Darkwing Duck, Season One, Episode Fifty-Six: "The Haunting of Mr. Banana Brain"

I've been reading Boom's DW comics, and, noting the appearance of the one-shot villain known as Paddywhack, I decided to see the episode where he originates.  'Course, there's no denying that some of the comic's potential impact is gonna be lost on me: if you'd seen this episode back in the day, you'd read the comic and think, dude--that guy's back! COOOL!  Whereas for me, it's just, wow, some guy I'd never heard of is now in a comic; let us see where he first appeared.  Huh.  So that's where he first appeared.

OH WELL.

So the plot of this episode is that this toy museum has a jack-in-the-box containing an evil spirit (how did they obtain this thing?  Stop asking dumb questions).  Ultimately, it escapes from the box and possesses Quackerjack's Mr. Banana Brain doll; they work together for a while, but then the spirit--Paddywhack--decides that there must be more than this provincial life, and turns on QJ.  Ultimately, he and DW have to work together to defeat it.

I had mixed feelings about this episode.  I liked some things about it, but I also feel like it missed its share of opportunities.  There's an obvious story here: I've always said that Quackerjack is the most "evil" of the recurring DW villains, so what we have here is the opportunity to show that Paddywhack is a REAL badass by showing that Quackerjack is only a piker compared to him.  

But the thing is, in spite of its intentions, the episode doesn't *really* show that Paddywhack is uniquely evil.  He basically thinks and behaves in standard-villain mode.  The writers try to differentiate him from Quackerjack by having QJ assert that "Darkwing Duck always ruins things! It's no big deal; it's just part of the game," which in a way is kind of interesting, but in another way shortchanges his character a bit.  The idea being, at any rate, that QJ is not *that* bad, so PW can be worse--if you have to play down the initial villain to make this conception work, you're not doing it right.  And in any case, Paddywhack really is NOT all that horrific.  He uses the same sort of slapstick-y methods that any villain does, and although the way DW and QJ team up to beat him is kind of amusing, it's not really any more difficult or climactic than the way any OTHER villain goes down.  Mah.  The guy's ably voiced by Phil Hartman, which lends him a certain amount of gravitas, but to me, he does not go down in the annals of great villains.  Also, I think it would be cooler if we only ever saw him as a shadow, rather than his "true form" actually manifesting itself.

Still, there's a somewhat amusing framing device where Drake, LP, and Gosalyn are each competing to tell the story in their own way.

Stray Observations

-Quackerjack gets pissed off when Gosalyn gets bored of the toys and wants to go play videogames--I like that the writers remembered QJ's origin story.

-"Mr. Banana Brain! Your voice has changed!"  I also like the fact that he apparently doesn't realize that the doll's normal "voice" is just himself talking squeakily.

Darkwing Duck, Season One, Episode Thirty-Eight: "Disguise the Limit"

Hmph!  I wait two months between watching episodes, and THIS is what I come back to?  Dick move, show.  Or maybe I'm just being punished for my tardiness.  Who can say?  But in any case, I was decidedly not enamored of this episode.  The idea is that, oh no, Negaduck is dressing as DW and committing crimes to frame him, a pretty banal idea, really, but okay.  So SHUSH uses a special ray to disguise DW, since now he's wanted for crimes, but it turns out the ray transforms him into people he looks at.  Only sometimes, though; it seems to happen only it's convenient for the writers.  And when I say "transformed," I don't just mean appearance; he actually takes on the personality of the people he's changed into and thinks he's them.

Hijinx ensue, but they're not really all that wacky.  Thing is, most of DW's transformations are apparently meant to be funny, but if so, they're jokes without punchlines: the writers seem to think that merely the fact of the transformation will be amusing.  It's really not, though.  I like how when transformed, his voice changes into a DW-voice imitation of the people he's being, but that's about it.  It would've been more interesting, and made more sense, if the idea were that he changes into his conception of Launchpad, Gosalyn, etc.  Then we could get some good character depth going.  But as it stands: bah.  There IS one sight gag I liked, where DW and Negaduck are falling off a cliff on DW's motorcycle thing and DW's all, relax!  I'll just put this parachute on the cycle, and he does and, sure enough, the cycle slows its fall, only the two of them immediately fall off.  Mebbe you had to see it.

Anyway, show, you gotta try harder than this.

"Mickey's Christmas Carol"

This 1983 short (well, twenty-five minutes) was--wikipedia tells me--the first theatrical Mickey Mouse cartoon in thirty years, and thus there was clearly a desire to really create a splash; to make this into a Big Thing (though that title is clearly just for name recognition; Mickey, as Bob Cratchit, is not at all the central character).  Also worth noting: we have here Clarence Nash's final performance as Donald and Alan Young's first as Scrooge.  Some sort of vague metaphor about transition and renewal seems to be called for.  Certainly, this is worlds beyond that Little Golden Book both in terms of textual fidelity and overall quality; ultimately, however, in absolute terms, the results are decidedly mixed.

To start with the positive: it looks really, really good.  Not for these producers the chintzy visual minimalism of tomorrow's entry; if nothing else, this cartoon really looks rich and alive.  Furthermore, and also unlike the aforementioned story, there is a wholehearted embrace of Disney's legacy; just about all the secondary characters, including random background people, are actual characters; for instance, the two guys who try to solicit money from Scrooge for charity are played by the water rat and mole from The Wind in the Willows via Mr. Toad's Wild Ride; Toad himself shows up later on as Mr. Fezziwig (spelled "Fezzywig" here, for whatever reason).  It's pretty fun just IDing familiar faces; we even get (non-speaking) animated appearances from Grandma and Gus:

Is that fun?  Sure, that's fun.  It's clear that the producers were not messing around here; they wanted to go all-out.

As for the story itself?  Well, it follows the general beats of the original, but overall, for better and for worse, it's a very loose adaptation in the specifics.  But before anything else, let's stop ignoring the elephant in the room and note what is by far the worst decision the producers made here, which is that Jacob Marley is played by fucking Goofy ("what makes you think your wife is crazy, Mr. Mouse?").  I find Marley's scene to be by far the most memorable part of Dickens' story, and this version just ruins it.  There's this bizarre tonal disconnect: on the one hand, the script tries to make it clear that he was a bad guy, who "robbed the widows and swindled the poor," but you just can't take this seriously, because his dialogue and mannerisms are all one hundred percent Goofy, including the "hilarious" bit where he trips and falls over Scrooge's cane:

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?  COME ON!  Granted, it's sort of hard to know what Disney character you would cast in this role, given a milieu in which Glomgold and especially Rockerduck are both far too obscure, but this was just about the worst way this could possibly have been played.  And on a somewhat subtler note, can I object to that "robbed the widows and swindled the poor" bit?  Granted, we don't get specific details of what this means, but the strong implication seems to be that we're talking about illegal activity here, which is substantially missing Dickens' point.  Just nothin' good to say here, except perhaps that his chains are nicely substantial--and look, we can even see the financial accoutrements that Dickens describes them as being composed of.  Whee.

The three spirits, however--played respectively by Jiminy Cricket, Wille the Giant from Mickey and the Beanstalk, and Pete--are a lot better, and somehow manage to capture the proper feeling…well, okay, that last one is pretty ridiculous, but I find the chutzpah endearing.  Christmas Present is best:

Really captures the feeling of plentitude that Dickens describes.

As for the visions themselves?  Again, a mixed bag.  They're extremely truncated, and this does not tend to work in their favor.  In the past, Fezziwig's party--featuring Scrooge's very hot-to-trot fiancée, here named "Isabelle"--is reasonably fun, but then the scene of the two of them breaking up is mishandled; here, he more or less actively rejects her, as opposed to the original, in which he just lets her slip away, which has a great deal more tragic resonance.  

That's all that happens in the past, and in the present, there's only one vision, at the Cratchit residence; the part with Fred's family is entirely absent.  This scene is actually quite good, however--certainly better than it is in our third entry, tomorrow.  This is the only version of the story I'm covering that features Tiny Tim, a character who is important to the narrative but is also easy to overplay and render just intolerably saccharine.  The cartoon avoids the latter, though it certainly never achieves Dickensian levels of pathos either.

Then, we transition quite abruptly into the very short future segment, which has the guts to show the Cratchits at Tim's grave, and then, oh no, here's Scrooge's grave, and then, bam, reform.  Here, "reform" consists mainly of an all-new scene where he visits the Cratchits, and again, I have to say: it's actually really good; heartwarming without being overly pushy about it.  And he makes Bob a partner, which seems to demonstrate an egalitarian spirit that you don't really see in the original.

…and did he really just stick this enormous roast goose, unwrapped, in the same bag as the toys?  Well, they had different ideas about hygiene back in the day.

So anyway, the cartoon is problematic--very problematic--in some ways, but overall pretty okay for what it is.  Coulda been great with a little revision, however.  Check back tomorrow at the regular blog for the centerpiece of this series.  Believe you me, it'll be a doozy.

Darkwing Duck, Season Duh, Episode Twelve: "A Brush with Oblivion"

So is this the way it's gonna be, then?  One episode a month?  Pretty pathetic, I have to admit.  Well, I suppose at that rate I'd be done in some number of years…

…but maybe I'll watch 'em at a somewhat higher rate than that, 'cause this episode reminds me that this show can be really, really good.  The idea is that our protagonists are at the St. Canard art museum, which appears to have every famous painting in the world, when Honker spies a sinister women who is able to hide by hopping in and out of pictures.  The adults think he's crazy, and he's grounded, but Gosalyn takes him back to the museum to figure out what's what.  Turns out this woman is a frustrated artist who came up with the idea of stealing art so that she would have enough money to show everyone what a great artist she is (no, it doesn't really hold up under scrutiny), and she traps Gosalyn in a "Guernica"-ish painting, and DW and LP have to save the day and stuff.  RIGHT.

Now, this villain, Splatter Phoenix, benefits by looking extremely cool, a goth-y type like a duck version of Siouxsie Sioux; even if her plans are kind of nonsensical, she's quite expressive and fun to watch.  Also, more than in perhaps any other DATV thing I've seen, it's really obvious here that the creators were smart people who were interested in doing genuinely cool stuff, as opposed to "just" making a kids' show (even a good kids' show).  So the "artistic" gibberish deployed in the episode is a notch or three above what you'd expect ("'Ey, what can I say sweets--if the neo-postmodernist backlash hadn't-a caught pre-anti-realism in its wake, heh heh, you'd be sittin' pretty!"), and the episode can just toss out a line like "you've got a screw loose, Lautrec!" an' who CARES if anyone gets it?  It's not just the writing, either: naturally our heroes and villains enter various paintings, at which time they are rendered in an approximation of the artistic styles of said paintings, and it's strikingly ambitious and just plain fun on a bun.

Okay, there's this sort of side-side-sideplot about Honker's family life that doesn't really go anywhere or do anything interesting, but in the main, I liked this episode lots.  More, please.

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.