DuckTales turns 30 on the 18th of this month, and a friend of mine, Jason Schlierman of DAF Radio, wanted a banner for his Facebook group, so I went full Don Rosa and illustrated a collage of some of the most memorable Duck stories (except, unlike Rosa, I’m focusing on the animated series)!
Starting with the left margin…
TOP ROW, left to right:
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗲𝗮𝗴𝗹𝗲 𝗕𝗼𝘆𝘀’ 𝗵𝗶𝗱𝗲𝗼𝘂𝘁. Seen in various episodes, but depicted here is its appearance in “The Money Vanishes”, after the Beagles teleport Scrooge’s entire vault contents their way with the use of a special ray gun.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗕𝗲𝗮𝗴𝗹𝗲 𝗕𝗼𝘆𝘀. Namely, Bigtime, Burger and Bouncer, the typical “Big Three” players in most episodes featuring the Beagles. Bigtime is holding the ray gun from the aforementioned episode.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱 𝘗𝘩𝘰𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘹 (the rocketship from “Where No Duck Has Gone Before”). Scrooge visited the studio of the kids’ favorite sci-fi TV series, “Courage of the Cosmos”, and told Gyro to build a new set for it, making the spaceship “as real as it can be”. Well, to everyone’s shock, the 𝘗𝘩𝘰𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘹 actually blasts off during the big unveiling, with Courage and the kids inside - Gyro DID make it real!
𝗗𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗱'𝘀 𝗮𝗶𝗿𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗳𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗿. Donald spends most of the series in the Navy, but a small handful of first season episodes do feature him, and when he does pop his head in, you can usually bet the aircraft carrier he serves on will at least make an appearance as well.
𝗗𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗱 𝗗𝘂𝗰𝗸. Here he is in his Navy outfit, running away from the Beagle Boys (Bigtime is pointing the teleporter ray gun at him). No such scenario occurred in the series, but I wanted the characters to interact with each other amongst the margins.
SECOND ROW:
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗼𝗹𝗼𝘀𝘀𝘂𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗗𝘂𝗰𝗸𝗮𝗽𝗼𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗼𝘂𝘀, from “Home Sweet Homer”. This is one of those classic episodes that immediately comes to mind when someone thinks of DuckTales. It sort of retells the story of the Odyssey (with tons of creative license, of course), except that it takes place AFTER Ulysses has made his voyage, and his “nephew” Homer is the stand-in character. The Ducks, in a sailboat, approach a cleft between two cliffs, only to have a magical tornado sweep them up and send them back to Homer’s time. They sail into the cleft, but the sorceress Circe uses her magic to move the cliffs together in an attempt to squash the Ducks. This causes the Colossus statue, which stands with its legs splayed apart, either leg to a cliff, to crumble away until only its feet remain, making clear why that’s all that’s left of it in Scrooge’s time. I remember, when I was in 9th grade, the English class I was in actually watched this episode on its old laserdisc, when we were studying the Odyssey (though I did nudge the teacher a little into that decision). And when _The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring_ came out in theaters, I immediately thought of this DuckTales episode during the Argonath scene (I hadn’t yet read LOTR, so it was new to me). Now that I think about it, I wonder if the Argonath inspired the writer of “Home Sweet Homer” to some extent?
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘀, again from “Home Sweet Homer”. How could I make a reference to that episode without also referencing what I still maintain is the scariest scene in all of DuckTales? (Though I guess the fake Scrooge and fake nephews from “Nothing to Fear” are a close second.) This version of the Sirens is terrifying to me. They come across as beautiful female ducks… except… you can tell from the get-go something’s wrong with them. Never mind their croaky singing voices; the fact that they’re packed up to their heads in what looks like purple mud, with no visible limbs (evoking some grotesque parody of a Pez Dispenser), and that they sway creepily as they sing, makes the whole package VERY Uncanny Valley. When Scrooge is lured to their island, a gigantic ogre-like head with arms and a massive gaping mouth emerges from the mud beneath the Sirens, and we see it’s all one hideous creature. To be honest, I think the over-the-top mud monster does take some of the bite out of the subtlety of the horror of seeing the Sirens by themselves and knowing there’s something wrong but not knowing what that is, but five-year-old me would probably beg to differ.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝗚𝗼𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗮𝗻 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗹. The very last episode (technically, two episodes) of DuckTales involved a golden idol in the shape of a goose that gave Scrooge the Midas Touch. The Beagle Boys stole it for Flintheart Glomgold, and after a big struggle in Part Two over ownership of it, it transformed into a live goose, going on a wild spree transforming everything in sight into gold. Eventually the Goose shed its gold coating, and this is where things got epic. The gold it shed onto the ground began to spread, covering all of Duckburg and continuing on to the rest of the world. In order to reverse this process, Scrooge and his few remaining allies had to return the Goose to the fountain it came from, in a monastery in Barkladesh, before the entire planet was lost. There’s a particularly memorable space-view shot of the earth as the gold creeps over its surface (so much for the Blue Marble), and I knew I had to depict that in this picture.
𝗗𝘂𝗰𝗸𝘄𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗵 (Scrooge’s butler), and 𝗕𝘂𝗯𝗯𝗮 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗧𝗼𝗼𝘁𝘀𝗶𝗲. In “Pearl of Wisdom”, Huey, Dewey and Louie race through a hallway toward their room, to gather their marble collection together for a big tournament. They jostle a stand on the way, knocking a vase off and into Duckworth’s hand (Duckworth’s expression doesn’t change). Then, Webby comes tearing through after the boys, bumping into a second stand with a duck bust, which Duckworth catches with his foot (again, without changing expression). It’s one of Duckworth’s funnier moments, and I really think he doesn’t get enough credit. “Duckworth’s Revolt”, for instance, is one of the best episodes of the series, and he certainly deserved more than just that one focusing on him. Of course, here I change the reckless character from the usual kids to Bubba the Caveduck and his pet triceratops Tootsie. Bubba takes a lot of flak from critics, and he too I think wasn’t nearly as bad of a character as some claim. Heck, I remember just being thrilled at his debut episode, “Time is Money”, and sure that had a lot to do with the fact that it was the first new DuckTales episode in nearly a year (an eternity to a six-year-old), but it’s actually a really touching story, and Ron Jones really brings that out in the hefty handful of new music score cues he composed for it. There’s also the episode “Bubba’s Big Brainstorm”, which for all its flaws contains an adventure I love it to pieces for. I don’t care if you think I have bad taste.
THIRD ROW:
𝗚𝗹𝗮𝗱𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗚𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿. Here he is freaked out by the fact that Magica has Scrooge’s Number One Dime, evoking the plot of “Dime Enough for Luck”, except that the manner in which she’s procured it suggests “Magica’s Shadow War”. I fudged a bit here and depicted her shadow in its “super” form, which it takes on after it casts a spell to be freed from the flesh-and-blood Magica, even though here it’s obviously still “attached”. Magica’s shadow could only grab the shadows of things and not the things themselves (though these objects would float through the air to keep up with their shadows), so here it grasps the shadow of the Dime’s glass case. This is another great episode, and the original script is even online for us all to read. Check it out! It’s awesome to see everything that didn’t make the cut (spoiler: there’s a scene where Scrooge and the kids cut through a department store to escape the shadows). And as for Gladstone, he was hypnotized in “Dime Enough” into handing over the Dime to Magica (side note: again, going back to LOTR, Magica actually makes a One Ring reference once she’s back in her lair with the coin: “One Dime to Rule Them All”, she cackles). Gladstone’s character is notorious in DuckTales, because while his classic infuriating luck is there, he doesn’t have the kind of gloating personality his creator Carl Barks gave him in the comics (Well, sort of. We do get a quick glimpse of what he’s REALLY supposed to be like when he loses his luck and says: “I’ll have to get a JOB like normal people!”). If you only watched the cartoon, you’d never know Gladstone was created to be unlikable, as he constantly makes his cousin Donald hate life by winning every contest he enters and rubbing in the fact that he never has to lift a finger to earn his next meal. This is exactly the impression I had of him as a kid, where the only Barks story I read in my youth that had Gladstone in it was “The Billion Dollar Safari”, and there isn’t much in that tale to indicate I should hate this character with every fiber of my being.
𝗠𝗮𝗴𝗶𝗰𝗮 𝗱𝗲 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗹 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗣𝗼𝗲. Magica is my favorite recurring villain in both the DuckTales episodes and the Barks comics, and I think it’s a shame that she only gets one more episode once season two starts up, and even then it probably only featured her because she was in the Barks story it was a direct adaptation of. Seasons three and four are quite inundated with Flintheart plus-or-minus Beagle Boys episodes, and it does grate on one’s endurance after a while. As for Poe, he’s actually Magica’s brother turned into a raven. We never see what he looked like before the transformation, but supposedly if Magica successfully melts the Number One Dime into her amulet, it’ll give her enough power to turn Poe back into his old self. This is a bit of a contrast against Magica’s raven in the comics, Ratface, who was in fact an actual raven. Kinda reminds me of the different takes on Splinter between Ninja Turtles comics canon and 1987 cartoon canon.
𝗠𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁 𝗩𝗲𝘀𝘂𝘃𝗶𝘂𝘀. Magica’s lair. In the comics she lived in a small hut on the slopes of the historical Mt. Vesuvius in Italy (usually these exterior shots have lots of inkwashed surfaces/sharp relief for atmosphere!), but in DuckTales she lived IN the volcano itself (which for some reason was isolated in the middle of the ocean), and Vesuvius was even shaped like her head. I was beyond thrilled when WayForward turned the final stage of DuckTales: Remastered into Mt. Vesuvius, it was so perfect.
CENTERPIECE:
That’s the 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 on the top left, the 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆 𝗯𝗶𝗻 on the top right, and on the bottom, the 𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗶𝗹𝗼𝘁 𝗲𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲, “Treasure of the Golden Suns”. After Scrooge makes the mistake of opening all three doors in the vine-strewn temple, the giant discs lining the valley catch the rays of the sun and reflect off of each other to trigger the valley’s final, horrifying trap: the molten gold deep in the temple’s well rises to melt the temple and leave the Ducks stranded on the roof, seconds away from their doom, before Launchpad shows up in the nick of time. Again, I must tip my hat to Ron Jones, because the music in this scene is incredible, to match the visuals.
Now, the right margin…
TOP ROW, left to right:
𝗚𝘆𝗿𝗼 𝗚𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝗼𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗟𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲 𝗛𝗲𝗹𝗽𝗲𝗿/𝗟𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗹𝗲 𝗕𝘂𝗹𝗯. They’re sitting inside the Time Tub, which Gyro invented in “Sir Gyro de Gearloose” to escape the drudgery of always having to be the Mr. Fix-It (or “Gadget Man”) of Duckburg. Most probably recognize this episode as the source of the shot in the opening sequence on the lyric “…or rewrite history!” The Time Tub also made an appearance in “Time Teasers”.
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝘂𝗰𝗸 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗿𝗼𝗻 𝗠𝗮𝘀𝗸, from the episode of the same name. The face behind the mask is that of Count Roy, an old friend of Scrooge’s, whose twin brother Ray overthrew his rule and cast him in prison wearing the mask.
𝗚𝗼𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗲. In the flashback scene in “Back to the Klondike”, this is how Scrooge first sees his main love interest, on a stage in a saloon, sitting on a swing while singing a song about her love of gold nuggets.
SECOND ROW:
𝗠𝗿𝘀. 𝗕𝗲𝗮𝗸𝗹𝗲𝘆. She’s knitting the colorful scarf that would go to Skiddles the penguin in “Treasure of the Golden Suns, part 4”. (Maybe I should have had her brandishing a tuning fork?)
The 𝗠𝗶𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗮𝘂𝗿 from “Raiders of the Lost Harp”. DuckTales just can’t get any more vintage than a chilling reveal of a giant statue early in an episode, then the statue coming to life once the treasure it protects is stolen, and spending the rest of the episode pursuing the thief. Scary stuff for a five-year-old, and still pretty effective for an adult, too!
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗚𝗮𝗿𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗢𝗻𝗲 from “Sphinx for the Memories”. Specifically, the iconic scene of the crescent moon lining up behind the sphinx, a beam of light passing from the head decoration to a similar decoration worn by Donald, to complete the possession of Donald by the ancient spirit. I know I already showed Donald on the left margin, but I figured I could cheat for a scene as epic creepy as this.
THIRD ROW:
𝗚𝗶𝗶𝗶~𝗶𝘇𝗺𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗸! Man, the introduction of Fenton Crackshell to the series may have taken some of the wind out of Launchpad’s sails when it came to the role of the “heroic” character, but Gizmoduck is too awesome for me to have wanted it any other way. His debut story, “Super DuckTales”, was just a blast all around. Blathering blatherskite!
𝗙𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗿 𝗕𝗿𝘂𝘀𝗵𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗹, an uncannily talented door-to-door salesman. This is a DuckTales-exclusive character from “Much Ado About Scrooge”, the story of a race to uncover the lost play of William Drakespeare (that’s the play Brushbill is holding under his arm). The late, great Chris Barat speculated Brushbill was, in the early draft stages, intended to be Gladstone in his debut episode, and I think he was right - after all, Brushbill does exhibit the obnoxious personality traits one would expect from Gladstone, and has the right kind of voice, to boot.
𝗙𝗹𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗺𝗴𝗼𝗹𝗱. I know it’s probably hard to tell since I drew him so small here, but he’s eating his hat - holding up his end of the deal from “Treasure of the Golden Suns, part 2”. I designed the margin this way to suggest a character interaction: Filler Brushbill is running away, play in hand, from a frustrated Glomgold, only to be stopped by Gizmoduck.
𝗖𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗹𝗲 𝗠𝗰𝗗𝘂𝗰𝗸 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗼𝘁𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗠𝗰𝗗𝘂𝗰𝗸. “The Curse of Castle McDuck” is my favorite self-contained DuckTales episode (as opposed to the multi-part arcs). Scrooge takes the kids to visit his chilhood cottage in Scotland, only to discover that his ancestors’ castle across the stream is haunted by a bloodthirsty hound, and occupied by druids. While Scrooge and the boys set traps for the druids, Webby ends up separated from the others and wanders into a misty forest behind the castle. The others look for her and, in the forest, find themselves confronted by the hound. Just a GREAT spooky atmosphere all around, helped marvelously along by, yes, the music - in this case, there are a number of electronic cues that lend a truly surreal and dreamlike feel to this tale.
FOURTH ROW:
The 𝗧𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗮𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗺𝗶𝗮𝗻𝘀 roll toward a pillar to smack against it in competition for the Great Games. This depicts “Earth Quack”, an adaptation of Barks’s “Land Beneath the Ground”. I was terrified of earthquakes as a kid (even though I’ve always lived in areas not particularly susceptible to them - but then, maybe never experiencing any made the fear worse), and I’ve always suspected it was this very episode that introduced me to the concept of earthquakes.
FIFTH ROW:
𝗟𝗮𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗵𝗽𝗮𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗗𝗼𝗼𝗳𝘂𝘀 in the orange helicopter. And, if you can’t tell, that’s the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook Doofus is holding. Doofus is another character that got the shaft post-season one. Some people were happy about that, but he really never bothered me, even in his biggest moments of overbearing hero-worship of Launchpad.
𝗔𝗿𝗺𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴, from the episode of the same name. Gyro invents a robot that can outperform Launchpad at seemingly any task Scrooge can give him, but Armstrong eventually turns on the family and becomes bent on world domination, and it’s up to Launchpad to stop him. It’s a nice, solid episode, and I gotta mention the music again, as this was actually Ron Jones’s audition for DuckTales composer, and you can tell he really gave it his all.
𝗙𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗚𝗮𝗹𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗲𝗮𝗹. These two actually never interacted, being from two completely separate episodes (“Double-O-Duck” and “Spies in Their Eyes”, respectively), but as both episodes were spy-themed, I thought it appropriate to have them teamed up here in a sort of “Charlie’s Angels” pose. Except their weapons aren’t guns. Instead, Feathers is wielding her tube of poison lipstick, and Cinnamon is sort of gesturing toward her hypnotic eyes.
Anyway, there are loads of other episodes and characters I could have included, but only so much can fit inside Facebook banner size specifications. I hope I properly captured the better part of what makes DuckTales so iconic! #DuckTales30
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