The Gold Standard of Reboots continues upholding its standard.
SUMMARY (Spoilers for Seasons 1 and 2)
Welcome back to Duckburg, where birds are people, but also sometimes are birds. Seriously the opening shot of the series was a normal seagull being shooed off by an anthropomorphic bird. The most prominent citizens are Scrooge McDuck (David Tennant) and his family members: Huey, Dewey, and Louie Duck (Danny Pudi, Ben Schwartz, Bobby Moynihan), Donald Duck (Tony Anselmo), Webby Vanderquack (Kate Micucci), Bentina Beakley (Toks Olagundoye), and Launchpad McQuack (Beck Bennett).
In season one, the Duck/McDuck family worked together to defeat Scrooge’s most dangerous adversary Magica De Spell (Catherine Tate), only for the audience (but not the characters) to find out that Donald’s Sister Della (Paget Brewster), the mother of the triplets, was still alive and stranded on the moon.
In season two, Della finally makes it home, only for the Moonlanders, led by General Lunaris (Lance Reddick) to invade Earth. He is thwarted by the Ducks, Darkwing Duck (Chris Diamantopolous), and Scrooge’s rival Flintheart Glomgold (Keith Ferguson), but it turns out that this threat has forced an even greater evil power to escalate their plans: F.O.W.L. (the Fiendish Organization for World Larceny).
Now, the Ducks have set out to locate a collection of the lost treasures of Scrooge’s idol Isabella Finch while F.O.W.L. plots to get them first.
END SUMMARY
This has been a solid three-stage development for this show. The first season was mostly about acclimating the audience to the new world of DuckTales, which, while it still resembled its 1987 counterpart, had been updated in both tone and animation style to be more in line with Disney’s new animated series like Gravity Falls or Star vs. the Forces of Evil. It also abandoned the original series’ episodic nature and instead was a serial, which allowed the show to build up Magica’s threat gradually over the series, as well as the mystery of what happened to Della.
Season two didn’t expand the adventuring, but instead doubled down on expanding the series emotionally. It showed us the backgrounds of several of the characters from the last season and recontextualized their actions, which is a great storytelling device when done well (like the Ice King in Adventure Time) and expanded on the emotional loss felt by the Duck family over Della going missing. Then, when she returns, it’s not quite the happy reunion with her kids that she’d hoped for, because they’ve spent ten years without her. While they’re fighting giant golems or robots, the show still demonstrated that Della’s return was affecting everyone emotionally and that it was a gradual process to deal with it. It also gave us a little taste of nostalgia by bringing back the Three Caballeros and Darkwing Duck, which was basically a set-up for this season.
The theme for season three is “nostalgia.” It was advertised a while ago that the third season would contain almost every character from Disney’s ‘90s afternoon lineup and so far it has delivered on it and then some. I don’t want to say who has appeared so far, but I can say that making them canon to this show bodes well for future episodes. There’s even an episode which takes place in a ‘90s sitcom, just to make sure that everyone gets a full blast of that extreme pre-financial crisis optimism that is so hard to even remember now.
It’s the fact that the show was willing to be patient with their properties that makes it work. They didn’t bring Della back in season 1, nor was it just a “she’s back, everything’s normal now” situation. Season 2 gave us Darkwing Duck in an amazing reboot, but they only used him sparingly. Similarly, Season 3 is giving us several characters, but even when they appear it’s only ancillary to the storyline. It’s not overloading us on anything, instead just making us want it more. Really, I’m impressed with the restraint.
Overall, still love the show, recommend it highly.
If you want to check out some more by the Joker on the Sofa, check out the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time, Collection of TV Episodes, Collection of Movie Reviews, or the Joker on the Sofa Reviews.
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