
DuckTales invented a new animated wonderland—that quickly disappeared - Lightning
http://www.avclub.com/articles/ducktales-invented-new-animated-wonderlandthat-qu,92324/
======
jacques_chester
I can't tell whether the 90s were a little renaissance in animation, or
whether it's just my imagination.

As gcatalfamo and yareally pointed out, Disney had _Duck Tales_ , _Darkwing
Duck_ , _Chip n Dale_ and so on.

Meanwhile at Warner Brothers they had _Tiny Toons_ , _Animaniacs_ and of
course the excellent _Batman: The Animated Series_. I rewatched it recently
and, unlike a lot of my nostalgic favourites, it has held up beautifully.

MTV backed _Beavis and Butthead_ and _Aeon Flux_. Fox backed _King of the
Hill_ and was riding the wave of some of the best of the _Simpsons_.

And let's not forget Klasky Csupo -- most famous for _Rugrats_ and _Aaahh!!!
Real Monsters_ , they were also responsible for my favourite "cartoon for
grownups", _Duckman_. I love that show -- if it'd been around for the DVD era
we'd probably still be watching it.

Edit: and Nickolodeon (forehead smack) with _The Ren & Stimpy Show_ and
_Rocko's Modern Life_.

~~~
shawnc
There's also Genndy Tartakovsky with Samurai Jack and Dexters Laboratory,
although I realize they're in early 2000 - they're both excellent. Sad that
his first foray into feature films is Hotel Transylvania.

~~~
umjames
Loved Dexter's Laboratory. I missed most of Samurai Jack, but what I did see
was good. Adult Swim is currently showing Sym-Bionic Titan on Saturdays at 2am
(so that would technically be Sunday at 2am). It's pretty good too.

~~~
jmelloy
Did they make more than one season of Sym-Bionic Titan? I thought the art was
gorgeous, but it felt like a decent high school drama, an awesome "large mecha
fighting monsters" drama, but that the two halves didn't blend well _at all_.
The strongest episodes were the ones that were either entirely in the high
school, or entirely in the suit.

I also enjoyed the political stuff & (oddly) the robot dating the cheerleader.

------
danso
Duck Tales is by far the best, most fulfilling cartoon I can remember
watching. I don't know how old I was when I saw that episode where they bring
bottle caps to Shangri La, but I've never forgotten how inflation works since
then :)

~~~
contingencies
Hah, I gotta find that episode. I am near a place the Chinese government
_renamed_ "Shangri-la" for tourism purposes recently:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhongdian>

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Zhongdian and ducktales, those are two things I'd never thought would be put
together in a hackernews post. Awesome mountains though, we stayed up there
for a couple of nights in '06.

------
vanderZwan
_And instead of drawing its inspiration from a toy line or popular movie (like
other pioneers in the afternoon animated-syndication market), DuckTales drew
its inspiration from a series of comic books that weren’t terribly well-known
in the United States_.

I think the author suffers a bit from US-centric short-sightedness here. If
the goals was world-wide syndication, then the Carl Barks stories were the
most logical option, as they have always been Disney's most popular comics
internationally speaking.

~~~
kleiba
Just to give a counter-example: I am from "international", but until you just
mentioned him I never heard of Carl Barks. I do know Donald Duck an Co.
though, they were wildly popular among children when I was growing up.

~~~
vanderZwan
Well, do you know who the authors of the Donald Duck comics you read were?
Maybe I should have said Donald Duck comics in general, but Carl Barks created
the majority of that particular comic universe.

(The funny thing is, I still don't know any authors except Barks and Don Rosa,
but I can see if a Donald Duck comic originates from the Netherlands, Italy,
Denmark, etc.)

------
spc476
I must be an outlier because I can't stand Duck Tales. I grew up reading Uncle
Scrooge comics (and even at age 8, I could tell a Carl Barks story just from a
glance, even if I didn't know who Carl Barks was at the time) but the first
episode of Duck Tales I saw just infuriated me. They _ruined_ Carl's stories.

For instance, the one episode they link to in the article, "Back to the
Klondike" is _nothing_ like the comic story. In the comic, Glittering Goldie
stole Scrooge's gold nugget by drugging him---he goes back to town, forces
Goldie to give him his gold back, plus sign an I.O.U. for the rest, with
interest. The story is him going back to collect on the I.O.U. with a now
penniless Goldie and him intentionally throwing a contest (via a subplot of
him losing his memory) to let Goldie "win".

The show? Too much changed and I couldn't even watch it past the 10 minute
mark when they introduced two new characters never in the original story.
Goldie was presented as a love interest (there is no love story in the
original comic) and the subplot leading to Scrooge throwing the contest was
dropped entirely. Given that I stopped watching a very painful episode for me,
I don't know what else Disney did to the story, but I just can't stand the
show.

Okay, I can somewhat understand Disney's reluctance in using Donald, but
really? Launchpad McQuack? And you really needed April's nieces in the
stories? Ahhhhh!

I also can appreciate and admire the animation quality for a TV show. But I
think I'm just too much a fan of Carl Barks stories to enjoy the TV show.

~~~
jacques_chester
And how did you feel about the _Lord of the Rings_ movies, about 2/3rds of
anime or 12% of the BBC's output?

Stories transposed into different media are under no legal or moral obligation
to produce 1:1 copies of any previous version.

~~~
TillE
I think if someone wants to use that excuse, they should produce a
substantially different adaptation of the source material, like some of the
crazier variations of Shakespeare.

LOTR was mostly well done (yes please, cut Tom Bombadil and that whole
pointless detour), but they also made changes for no apparent reason.

The Harry Potter movies were perhaps the worst offender, substituting
perfectly decent dialogue from the books with cringeworthy kids movie crap.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

------
msg
Oh, my young life. And yes, the 90s were a Golden Age.

My son and I watched DuckTales together for the first time this year. I was
pretty disappointed that the discs stopped before the last season, although I
did feel the earlier shows were more atmospheric and classic.

I had massive deja vu for every single frame of the GizmoDuck 5-parter. We
must have taped it and I must have seen it many many times.

The other thing I really love about this show is that it's so sweet. The
characters really mess up and have feelings and make important choices.
Scrooge many times walks away from money for family and friends and is better
off for it (he gets the money in the end too but that's not the chewy center).

------
kriro
Some of the stuff I enjoyed:

* Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs

* BraveStarr

* Defenders of the Earth

* M.A.S.K.

* Thundercats

* Ulysses 31 (80s series but ran in the 90s here)

Fun anecdote:

I watched Ulysses 31 and the day before one of my Latin exams in school they
aired the episode where he returns home and proves it's him via the bow.

The great thing was that the exam was an experimental one where instead of the
usual translation+grammar we got a pretty long text and had to summarize it
and answer questions about it. As soon as I recognized some key words (name of
the hero, arcum tendere construct) I basically wrote down the stuff from the
episode (-the space theme) and hoped they stayed true to the original story :D

Least painful Latin exam ever.

~~~
sputknick
M.A.S.K. was awesome! I have trouble finding people who remember it. They also
had the second best toys (after Transformers). I wonder if this stuff is on
Netflix...

------
bengoodger
Ducktales inherited much of its sophistication from the comics on which it was
based. Carl Barks, creator of Scrooge and most of the rest of the Duckburg
universe, was an avid reader of National Geographic and sought to expose his
readers to the wonders he found within. I'm incredibly thankful to have been
exposed not only to this show but the comics which were also briefly resurgent
in the mid-late 1980s (published by a small company out of Arizona called
Another Rainbow under the Gladstone mark). The editors recognized the
importance of these works not just as simple stories for kids and filled the
comics with analysis alongside reproductions of the golden age works. It was
around this time that Don Rosa (who was featured on Hacker News last week)
emerged as a modern day torch bearer. What a great time to be a kid! It's a
shame this stuff has faded from popularity and public consciousness.

------
umjames
I was a Duck Tales junkie but my love of good cartoons goes before that. I was
raised on Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry, before they were censored and rehashed
multiple times. I remember religiously watching Danger Mouse, Bananaman, and
Count Duckula on Nickelodeon in its infancy. Most people remember the original
Thundercats, but I was more into Silverhawks which was around at the same time
as Duck Tales.

I always came home from school to cartoons, whether it was Looney Tunes,
something from Hanna-Barbera, Transformers, G.I. Joe, old anime like Speed
Racer and Robotech (Macross), TMNT, or the various Disney and Warner
Bros.-inspired cartoons mentioned in the article. I still watch cartoons, and
always will.

~~~
mbrameld
"Right DM, but what if somebody's parked there?"

"Penfold, shush."

I miss that show.

~~~
steverb
On Hulu now, if you feel nostalgic.

I still have a VHS of DM episodes that I taped during the 80's , I still dig
out the VCR once a year and watch it (with commercials) just to get the
nostalgia hit.

------
loso
I was a big fan of DuckTales, Thundercats and a lot of the other cartoons of
the time. As a military brat what would always amaze me is the different
afternoon cartoons that would come on depending on what region of the country
you were in. I know it had to do with syndication but whenever I moved or
visited somewhere as a kid they would have different afternoon cartoons than I
was used to. This was probably noticeable a little more before the DuckTales
effect happened as stated in the article.

For example, when I lived down south I would see Tennessee Tuxedo, Sherman and
Peabody and several other different cartoons. But when I would visit my
grandmother in Delaware I would see cartoons like Chilly Willy, Inspector
Gadget and Heathcliff. The only time I would get consistent cartoons was when
they came on basic cable stations like TBS. When I moved to Massachusetts they
had afternoon cartoons like Dinosaucers and Denver the last dinosaur, two
cartoons I had never heard of before moving there.

The big budget cartoons (Transformers, Ducktales) were for the most part a
constant no matter where I lived. But the next level cartoons that I described
earlier I would only see depending on what part of the country I was in at the
time.

------
pm90
I'm glad they included the hindi version of the title theme! It was a great
hit in India too, where they were completely, but artfully, dubbed into Hindi

------
rwhitman
My girlfriend is very into nostalgia and a few months ago put DuckTales on her
Netflix queue... At first I laughed at her but quickly realized that the show
holds up surprisingly well as an adult - as the article mentioned, the stories
are top notch, the animation is of shockingly high quality and its pretty
funny to boot. I'm glad I'm not the only person to pick up on how entertaining
this show really was.

------
malkia
The adventures of Teddy Ruxpin is what I grew with in Bulgaria - it was very
popular show (also Pink Panther, Flinstones) -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Teddy_Ruxpin>

we still use some of the abbrevations from the movie (LB) but in Bulgarian
when we talk to other people

------
Zimahl
_...but most of Barks’ comics about the Disney ducks centered on Donald, a
character the DuckTales writers couldn’t use for reasons both corporate
(Disney didn’t want to overexpose such a key character on an afternoon series)
and practical._ __

And then Disney went on to expose Goofy in 'Goof Troop'.

Other than _Duck Tales_ , I think what happened to a lot of those shows is
their quality slowly went downhill in the race for syndication. A lot of them
devolved into slapstick comedy that was 'too easy' for the more maturing
audience.

As an example, in the beginning of _TaleSpin_ , Don Carnage is a ruthless air
pirate who almost lays waste to Cape Suzette with a lightning gun. By the time
you get near the end of the series, he's simply comic relief.

I think the audience also grew up and moved on to the MTV shows ( _Beavis &
Butthead_, _Aeon Flux_ ), Fox's _Batman: The Animated Series_ , and _The
Simpsons_ put the shows focus on Homer and marginalized Bart, which was
genius.

------
jstalin
Does anyone remember the Pirates of Darkwater?

~~~
msg
And yes. Watched it with my father.

------
famo
Another duck-based animated series that passes the nostalgia test for me is
Count Duckula. The heated exchange in the Who Might You Be segment reminds me
of some HN comment threads I've read:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHnuFmrQtMU&sns=em](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHnuFmrQtMU&sns=em)

------
nhebb
The last line:

 _it’s surprising to look back at it today and realize just how thoroughly it
was shaped by the world that required it, a space on the TV schedule that
simply doesn’t exist anymore._

... makes me wonder. Looking at what channels like HBO, AMC, and Fx have done
with adult programming, you'd think there would be a market for a channel that
focuses on well-done animated series.

I have three kids 10, 16, and 18. In the late 90's I'd watch cartoons with the
older two, and many of the shows weren't half bad (I still wish Samurai Jack
had continued). Luckily, though, my youngest prefers watching sports over
cartoons because I don't think I could tolerate watching most of the stuff
that's on today.

~~~
agscala
Well, there's a lot of good anime. I know it's cliche or whatever, but a lot
of it is very entertaining and sometimes mature and thought provoking.

------
danso
Duck Tales is not on Netflix Instant, but Season One is streaming on Amazon
Instant, FYI

[http://www.amazon.com/DuckTales-Volume-1-Alan-
Young/dp/B000A...](http://www.amazon.com/DuckTales-Volume-1-Alan-
Young/dp/B000AXWGRC)

~~~
nhebb
Given that it's a Disney property, I'm stunned that they are available on
YouTube -
[http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ducktales+full+e...](http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ducktales+full+episodes)

------
businessleads
And all the full episodes are on YouTube!!! LINK:
[http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKbjh13l4YB9KHRCl5SjMs...](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKbjh13l4YB9KHRCl5SjMsuEBZyjYlGSF)

------
evolve2k
'The Mysterious Cities of Gold'. What can I say, pure gold and personal
favorite of most of me and most friends that watched it.

I remember thinking this show has the best graphics ever! The gold shining in
the sun off the flying bird plane when they first discovered it is etched in
my memory forever.

<http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Cities_of_Gold>

------
zavulon
Duck Tales was the first American cartoon series shown in post-Soviet Russia
and it was incredibly popular over there. Every single kid that had a TV
watched it in the early 90's, along with Ghostbusters the animated series,
Tailspin, Gummi Bears, and Winnie the Pooh.. but Duck Tales was always the
best and most loved.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp3Q1x4gKjw>

------
dottrap
More! More! I want to see more! DuckTales: 25th Anniversary Retrospective
<http://bit.ly/PUUCKE>

------
gcatalfamo
duck tales and darkwing duck were the absolute best...good times

~~~
yareally
Don't forget Chip n Dale: Rescue Rangers, Gummy Bears and Tailspin.

On the Warner Brother's side, Animaniacs, Tiny Toons, Pinky and the Brain are
almost as good as the original Looney Tunes (which I also loved as a kid and
still do).

I know Looney Tunes was originally geared towards adults (as short films
before movies), but grown ups and kids alike love them. I've recently gone
back to watch the classic Looney Tunes[1] and was surprised at how much satire
was in them related to the 30s, 40s and 50s. It's the kind of stuff you would
only really noticed if you studied the history of the era and are somewhat
aware of the pop culture then. They were definently not meant for children,
but the slapstick comedy and music draw in all audiences. Looney Tunes was my
first real introduction to classical music. I would later go on to play Violin
(probably somewhat influenced from Looney Tunes) for a number of years in
school and still listen to classical music when I program quite often.

I don't know what happened to cartoons, but nothing seems to be interesting
that's also geared towards children these days. Most just seem like some half-
hearted attempt to educate children while attempting to be entertaining,
instead of being entertaining and also subtly educating at the same time.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looney_Tunes_Golden_Collection>

edit: elaboration

~~~
elijahtaylor
> I don't know what happened to cartoons, but nothing seems to be interesting
> that's also geared towards children these days

I don't disagree entirely, but there are still some gems today that are
enjoyable for kids and adults. Speaking of Looney Tunes, the new "The Looney
Tunes Show" is pretty great. And there are some things on Cartoon Network that
are passable, like Adventure Time and reruns of other niche shows from the
past 10 years.

I think the options are fewer, or the ocean of content is vaster, so it seems
like there's nothing there when there is.

~~~
yareally
Ah yeah, I've heard of the Looney Tunes show and looked at some clips online.
I was kind of turned off when I saw they had Yosemite Sam rapping though[1].
Just seemed like they were trying too hard to be relevant to kids. I know that
might be premature judgment, so I'm keeping an open mind and have a question
for anyone who has watched it.

How is it outside of that? Is it pretty faithful to the original Looney Tunes?
I know my example could be somewhat of a hyperbole, so I would love to get
another opinion on it before passing final judgment.

[1] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP2qEo8j2KM>

~~~
elijahtaylor
Yeah, the new "Merrie Melodies" (of which that clip you linked) are the worst
part of the show IMO. They only lasted the first season, probably for good
reason. A couple were funny/interesting but most were not.

Other than that, it's a show I really look forward to watching. You may be
disappointed if you're looking for original Looney Tunes, it's not really like
that. The characters are the same, their personalities are more fleshed out
and exaggerated, the times are modern and they live "ordinary" lives. Some of
the reviews I've seen on Amazon for it accurately labeled it as Looney Tunes
meets Seinfeld (they were being pejorative but I find the comparison apt and
view it in a positive light).

Try watching an episode from Season 2 (the currently airing season) before
writing it off. It will only take ~21 minutes out of your life if it's not
your thing.

~~~
yareally
I'll check out Season 2 and see how it is. I don't mind if it's not one-off
clips like the original as long as they ditched things like the youtube clip,
haha.

Thanks for the reply :)

------
lifeisstillgood
I know this has 91 comments, I know its on the front page, I know that three
days ago I got slapped for being on the other side of this issue, but,
really... this thread is HN worthy?

~~~
steauengeglase
Yes. It tells an important story about product creation.

DuckTales had to make it over 65 episodes and under budget. It had simple
goals and it accomplished them.

Look at Apple at their brightest hours. You can say that the iPhone was Apple
throwing down the gauntlet and rejecting the tyranny of buttons and saved us
all, but the reality is simple. Touch was expensive and bad for a long time,
so Apple waited until touch was cheap and good, then they solved for X. They
didn't care if you didn't buy iWorks for your iMac and your iPad, they just
wanted to sell hardware.

That is the secret to success for many products and avoiding it is the road to
failure for many others: if affordable{solve for x();} else {do something
else();}

MS and Disney have shot themselves in the foot numerous times. MS making sure
they didn't hurt other product lines created huge waste and left consumers
hesitant. Disney obsessed with the Disney Princess and drove away everyone but
the pre-teen girl and parents didn't bother taking their kids to see The
Princess and the Frog because Dad would lose his mind and empty his walled if
he thought he'd have to spend another second in Hanna Montana-ville. Instead
of just solving for X, they lost consumers who assumed they'd get screwed down
the road somewhere.

