yeah but they should at least have goofy voices, I hate that trend lately of using realistic teen voices for eveything

Bobby Moynihan, Danny Pudi and Ben Schwartz are not teenagers.

I'm a lot more excited about the character design for this than what they came up with for Tangled Ever After, which just seems distracting to the eye.

I mean, they basically did the 90's equivalent of that with Quack Pack, which is a strong contender for most unpopular Disney cartoon ever. Maybe the memories of that fiasco stayed their evil hand.

>most unpopular Disney cartoon ever

I thought that was Raw Toonage.

Bonkers was a pile of garbage.

Besides Ducktales everything on Disney Afternoon sucked. Fight me.

Bonkers was the least necessary thing in history. Why was the company that owned Roger Rabbit making a ripoff of Roger Rabbit? Gary Wolf's royalties couldn't possibly be that much.

With Bonkers, Disney doesn't have that whole Amblin co-creation problem that it does with Roger Rabbit.

That typed, you'd think Disney having to retool the show after the episodes from the first production order came in would have told the company something.

IZ, how you can you say such a thing!? What could possibly be wrong with TaleSpin, Rescue Rangers, and Darkwing Duck? Was the writing poor? Maybe nostalgia clouds the memory... I know Darkwing Duck was a Donald Duck version of Batman, but c'mon! Can you not remember such classic episodes of TaleSpin, such as when Baloo and Louie both open up flying gas stations and try to undercut each other?

Goof Troop gave us A Goofy Movie, one of the bleakest family films ever made.

WHY BONKERS HAPPENED:

Disney does not own Roger Rabbit. Disney owns Roger Rabbit as a joint ownership with Amblin. At the time, Amblin had other afternoon cartoons in direct competition with Disney Afternoon. Eisner did approach Spielberg about developing a Roger Rabbit series, but due to the Roger Rabbit Cartoon Spin at Disneyland, Disney was making money off Roger Rabbit but not moving that money over to Spielberg, which pissed him off. Spielberg refused to cooperate. To this day, Spielberg won't work with Disney over not being given a cut of the Disneyland ticket sales. To that end, Disney is ripping out the Roger Rabbit Cartoon Spin from Disneyland and replacing Toontown with Star Wars Land. Roger Rabbit no longer makes character appearances.

I never knew that about Spielberg. Huh.

Talespin would be great if they made a reboot. I loved it but I could do with them changing things around so that it was a little more dangerous feeling. The two hour movie they made that started the series and acted as the first episode was amazing. I would keep the air pirates but make them a bit more badass rather than just the comic foils they became. Definitely keep the guns. To this day, I think it's one of the only Disney series, if not the only one that featured regular gunfire. Make the kids into teenagers so they aren't annoying (Molly was a TERRIBLE character and her episodes suuuuuck) and introduce them all a bit differently so that it wasn't all of them gelling after one episode. Make sure Shere Khan is in it more and that he's a bit crueler. I really liked the fact that he was an oligarchical Lex Luthor type. Have it be a bit darker and noirish but amp up the comedy, too. And why not just be honest that Karnage is gay, look at who he lives with.

The best episodes were the really funny bits they did. I liked the one where Louie's mancrazy aunt shows up and she's just Louie with lipstick with the same voice actor doing falsetto. Baloo dresses up as a woman so he can win an air race since he's banned. Hilarious drag hijinks everywhere! The Wildcat giving a tour of the city episode while Baloo and Kit run for their lives from gangsters shooting at them? Fantastic! The more guns the better! On the dramatic side, they had a few ghost episodes that were surprisingly good, especially the one where Baloo loses his memory and goes to a netherworld where a ghost teaches him to fly again.

Pretty much every other Disney series can be explained away somehow. Darkwing Duck was a superhero spoof. Goof Troop was utilizing a classic character, and so did Chip and Dale, for all of their lack of interesting plots. Gargoyles rebranded them with a genre show that became a cult hit. The Mighty Ducks, as awful as it was, was meant to be a tie in to the movie and hockey team they bought. Timon and Pumbaa was surprisingly funny.

But there is literally no explanation, NO excuse for Bonkers. Even if it was a Roger Rabbit clone, there wasn't a single thing about it that wasn't cringeworthy and the fact that no one noticed this during production of all 65 fucking episodes (how could that many episodes of this show possibly exist) is beyond me. Whereas Roger Rabbit had his tooniness, he was somehow likeable. He went so frantically between being funny and pathetic that it didn't grate on your nerves because there were so many personalities bouncing off his.

Bonkers, on the other hand, is just pathetic. There isn't anything likeable about him. He's trying to be something he's not, a police officer and it comes across as the ultimate bad 90s movie idea. A cop buddy wacky sendup. They even tried to steal Eddie's name from Roger Rabbit with Lucky, and even that didn't work. He had no charisma. It was too cute to be taken as funny, but it didn't work for younger kids who couldn't relate to the setting and older kids didn't like it because of the sheer lack of any kind of edge. It just made no sense on any level whatsoever and I think about this too much...

Oh, believe me, Rodents, Disney noticed that Bonkers was crap during the production. That's why they fired the showrunners nineteen episodes in. The new staff tried to overhaul the show, creating a new partner for Bonkers and new supporting characters, but the show was still a complete mess.

As for why they ended up making 65 episodes: because the Disney Afternoon was a hungry beast and it had to have a new 65 episode series every September. All the episodes were produced before any of them aired, which gave them a good amount of wiggle room, but this meant they all had to be complete by an ironclad deadline. Disney had thousands of syndication contracts around the country which all fell apart if they didn't deliver 65 episodes of *something* by Labor Day. And by the time the shittiness of Bonkers had become clear to all involved, it was too late to start working on anything else.

ok, now explain marsupilami

REMEMBER, YOU ASKED FOR THIS.

Marsupalami is an annoying Belgian comic character who has been around since the 50's, lemur/leopard thing who lives in a jungle or something. In the comics he can only say the word "Hooba," which means nothing. Fun?

Anyway, Marsupalami's publisher, Marsu Productions, was inexplicably convinced that he was destined to take America by storm, so they made a deal with Disney wherein the Mouse would get US the rights to the character if they agreed to promote him and split the profits.

But then Disney was like "okay, or we could promote OUR OWN characters and keep ALL the profits. How about that, Frenchie?" And so Marsupalami's promotion amounted to some unexplained commercial bumps on the Disney Afternoon, and eventually he got his own show only because Disney was legally required to make it. In the twilight years of saturday morning cartoons, Marsupalami burned off its 13 episodes on CBS's coveted "this-will-get-pre-empted-by-college-football" timeslot, and was never seen again.

Marsu ended up suing Disney for ruining the franchise. But the joke's on them, because the franchise sucked. I hope someone used that argument in court.

I dunno Duckta oles was the only one that worked for me, maybe because it was the first to provide a somewhat "realistic" story arc, building from nothing much besides the old Donald Duck Cartoons where he was fumbling around in the Armed Forces. And look! Donald's hardly in it because he's doing Navy Stuff! Cool. Now just write around the fact that Scrooge is basically a Dickens Character who ostensibly died more than a century before the events in Ducktales.

And then everybody else tried it because it worked! Chip and Dale? Make them detectives even though they were unintelligible tree dwellers prior, and Talespin's whole "let's make them pilots" doesn't any sense, since a precedent was set in the Kipling adaptation that this is indeed a universe populated with Homo Sapien, therefore Balooo and the gang should still be clothes-less and definitely plane-less, since humans aren't in need of an anthropomorphic replacement. Darkwing Duck was pretty good, and funnier than Ducktales, but it also signaled the move into "extreme" which would of course give way to Goof Troop. Gargoyles had blood and people died, so that was cool for a cartoon back then, but wannabe anime like that is every bit as zeitgeisty as a TAZ car seat cover in a Bentley.

Fuck Bonkers. For no reason that theme song gets stuck in my head every now and then and I have no idea why, since I think I watched like half of an episode.

"who ostensibly died more than a century before the events in Ducktales"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_and_Times_of_Scrooge_Mc Duck#Scrooge_McDuck_timeline_according_to_Rosa

Scrooge McDuck was born in 1867, amassed his fortune by 1930, sank into isolation until the arrival of his nephews in 1947, and died in 1967. "Duck Tales" had to shift the scale by about 40 years, we'd need to slide it by another 30, or just accept that "Duck Tales" is historically inaccurate. Well, not many people have argued that "Duck Tales" is a documentary.

..just me and the guy from Nightwish, we know the truth b

Talespin was actually a bizarre amalgamation of pulp adventure tropes. Initially they based it on the Jungle Book, but then that became a cross of Jungle Book and Indiana Jones, which was THE pulp adventure series of the 80s. There are actually numerous references to Indiana Jones throughout Talespin. The second and main inspiration, bizarrely, was a very little known and often forgotten TV series with a big one season budget called "Tales of the Gold Monkey" starring Hollywood's now disgraced TV pedodad Steven Collins of 7th Heaven fame, back when he was younger, hotter and could pull off a WWII gruff pilot role. Talespin essentially knocked any WWII plotline out of the picture and inserted Jungle Book characters.

There were episodes where this worked and episodes where it felt too cutesy. It oscillated back and forth between the two. There were a couple of really great episodes starring only Baloo and Louie that could be seen as prequels since none of the other characters show up and it's not explained, where they are running around solving archaeological mysteries, and those are very much inspired by the Road movies of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. As a child I was obsessed with really early 30s and 40s movies since they were all I ever watched with my grandmother, which is why I got the references. Also it explains my wild unpopularity in elementary school when I tried to explain why Bob Hope was cool and other kids looked at me like I was from Mars.

If they did reboot it, I could see it going in a way more serialized direction. I thought the fact that it wasn't a progressive story arc like Gargoyles had actually really hurt it. Aladdin suffered from the same fate. How the hell long can Aladdin and Jasmine remain betrothed while he's just living in the same palace as her? What the hell was going on there? Were they just living in sin (him fucking her while unmarried might explain why that one guard hates him so much) or was he just trying to constantly get in her pants? He must have! I mean, fuck, even the goddamn parrot got some action in one episode but Aladdin and Jasmine never even kiss! You can't tell me that between those episodes he wasn't constantly trying to get some. They took trips outside of Agrabah every week! The only thing I can think of is that the genie was keeping them from having sex somehow, like the Sultan said everyone could live together if Genie acted as Aladdin's perpetual cockblocker, which let's face it was pretty much his whole purpose for the TV series.

Getting back to Ducktales, I loved the miniseries they came up with the best. The serialized versions of episodes were always better. The one where Scrooge hauls all his money to the middle of the desert to weigh on giant scales is hilarious (A SEA MONSTER...ATE MY ICE CREEEEEEAM!) and the one where the Beagle Boys steal his fortune and hide it in a lake is pretty hilarious as well (I didn't hate Gizmoduck at all and thought he and Fenton were great characters). They ran out of steam with Bubba and I pretend those episodes just don't exist.

The Navy stuff was a really nice touch. It actually did bother me that Donald wore a sailor suit but never went into the Navy. In a recent short on the Mickey Mouse channel on Youtube, Donald actually mentions he doesn't know how to sail and Mickey is surprised because of his sailor suit. Donald confesses he just wore it because Daisy thinks it's hot, which was a pretty fucking funny joke if you ask me.

I hope Admiral Grimace makes an appearance, I loved his cameos.

so many stars to Xenocide, that Belgian Marsu thing is textbook denialism of a shitty product!

Spirit stars right back at you for that Talespin write-up. I adored that show for its 30's setting and pulp adventure vibe, but its big flaw was that the hero had a clear goal (to buy back his plane) that he never made any progress toward (except in the dozen or so episodes where he gets it back and loses it again by the end) and romantic tension with his boss which never went anywhere.

Story arc-driven cartoons are more accepted now (and Disney actually encourages it these days, mostly due to what a smash hit Gravity Falls was) so a modern Talespin reboot would probably avoid these problems.

Hell, you could probably do a whole season of Baloo and Louie going on treasure hunts, steadily losing money on wild goose chases until Baloo's air cargo service goes bankrupt and Becky buys the place out from under him.

They need to sound duck-ish, even if they don't go full Donald.

Giving them very distinct voices is kind of a mistake too, or at least I think it is. H/D/L are supposed to be pretty interchangeable, unless there are DuckTalesologoists out there who can point to distinct character traits (I don't think you can). If they want to differentiate between the three I guess that's okay, but they're going to need to sell me on it, and not just make them Alvin / Simon / Theodore, Yakko / Wakko / Dot, or Hank / Dean / Dermott.

I hope they don't dwell too much on the nephews' lineage; they seem to have no parents, just uncles, or perhaps "uncles".

I think it would work to just make a bunch of jokes about it. Like every time someone asks them about their parents they open their mouths to talk about it and get interrupted. Or if someone asks and they say "There's actually an unspoken rule we have, otherwise I would tell you."

I am totally excited about the changes they've made, except Launchpad's voice sounds a bit too masculine. I liked Launchpad because he was this big galoot on the outside and he had the mind of a nerdy self-conscious teenager on the inside.

And in the original series, the boys were pretty interchangeable except for one episode where one of them wore sunglasses and a Hawaiian shirt in a brief desire to be different before adopting his regular clothing again and fitting into his clone pod once more. Now you know.

Also I am really excited that Danny Pudi is gonna be in this.

Oh and also! Disney has confirmed that Ducktales and Darkwing Duck were not taking place in the same universe. Even though Launchpad shows up in both, they are considered part of a MULTI DUCKVERSE. I am not making that shit up. So that means that, theoretically, Ducktales, Quack Pack, this show and Darkwing (and every other Disney Afternoon show) each have their own universe and clash with every other in terms of consistency. This is opposite to their movie franchises, which always take place within the same universe.

http://io9.gizmodo.com/darkwing-duck-and-ducktales-are-in-sepa rate-universes-a-1786479437

Launchpad was modeled after Cliff Clavin, I will not accept any arguments to the contrary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=botdmsQilnU

I never detected a Boston accent from Launchpad. His father shows up in one episode and his voice was based on John Wayne, though.

But he does sound like Cliff Clavin in the original! I never picked that up before!

I don't think anyone could replace June Foray's characters, though. That would be tough because she has one of the most distinctive voices ever.

The multi-Duckverse doesn't check out, because Gizmoduck appears in Darkwing Duck and explicitly asks Launchpad why he left the employment of Uncle Scrooge, to which Launchpad said something along the lines of "Oh yeah, I forgot about that guy."

I'd love to see Morgana Maccawber mainstreamed into the Duckverse as maybe Magica DeSpell's wayward apprentice or something. Lots about Darkwing Duck works. Perhaps you've seen my fan art?

*IF Darkwing Duck is an alternate Duckverse, then the argument can be made that Count Duckula is Duckverse, as he appears in the NES game.

I thought of the same episode! Fenton comes to visit Launchpad and Drake can't stand him, just as Darkwing can't stand Gizmoduck. And neither of them put it together, which was a great gag.

The only thing I can think of is that those were alternate versions of Launchpad and Fenton, and they exist side by side with another very similar Duckverse, only less obviously different than the Negaverse.

I don't think about duck cartoons too much, why do you ask?