Trivia / DuckTales (1987)

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: Bubba is a neanderthal-like caveduck and is depicted with red hair. A 2007 study suggests that red hair was common among Neanderthals.
• Accidentally Correct Zoology: The hadrosaurs in "Dinosaur Ducks" are depicted as resembling sauropods with duckbills and crested heads. Real hadrosaurs are now known to be quadrupeds, and the largest hadrosaurs are the second largest dinosaurs after the sauropods. The mother hadrosaur is also depicted fighting a T. rex and hitting it with her tail, something that would have been arbitrary with real-life hadrosaurs (in contrast to their usual depiction as defenseless).
• Acting for Two:
  • Russi Taylor does the voices of Huey, Dewey, Louie, and Webby, with pretty much every episode featuring those characters talking to one another.
  • Many of the voices for the more minor characters in episodes were provided by Peter Cullen. There are several episodes where nearly every male character that isn't a main character is him, conversing with each other or not.
  • In the episode "Earthquack," Scrooge is imprisoned by a guard who is also voiced by Alan Young.
  • Frank Welker plays both Big Time and Baggy Beagle, as well as the two dim-witted cops in "The Good Muddahs."
• Actor Allusion: Bernie Kopell voices a villainous spy, talking in almost the exact same voice as Siegfried no less.
  • Another spy-related one, in The Duck Who Knew Too Much Agent X (voiced by Alan Oppenheimer) remarks that "Oppenheimer" is a stupid code name.
  • In one episode, Scrooge dealt with a genie. Scrooge's voice actor has dealt with a genie before named Gourdy, and not only that but he was the genie's 'mastuh.'
• Breaking News Interruption: A December 1993 broadcast of the episode "A Whale of a Bad Time" in Hungary was cut to announce the death of the then-serving prime minister. The event confused children across the country and became a defining generational moment — they were eventually dubbed the "DuckTales Generation" and became the focus of numerous articles and cultural analyses.
• Channel Hop: Kind of- though the majority of the series aired in syndication, Super DuckTales made its premiere on The Magical World of Disney on NBC primetime for Easter 1989, with "A Duck Tales Valentine (Amour or Less)" airing on NBC on February 1990.
• Completely Different Title:
  • Chinese, 唐老鴨俱樂部 (Donald Duck Club)
  • Danish, Rip, Rap og Rup på eventyr (Huey, Dewey and Louie Adventures)
  • French, La Bande à Picsou (Scrooge's Gang)
  • Japanese, わんぱくダック夢冒険 (Naughty Ducks Dream Adventure)
  • Korean, 욕심쟁이 오리아저씨 (Mr. Greedy-duck)
  • Romanian, Povești cu Mac-Mac (Stories with Mac-Mac)
  • Hispanic America (or Spanish-speaking Latin American countries), Spain and Portugal, Pato Aventuras (Duck Adventures)
  • The Foreign Subtitle: In Brazil, it was DuckTales: Os Caçadores de Aventuras (The Adventure Hunters).
• The Danza: In "The Duck Who Knew Too Much", Alan Oppenheimer guest stars as a villain named Oppenheimer.
• Disowned Adaptation: Several prominent Disney comics writers have expressed some criticism towards the series.
  • Don Rosa has expressed strong criticism of the show. He gave some praise to parts of it, and even called it a good show on its own merits, but felt that as a whole it was not in tone with the Disney Ducks Comic Universe they established. Rosa resented being referred to as a "DuckTales cartoonist" as a result of its popularity. Some of Don Rosa's thoughts on it can be found here.
  • According to some of the show's staff such as Michael Peraza (art director), Carl Barks was in fact quite fond of some of the ideas in the first season, though he wasn't as fond of some of the retools in Season Two. Barks did keep up with the comics, however, and even wrote a thank you letter to Marv Wolfman for including a cartoon version of him as Scrooge's banker, Savin Cash, in a Ducktales comic story.
• Dueling Dubs:
  • There exists two dubs in Swedish, one from when the show first aired and a re-dub in 2020 featuring all the voices from the 2017 series, except for the triplets who were voiced by Leo Hallerstam (his father, Staffan Hallerstam, voiced them in the first dub).
  • There's also three Japanese dubs: One for TV Tokyo, another for the cable network WOWOW, and a newer one for Disney+, being the latter using the voice cast from the 2017 reboot.
  • The show was dubbed into Brazilian Portuguese by Herbert Richers studio in 1988. But this dub used the protegee of the SBT Channel, where the show first aired in Brazil perform the theme song, and so the version couldn't be used for the VHS release unless they approached SBT for a deal. Instead, the handful of episodes released on VHS in the 90's was redubbed by S&C studio, from another state and with an entirely new cast and a new theme song.
• Edited for Syndication:
  • The Disney Channel/Toon Disney versions of this show (and other shows under the Disney Afternoon umbrella) were edited to remove a lot of gun violence, anything dangerous that impressionable viewers could imitate (for this show, it was messing with electric wires), and scenes considered too scary or intense for younger viewers.
  • In "Sir Gyro De Gearloose," when Merloon is trying to make Gyro's magnet work by slamming it into the table, he says "Work, work, work!" - but because of his accent, it sounds like he is saying F-Bomb instead. This is why they eventually dubbed that sentence over again. The original VHS tape has the original dialogue, but the DVD has the new version of the sentence.
  • Disney's iTunes/Amazon Video streaming uses the censored cuts.
• Fake Brit: Duckworth speaks in an approximation of an upper-class English accent, though his voice actor Chuck McCann is from New York.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • Rescued, though not without caveats:
    • Not all episodes were initially issued on DVD. And some countries only released the movie!
    • The series is available on iTunes, although there are other issues.
    • Disney released the 4th and final volume on DVD as a Disney Movie Club exclusive, 11 years after the previous volume.
  • Both Finnish dubs are this, as when the show was released on Disney+, it was subtitled in Finnish instead of using either dub (the same applied to a few other older shows, such as Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers and Darkwing Duck). It's unknown why this was done, considering the Tuotantotalo Werne dub was still being aired on TV well into the mid-to-late-2010s.
• Kids' Meal Toy:
  • In 1988, McDonald's released a set of four detective toys. There was a wrist decoder, a telescope, a magnifying glass, and a duck code "quacker".
  • Also in 1988, a set of four vehicles with interchangeable figures were released. They consisted of Scrooge in a car, Launchpad in an airplane, webby on a tricycle, and Huey, Dewey, and Louie on a jet ski.
  • In 1997, Long John Silver's released a set of four pencil topper figures based on shows from the Disney Afternoon despite the block having ended that year and its shows having ended their runs several years prior. Scrooge McDuck had his own figure, as did Dale, Baloo, and Goofy.
• Missing Episode: For some reason, "Sphinx for the Memories" is missing from Disney's iTunes/Amazon Video streaming, and both "Sphinx for the Memories" and "Launchpad's Civil War" are absent for the Disney+ release. That said, the episodes are available on DVD, so all is not lost if you wish to watch the whole series legally.
• The Original Darrin: After being replaced by Wil Ryan in Sport Goofy in Soccermania, Alan Young takes back the role of Scrooge here.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Due to Paul Frees' passing a year before the series premiered, Corey Burton assumes the role of Ludwig von Drake starting from this series.
  • Hal Smith replaces Will Ryan (from Sport Goofy in Soccermania) as Gyro Gearloose.
  • Frank Welker, Peter Cullen, and Terry McGovern replace Will Ryan, Phil Proctor, and Jack Angel as the Beagle Boys.
• Out of Order: The DVD releases mostly have the episodes in the order they aired... but for whatever reason, the five-parter that started the series is in Vol. 2's DVD set.
• Recursive Adaptation: This animated series is based on a comic book series which is based on a series of animated shorts. And, to continue the loop, there's a comic book adaptation of the series!
• Role Reprise: Alan Young returns to voice Scrooge after previously voicing him in 1974's An Adaptation of Dickens' Christmas Carol, Performed by The Walt Disney Players and "Mickey's Christmas Carol" a few years prior.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: At one point, the theme song was blocked on YouTube for copyright by Warner Music Group, a move that got many Disney uploaders banned. Fans were not impressed.

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