But, you know, that doesn't offend me.

Still. I didn't love this episode. It's not entirely clear to me whether this is actually worse than the norm or if I've just become more sensitive to it, but the nephews and Webby babbling at each other in the beginning was kind of intolerable to me ("I am offended that you would try to taint this treasure hunt with learning," seriously, just go to hell). It just emphasizes the massive gulf between them and the real versions of their characters (okay, I suppose I'll allow that Webby can be the "real" version of Webby. You know what I mean). And then the conflict of the episode, such as it was, where no one cares even a tiny bit about Dewey so he becomes a pirate captain, as you do, was forced as anything. Care for it, I did not. WHATEVER.

Not related to this episode per se, but let's not that the original theme song went "tales of derring-do bad and good luck tales," whereas with the new one it's just "tales of daring bad and good" etc. Now, if I liked this show better, I wouldn't say (or think) anything about that, but since I don't, I'm just going to say, oh look, they dumbed it down on the basis that "derring-do" is an idiom that The Kids Today are too illiterate to know. Whoo-oo. Whoo-oo, indeed.

10 comments:

  1. How did you like the chracter of Don Karnage?

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    1. I thought he was fine. No real problems. Mind you, as a man who has never in his life seen an episode of Tailspin, my opinions on this may not be considered by many to be very useful.

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  2. BTW - For some odd reason, my favorite title of the season...

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  3. Speaking as a fan of TaleSpin, I just want to point out that Karnage's "cameo" is probably one of the emptiest "references" I've seen so far on the show. Besides not having his original voice (even though it's the same guy as Darkwing), he doesn't have any of his original crew- and believe me, they would have definitely been there if this show actually cared about these things.

    Pretty typical of every other "reference" so far, really. Just drop in something they heard about once with no substance behind it. Honestly I wonder if they just look them up on the Disney Wiki and that's it.

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    1. While I think that change in the pirate crew felt odd, I do think they had best intention and he felt in character... Heck, I would go as far to say so far, after Magica he is my favorit villian on the show, so far shown to be more competent then Glomgold, Beaks and The Beagles and was an actual threat to the characters... As for voice acting (by the same guy who do Panchito in the "Three Caballeros" show) I think they where sort-of forced to use Latino actor for the character, to some policie of having as much "Representation" in the cast as possible. New actor did a good job in my opinion, it's just that - from what I understand - Jim Cummings, the oryginal voice did a lot of improvising as Karnage, adding a lot of linguistique oddities, which this version is lacking. I asume they didn't want Karnage to sound like some ethnic stereotype, which is ironic seeing how his oryginal accent was totally made-up. Still, it feels more of executive "Let's be PC" meddling rather then lack of care from the writers as in my opinion the character is fine on his own and I found him a memroable one-shot villian.

      (Also I woudn't call it a cameo since the episode pretty much center around his character.)

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    2. I mean, they had no problems of bringing oryginal voice actor of Darwking, Quackerjack and Ludwig von Drake just for few lines and Cumming is still voicing Disney characters all the time so I think there would be zero problem to bring him here and with the constant "LOOK! WE HAVE ACTUAL LATINO ACTORS VOICING LATINO CHARACTERS" in promotional material I just think it's executive meddling to blame for the voice change.

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    3. wait none of karnage's crew was from the original show? the way people got upset at the female crew members i thought they were the only ones who replaced original characters?

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    4. Well, nope, they invented their own. Who kinda look like the originals, which is what's so confusing, actually: Stinkyboot is kinda like Dumptruck, and Jitterbug is sort of Mad Dog, but not quite

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    5. @tymime:

      Angones has hinted that their intention was that these Air Pirates were the modern-day "descendants" of the TaleSpin Pirates who were from the 1930's, and that includes Don Karnage. I don't like it but it explains why Karnage doesn't quite look like himself and none of the original crew are here.

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  4. RE: Your comment about Webby, I like the original Webby (it's just that she was the only girl in the main cast that was unfortunate, so she was kinda 'ehhh' by circumstance) and I'm willing to accept she is still 'canon' to this Webby considering she is older. I can buy 87' Webby grew into this one. (but I won't buy the comics HDL grew into these HDL)
    (And I do still like this Webby too, it's just the tone of the show is... hmmm)

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