Darkwing Duck, Season One, Episode Thirty-Seven: "Heavy Mental"

Here's a crazy idea: let's try watching a Darkwing Duck episode and see what happens!  Crazy, I know, but I'm thinking it just…might…work.  Yeah, okay, I should be watching a Quack Pack episode right now if I want to follow my own rules, but fuck me, after all this time, the first thing you want me to do is watch more of that shitpile?  I mean, I will.  Eventually.  But for now, let's call Dee Double-You.

This episode opens with Darkwing and Launchpad on a mission to the Swiss Alps to deliver a top-secret something to SHUSH, which turns out to be a stapler, ha ha, how wacky.  While they're there, SHUSH scientist Sara Bellum (boy, I'll bet that one took a lot of thought) gets LP to try out her new psychic ray machine which is supposed to endow people with psychic powers.  I want to note that the rays in question are called "Norma Rays," and to further note that a pun like this would be a whole lot more effective if there were, you know, any connection whatsoever between Norma Rae and psychic business.  Without that, it's just weird and arbitrary.

Anyway, LP seems unaffected, because everyone comically misses the trees out the window that he levitates and sets on fire, so off they go, back home.  It turns out that the powers that LP, inevitably, gained, are kind of random and impossible to control; sometimes he predicts stuff, sometimes he summons fire or ice, and sometimes he just moves stuff around, but his ability to do this seems to be triggered more by momentary sense impressions than by anything he tries to do.  It's actually somewhat well-done.

Meanwhile, FOWL's Psychic Division, led by a bear named Major Synapse and staffed exclusively by a couple of hippies (hmm…I'm getting a real Men Who Stare at Goats vibe here), is also trying to figure out this psychic-powers business.  Why does he only have these two staff members?  Because "troops perish when they're marched into erupting volcanoes."  Jeez, show--that's pretty brutal.  Long story short, they end up invading the Alps SHUSH facility, and the two hippies get psychic powers.  They also get supervillain costumes and identities (and turn evil, apparently--they just seemed kind of neutral before).  He's called Hotshot, an' she's called Flygirl, an' it's up to our heroes to come an' stop them, which they do.  Though not before DW is incapacitated and threatened: oh noes! They're gonna drop a giant anvil on his head!  As I've noted, though, these life-or-death situations just don't work on this show, because we know damn well that getting flattened by an anvil is never going to be anything more than a minor inconvenience for anyone--as we later see, when the hippies get smashed but don't die.

Oh, and in the end, Major Synapse becomes godlike and then gets his brain exploded.  Crikey.

Did I like this?  I liked it okay, though that was surely at least in part for not having seen the show in some months.  I wouldn't say the writing was the greatest; there was a bit more of the "look how ZANY it all is, goddammit!" stuff than I usually like.  Still, it certainly could have been worse!

Stray Observations

-We get a close-up image of Synapse's drivers license, and we see that it expired on 04-07-66.  Oh man--driving with an expired license?  Is there anything those fiendish FOWL fiends won't do?  Also, if I'm reading it correctly, he was born on 02-06-39.  I wouldn't have thought he was quite that old, but it is kind of hard to tell in situations like this: you can differentiate between youngish and oldish with anthropomorphic animals, but precise gradations can be more problematic.

Darkwing Duck, Season One, Episode Thirty-Five: "Life, the Negaverse and Everything"

Hmm.  Sorry for the long silence here.  I've been busy with, um…well, not writing cartoon posts, apparently.  Anyway, here's this, which is pretty entertaining, and I'm certainly not gonna complain about the Douglas Adams title.

At the end of a Fearsome-Five heist, Quackerjack wonders why Negaduck never wants to "hang out" with them afterwards.  Truly, it's hard in any circumstance to wonder why anyone would want to hang out with Negaduck, but his response--because "I hate you guys 'cause you're just a bunch of losers!"--seems ill-advised; I mean, how masochistic are these people meant to be?  Pretty substantially, it seems.

Anyway, what ultimately happens is, DW gets sucked into the Negaverse, where everyone's personalities are reversed.  I like that they include pretty much all the important characters in this (well, except Morgana, I suppose), and there's a lot of fun stuff: punk Launchpad with five o'clock shadow is nice; the leather-fetish-Nazi-biker-chic Muddlefoot family is even nicer (no swastikas, obviously, but I'm pretty sure if the show could've gotten away with it, there would be).  Unfortunately, not everyone fares so well: Gosalyn is all demure and "lady-like" in a pink dress with her hair in curls--in contrast to her normal-universe obstreperousness, sure, but given that everyone <i>else</i> goes from 'good' to 'evil' or vice versa, it's distractingly inconsistent.  More irksomely still, the 'good' versions of Bushroot, Megavolt, Quackerjack, and Liquidator aren't visually distinguished in any way from their regular versions--nor do they do anything really memorable to make them stand out.  I enjoy the conclusion when they all get Darkwing costumes and are apparently set to become Nega-Gosalyn's new daughter, but this really raises the question of why Negaduck would possibly have adopted her in the first place.  I would've liked it if they'd complexified his character a bit by deciding that, in spite of everything, he was a good father figure…but they don't.  So what gives?

Regardless, not a bad effort.

Stray Observation

-Negaduck keeps calling his enemies "knobs."  Clearly not a British-produced episode, then.

-"So long--I'm off to create MORE unnecessary pain and suffering--losers!"  Okay, which onea you jokers leaked Romney's victory speech?

Quack Pack, Episode Six: "Pride Goeth Before the Fall Guy"

So the idea here is that there's Columbus had a fourth ship that somehow got lost somewhere.  But it's been recovered!  An' there's an awesome treasure aboard!  An' Daisy's network has exclusive rights to film the unveiling!  But there's a MASTER THIEF, Nigel Nightshade, who wants that treasure!  Crud!

Nigel's a short, smarmy guy who looks exactly (seriously, exactly--I feel like someone could've sued someone if anyone had been paying attention to or cared about Quack Pack in any way) like Leisure Suit Larry.  The other notable thing about him is that he's clearly voiced by the same guy who does Steelbeak in Darkwing Duck.  "Clearly" because he uses exactly the same voice.  I guess he didn't feel the need to come up with something new for a one-off character like this, but I found it really distracting.  I like his work as Steelbeak, but only when he's actually playing Steelbeak.

Now, this whole missing ship/treasure business seems potentially interesting, but the show does exactly nothing with it.  How'd this ship get lost?  What's the deal with this treasure?  Don't ask, 'cause the show ain't about to tell you.  Instead, it's going to give you this really long, tedious business where Nigel worms his way in as Donald's assistant cameraman, because he thinks this will get his hands on the treasure, for reasons that are more or less wholly incomprehensible.  He plays some dumb slapstick tricks on Donald to get him fired so he can take his place, and then…I dunno.  He gets the treasure somehow.  It's unclear and dumb.  And then Donald uses his own trickery to get it back.  There's a final chase sequence that I guess is okay, where the ducks follow him through deserts, jungles, prehistoric lands, ice fields, and so on, but that's about it.  This episode is not exactly well-paced, nor particularly entertaining.

Stray Observations

-Okay, when Donald's tricking Nigel into thinking there's an extra treasure he should go after, he calls it the treasure of Tralfamadore, after Vonnegut, which is kinda cool I guess, but you've gotta stick in a Pynchon reference to really impress me.  An easy way would be to include a sailor--a pig sailor, no less!--named Pig Bodine.

-So…is the idea that Donald has always been Daisy's cameraman and they just never made this even remotely clear, or did they just come up with that for this one episode?  I feel like a better show wouldn't leave me asking questions like that.

Darkwing Duck, Series One, Episode Thirty-Four: "Up, Up, and Awry"

Darkwing is undercover at a racetrack trying to figure out why horses are disappearing.  Turns out Megavolt is magicking them away to steal the horseshoes (the disturbing question of what he does with the horses themselves is never addressed).  DW and Launchpad are engaged in trying stop him when, in a genuinely unexpected twist, Gizmoduck shows up to save the dang ol' day (why was he just hanging out in St. Canard? Another mystery). 

As expected, DW is jealous of Gizmoduck's popularity and general awesomeness, and wishes he had superpowers too (if you count a suit as a "superpower"--and in any case, surely that teleporting thing he always does must count…).  So GD builds him an amusingly half-assed Gizmosuit knock-off involving a barrel around his torso and skateboards strapped to his feet.  Then, it's time to stop Megavolt.

Now, Megavolt's plan is good: he wants to steal all the metal he can so he can melt it down to make magnets which he can use to steal more metal to build even bigger magnets.  This seems quintessentially Megavoltian, and I approve.  I don't approve so much of the portrayal of Gizmoduck, though: Megavolt has them incapacitated with his giant electromagnet, and he goes "I'm afraid we're in trouble, Darkwing--without this suit, I'm nothing!"  Cue an obvious chance for DW to prove that fancy-pants metal suits aren't everything.  But that's exactly the opposite of the point of Gizmoduck in Ducktales, which went out of its way to demonstrate that he isn't just the sum total of the suit's powers.  Different show, different requirements, sure, but I really don't care for this devaluation of Fenton's character.

Also, the way DW subdues Megavolt is kind of unpleasant--he ties him up with wire and then, as he's begging for mercy, plugs the cord in, electrocuting the hell out of him, and then makes a dumb joke about "magnetic personality."  It reads like a parody of your Frank-Miller-style gratuitous sadism, but I'm pretty sure it's actually a version of the thing itself, and I kind of hate it.

So…yup.  That's about it.  I may have initially been keen on watching this series because of the promise of Gizmoduck appearances, but now I could do without ever seeing him again.  And let's be more careful about our characterization of Darkwing too, okay?

Stray Observation

-Hey, Ducktales' Webwa Walters appears, though Gizmo just calls her "Barb."

Quack Pack, Episode Five: "All Hands on Duck!"

Hey, here's an episode with no HDL in sight!  A good thing?  Well, not a bad thing, I suppose, but let's not get carried away.

The idea is that due to some sorta bureaucratic snafu, Donald, who thought he'd been discharged, has to spend another twenty-four hours in the navy, which a vindictive captain wants to use to make his life hell.  This captain is an insane fellow who's constantly petting and making much of a little toy sailboat that he calls "Mr. Sloopy;" granted, that sounds pretty awesome, but it's not executed with much in the way of panache.

Meanwhile, Daisy wants to do some sort of profile on Donald, because she's bought hook like and sinker his stories about what an awesome hero he was in the navy, which seems to me to rather drastically compromise her character, since she's supposed to be, like, smart and competent and stuff in this show.  But in any case, Donald predictably fails at various tasks that he's assigned, and all I could think was, dude, it's just twenty-four hours--sure, it sucks, but just do a really slow, sloppy job, lollygag around a bit, and you'll be done before you know it.  The insane captain does at one point threaten to have him sent to the brig for twenty-four years if he doesn't do everything right, but that's almost certainly just so much hot air, and if it's not, let's face it, he's just gonna fuck with you no matter what, so there's nothing to be done about it.

Anyway, the computer turns evil or something for some reason that I didn't quite catch and then Donald has to fly a plane and stuff and blah blah flippin' blah.  Not very exciting, but it does have the line "Good work, my boy--you've got the heart of a lion, the eyes of an eagle, and the gulf of Mexico," which isn't half bad.

Darkwing Duck, Season One, Episode Thirty-Three: "The Secret Origins of Darkwing Duck"

Hokay.  This episode starts in The Future™, where Future Gosalyn and Future Honker (named "Gosaloid" and "Honkulon") are visiting a museum which features the costume of some old twentieth-century superhero named Darkwing Duck (or rather, "props from a massively popular cartoon series based on Darkwing's mythic exploits"--I can only grit my teeth and endure such facile self-referentiality).  The two of them end up accidentally getting whisked away to the basement, where Drake, in the role of Mysterious Old Janitor Guy, is working, an' he tells them Darkwing's SEKRIT ORIGIN STORY, a takeoff of Superman's.

Now obviously, the show's just messing around and thumbing its nose at continuity by giving DW multiple origins, but if there's one thing I like about this episode, it's that it never even tries to pretend that Drake is doing anything other than making up the nonsense that he's regaling the kid with.  That makes it funnier to me.

The idea is that baby DW gets rocketed to earth, yeah yeah, but so does his Evil Cousin, Negaduck.  He falls in with Gosalyn-as-masked-avenger and Launchpad; he gets some superhero training, but when Gosalyn DIES(!!!!!), it's up to him to save the day and stuff.  Seriously, it blow my mind that the writers were allowed to do that, even in an alternate-reality setting.  Cripes.

The episode certainly has its amusing moments, but in the above description I kinda glossed over some pretty dull stuff, like the business with DW's and Negaduck's respective parents back on the doomed planet and DW's kung fu training and Herb Muddlefoot as a genie.  Those drag the episode down a bit, and the writing really isn't all that.

Stray Observations

-Cute Sorcerer's-Apprentice riff with Drake-the-Janitor.

-"But if he was real, there'd be some record of it--there'd be a birth certificate or something!"  This is where a joke involving the phrase "long-form birth certificate" goes.

-"Haven't you forgotten something?"  "Yeah, like telling a story that makes sense?"

Quack Pack, Episode Four: "Leader of the Quack"

Someone in the back went quack quack
Money is stacked now bust your gun quack quack 

Okay okay…here we are.  In this episode, Donald, Daisy, and HDL are off to a place called "Quaintinia" for some sort of vague reporting-type business; if it's ever explained in greater detail than that, I don't remember it, or care to.  Quaitinia, we are given to understand, is "a whole country still stuck in medieval times."  DON'T QUESTION IT; JUST ACCEPT IT. 

When they get there, it turns out, to everyone's surprise, that everyone is awaiting Donald as their long-lost king.  What happened, we learn, is that, when Donald had visited the country years ago, on his way out he backed his car into a catapult causing it to launch a rock which hit a floodgate which washed away the dragon that was attacking the kingdom, and the law says that whoever does that is king.

So he's king, and there's a whole lot of aimlessness.  Then there's an evil wannabe-king guy who makes several inept attempts at assassinating Donald and who, we learn, actually has the aforementioned dragon locked in a tower, trying to figure out how to get her fire to start up again so he can get her to take over the kingdom for him again.  Oh, and the dragon talks like a stereotypical teenage girl.  And there's this unbelievably-fucked-up-and-not-in-a-good-way business in which it appears that she is romantically interested in would-be-king guy, and he is using this attraction to manipulate her to command her obedience, and seriously, this whole thing makes me feel unclean.

Anyway, when she gets her fire back in a manner too dumb to bother going into, Donald has to stop her, and he figures the best way is to give her presents, and he and usurper-man (he does have a name, but I didn't quite catch it, and he's too lame a character to make any effort for) compete to see who can give her the most presents; the idea is that she will go with whoever gives her the most--not feminism's finest hour, this.  Usurper-guy wins, but he's defeated anyway, when…you know, I watched this a few days ago, and I'm drawing a complete blank on how he gets defeated.  I'm sure it's something dumb, though.  And Donald loses the throne 'cause of his unreasonable edicts and blah.

Nothing more to say--this is just a shitty episode, for reasons that really have nothing to do with HDL, showing that they're not the only problem with this show.  Okay, there's one bit I found sort of funny: Donald has a taster to avoid potential poisoning, but instead of just tasting the guy just eats all his food.  Okay, maybe you had to be there.  And have an infantile sense of humor.  But I thought it was amusing.  But that's all.