New DuckTales Animated Series

As soon as I saw the trailer I came here. I wasn't a huge DuckTales fan as a kid, just saw an episode here or there. I do have the DuckTales movie on VHS though. But people keep saying how good DuckTales was. Well now I get to see for myself. What I'm most excited about is Huey, Dewey and Louie actually having unique personalities. Maybe now I'll finally be able to tell them apart. And of course I'm happy to see Launchpad. I may not have watched a lot of DuckTales, but I watched a ton of Darkwing Duck and Launchpad was great in that. Oh, and Donald's in this. I don't think he was ever in any classic DuckTales, but I could be wrong. I really hope this is successful.

edited 24th Mar '17 5:50:41 PM by WillKeaton

Donald was in a select few episodes, but otherwise just was not allowed to show up without Roy Disney's approval.

Donald was only occasionally in the original Duck Tales, but he is in the comics that the series was based off of (Launchpad and later Fenton essentially take his role in the show).

Edit: Sorry, wrong thread.

edited 24th Mar '17 5:51:11 PM by NapoleonDeCheese

And that was mostly because during the 80's, Roy thought animated TV shows were mainly to sell toys and little else... which, in his defense, was kinda true.

DuckTales was pretty much the first animated TV show to say "no, you don't need to have a toyline to justify your existence, you can just be a well-crafted series with very compelling characters."

Without DuckTales, we probably wouldn't have Gargoyles or any other animated show that doesn't have an accompanying toyline. (Can't think of any beyond Gargoyles...)

edited 24th Mar '17 6:17:47 PM by TargetmasterJoe

Gargoyles had a toyline.

So does Batman: The Animated Series, but I don't think either was made primarily to sell the toys.

Gargoyles had some really bad cases of Executive Meddling where the merchandising department forced the showrunners to include some really out-of-place elements to make into toys. This includes the Gargoyles owning a motorcycle and a helicopter. Seriously. The winged gargoyles needed to have a helicopter. And to add insult to injury, they ended up never even making it into a toy.

I thought it was the Gummi Bears that showed you could do high quality stories without the need for toys...Or maybe, one can say that what the Gummi Bears did for Saturday Mornings, Ducktales did for Syndication.

I always like how in Gargoyles, when they asked to promote the motorcycle, it got crashed after about five minutes of screentime.

I think I actually owned one of the Gargoyles action figures, come to think.

Did not realize that.

Yeah, that's what I was going for.

For that matter, they did have Duck Tales merchandise; i remember they made plush toys of the main cast (except Launchpad, as far as I know). They did the same thing for the earlier Gummi Bears, and of course The Wuzzles was a line of plush toys even before it was a cartoon. I don't think any of them were contingent on the toy sales success, though.

I actually wrote an article once, on the history of the "half-hour toy commercial." It actually used to be against FCC regulations to broadcast cartoons with significant lines of merchandise (it's what killed a Hot Wheels cartoon in the 60's). Then, in the late 70's they amended the regulation so that cartoons with merch could be broadcast, you just couldn't attach any commercials for said merch to the show itself. The first cartoon made to promote a line of merchandise was, believe it or not, Strawberry Shortcake. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, which is what most people think of when they think of this type of 'toon, was second.

edited 25th Mar '17 9:45:52 AM by Robbery

Batman The Animated Series had the advantage of running parallel to three big time Batman movies in a time when Warner's TV executives cared about cross promotion between animation, comics and films.

Realized my earlier post got rather buried, so allow me to bring it back up:

Do we know how many episode we're getting?

From the page itself:

edited 30th Mar '17 5:25:09 PM by TargetmasterJoe

Has this been posted yet? Because if not, it should have been.

It got posted ages ago.

Bump, because the trivia page for DuckTales (2017) had something like this:

Which got me to go "wait, what?"

Then I got to CBR.com, where I found this, which made me go "ohhhh."

I didn't watch the old Duck Tales much, but looking at episode descriptions I don't think it had story arcs. Unless you count multi-part episodes where the plot thread is concluded at the end of the last part and not brought up again. Do you think this series will have story arcs? Because a TV show today is much more likely to have overarching plots than shows in the late 80's.

The original Duck Tales started with a five-episode arc called "The Treasure of the Golden Suns", and there was few other multi-part episodes during the show's run, but I'm not sure if that counts.

However, the current trend with animated series, the fact that large part of the production crew worked on Gravity Falls, and the whole "You used to be a big deal, whatever happened to you?" bit from the trailer are all reasons I'm thinking this iteration of the show will have some sort of over-arching plot.

Yeah, IIRC, they established that it'll have that episodic feel the original had while having an overarching plot.

Here's to hoping we get Brick Jokes!

I think that they're building cartoons more these days for binging in mind. Heck, for something so episodic, I was surprised at just how much continuity was involved with Phineas and Ferb. It's gotten to the point that it's popping up in just about every cartoon my 4-year old wants to watch. I'm not complaining about continuity, but I'm kind of wondering just how much continuity Peg + Cat needs.

Does anyone else love this as much as I do?

Bump.

What better way to celebrate the 600th post of this thread than with character-shaped pancakes?

edited 14th May '17 9:53:23 AM by TargetmasterJoe