At this point, we’re just going to have to accept that DuckTales just doesn’t really do great cold opens. The sequence before the opening credits (and really, a good portion of the first act) tend to be too enamored with dropping as many jokes, references, and clumsy exposition as possible, and it just kind of comes…
I’m not… entirely sure that the team who wrote, animated, and produced “McMystery At McDuck McManor” realize how truly bizarre this episode is. (Colleen Evanson, who penned the script to one of the show’s weaker outputs, helms this one as well.) DuckTales, in any incarnation–comic series, old TV show, new TV show–is…
The DuckTales crew is off to Scotland - or the Ducks’ Universe equivalent of it - for a country club golf outing that suddenly becomes a ghoulish, high-stakes, back-nine-of-death competition in “The Missing Links of Moorshire.” DuckTales have had some pretty outlandish episodes during both it’s past and present runs,…
I don’t think it’s much of a coincidence Frank Angones, the writer of today’s script, tweeted such an emotional sentiment prior to the debut of “Beware The B.U.D.D.Y. System,” an episode that is almost too much indebted to nostalgia. It brings back Gyro and Lil’ Bulb, but it also introduces Fenton Crackshell-Cabrera…
DuckTales is back! Again! After a six-months hiatus, Disney is pushing a new slate of shows and episodes this summer, re-jiggering its entire approach as this show now airs on Disney Channel proper. (I have a theory as to why.) Still, it’s good to be back in the Duck-verse, even if this ‘verse is perhaps a bit…
I don’t think I’m alone in recognizing that this fourth and final season of Star Wars Rebels was its best yet. Instead of a handful of standalone episodes and mini-arcs, all of which had their moments of greatness intermixed with moments of sheer mediocrity (and outright awfulness), this fourth season opted for more…
DuckTales returns the weekend with the long-delayed “The Impossible Summit of Mt. Neverrest!”–an episode that focuses on the nature of determination-turned-obsession, in Scrooge’s relentless desire to scale Mt. Neverrest, and Huey’s desire to map it and earn a new Junior Woodchuck merit badge. It’s a episode that has…
It’s been 13 years since the last new episode of Hey Arnold!, “Phoebe’s Little Problem/Grandpa’s Packard,” aired on Nickelodeon. But the show’s true finale was “The Journal,” a two-part, story-within-a-story that told the tale of how Arnold’s absent parents met, married, and gave birth to a son in the fictional,…
DuckTales has an appealing, eclectic cast of characters, but it struggles to focus them through a strong, viable narrative that either provides real, consistent stakes, or props up the more-comedic sensibility of the show. The strongest theme has usually been the familial dynamic, but it has only been trotted out…
After a pretty all around great premiere, Star Wars Rebels unfortunately falls back into its bad habits: big but underwhelming cameos, unnecessary references and Easter Eggs, and, most specifically, a basic, textbook sense of plotting that never goes beyond the rote narrative. There are definitely heavy themes…
If you haven’t heard, this is Star Wars Rebels’ fourth and final season. Throughout its run, Star Wars Rebels has had its heights for sure, but quite a few lows as well. Its primary issue, however, is that it has always felt inessential, a side curiosity to Star Wars lore instead of something substantial and…
Okay. Okay. I finally think I have a bead on how the new DuckTales is playing its game.
To be clear, I am aware of that DuckTales is airing episodes wildly out of order. While this is fairly normal for most TV programs, the argument seems to be that this is a particularly bad case of episode reordering, and that it really reflects poorly on, if not so much the overall story arc, than the connotations of…
Who would have expected that DuckTales would be spending so much time developing Webby? The first three episodes after the “Woo-oo” pilot has placed a significant amount on time showcasing and developing the ward, whose action-oriented, information-filled character has been braced quite nicely with a sense of…
I know that I mentioned I would try and avoid comparing this new DuckTales to the old show, but this comparison is warranted, at the very least for context: new-Gyro is quite different from old-Gyro. Old-Gyro was a brilliant goofball, a bumbling scientist that always had his heart in the right place, but could never…
Welcome back to The A.V. Club’s official Ducktales reviews! Considering the myriad ways Disney aired “Woo-oo”—on the Disney XD Channel, on the app, on Youtube—by now you have to have seen the first episode, probably more than once. Hell, you’re probably sick of it by now. Well, finally we’re at the point where we’ll…
Time recently published a wide-ranging, insightful article called “Donald Trump After Hours,” for which a team of reporters and photographers was given leisurely access to see how our president lives and works, four months into his presidency.
When Darkwing Duck premiered in syndication in 1991, Superman hadn’t died, Marvel hadn’t gone bankrupt, and Image hadn’t progressed beyond a glint in anyone’s creator-owned eye. Tim Burton’s next Batman movie was still a year away, as was the groundbreaking one-two animated punch of Fox’s X-Men and Batman: The…
Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. may have had its flaws but managed to mostly overcome them by presenting a number of various complications (the A.T.C.U., Lash, missing Inhumans, a goddamn alternate planet), and by gradually doling them out over the course of the season. Some of those complications, like Simmons on…
In March of 1956, Roy Orbison and his band The Teen Kings left their home in Odessa, Texas to record a session in Memphis for producer Sam Phillips, at Sun Studios. Over Orbison’s objection, Phillips had the band record “Ooby Dooby,” a novelty song that had raised The Teen Kings’ profile when they’d played it on local…