02.06
Ho boy.
As great as the Disney Afternoon was when the block was started, things went south in the span of a few years for Disney‘s television animation department. Gone were the days of Gummi Bears, and on went mediocre shows like the Mighty Ducks, a tude-filled action show featuring a team full of hockey-playing ducks who fight crime, that aired on ABC’s One Saturday Morning block as well on the block(which I personally won’t be going through), and Quack Pack, which I’ll be talking about here.
You see, even nearly a decade past the airing of DuckTales, the show was still popular, so Disney still continued to keep a home for it even years after it was taken off the block. It seemed like making a spin-off of sorts in continuation of some of the characters would be a good idea. Maybe make it a little closer to the source material than Darkwing Duck.
So the idea was to bring Donald back from the navy. Scrooge realizes that one day Donald will take over the McDuck fortune, so Don should have an idea of what it’s like to handle such responsibility, so he leaves Huey, Dewey, and Louie back with him. They are older now but are still the kids who used to look up to him and think the world of their Unca Donald, who just finished basic training. Donald should try to do his best to take care of the nephews while he gets reacquainted with Daisy and works in his new job.
The show was initially called Duck Daze, but for some reason Disney didn’t seem to be as keen on this idea as Jymn Magon, the person behind DuckTales, was, so the series went through some revisions and was retitled to Quack Pack.
For one thing, even though we’re still in Duckburg, the only DuckTales characters who appeared were the nephews and Donald(Daisy never appeared nor was ever mentioned in the series). In fact, now humans walk alongside the ducks for whatever reason. This contradicts with the DuckTales/Darking Duck/TaleSpin/Goof Troop mentality that humans do not exist in their world, but rather the animals act like humans. Now both live together with no qualms. This isn’t like Chip ‘N Dale Rescue Rangers where the animals live in a world mostly full of humans but interact with the beings as little as possible, which made sense. I don’t get why humans and ducks walked together with no problem myself, but that’s not really the only problem with the show.
I believe there’s even an episode in which it is stated that Donald is the only one of the nephew’s uncles still alive, saying that Scrooge and Gladstone are either dead or just plain forgotten. Even though we don’t necessarily need all of DuckTales’ characters on the show, having something like this said is disrespectful to the characters and fans of the show in general.
Not to mention that the new series was also given a “modernized” feeling. Rather than sticking to a time-tested family-friendly environment like DuckTales stayed in, Quack Pack’s environment looked and felt like it was stuck in sensibilities of the mid-90’s. The nephews as well as most of their peers dressed hip for the time, baseball caps, undershirts without regular shirts, and all, and also used “cool“ phrases to make them sound relevant. This doesn’t really work for the sake of the show and makes it look even more dated today than DT does, despite the 9-year gap between the two shows.
Another thing I don’t get is that Huey, Dewey, and Louie now have their own voice actors. They used to share one, Russi Taylor, who would play all three of them very similarly to each other. This is fine because the boys don’t really have much of a separate personality. They are good characters, mind you, but having a uniform performance for each of them helped to distinctify their characters from the other kids in town.
Now a voice actress plays one exclusively; Jeannie Elias, Ginger’s little brother Carl from As Told By Ginger, took on the role of Huey; Pamela Adlon, best known as the voice of Bobby Hill, was Dewey; while EG Daily, who did Tommy Pickles in Rugrats and it’s spin-off All Grown Up as well as Buttercup in The Powerpuff Girls, played Louie. All of which are good voice actresses, I am a fan of each of the series mentioned(well, not All Grown Up, but I still like the original Rugrats) and I also think that they do a decent job as each of the ducks, but I don’t see the point that the nephews would need their own, distinctive voice actor when they still act very similarly to each other. There is more of an attempt to focus on one of the nephews in particular in some of the episodes, but they still act like copies of each other.
Since they are a little older, the nephews should obviously act a little different than they previously did in DuckTales. If you can recall some of the original Donald Duck cartoons with the nephews in them, Huey, Dewey, and Louie tended to be a pain on Donald’s backside, while in DuckTales and Barks’ comics, the boys gave Scrooge a bit of respect that Donald didn’t see as much. Granted, Bark also softened Donald and the nephew’s relationship, but there were layers of admiration and obedience that the boys had for Scrooge that Donald didn’t see as much of. I think this is because Scrooge is older, has gone from more than Donald, and knows just what the boys need. The boys tended to get Donald into adventures in the cartoons and comics, Scrooge lent the boys to (generally, or at least tried to make them) fun, safe experiences that they will never forget.
The nephews acted kind of like how they did in the original cartoons; they were rowdy, rebellious, disrespectful, but they still cared about their Unca Donald. They also were a bit more lethargic than their previous selves, at least until they go on an out of town experience and something catches their interest, usually a girl, since the boys are just going through puberty. This isn’t too bad of a character trait, but I miss the loving, daring character traits they had in DuckTales. Here they’re just like every other boy their age, back in Duck, they were your desired golden boys, something we don’t get in many TV shows today. There is nothing wrong with sass, but DuckTales had more heart than your usual kids show will today, and the nephews were a big reason for that.
I think the episode that everything is as closely put together as best as the staff could make it be was the first episode, “The Really Mighty Ducks”, when the nephews have fantasies of being super heroes and fight off super villain Donald who keeps on nagging at them to clean up their room. It is unlike most of the series but there is enough charm in the silly Darkwing Duck-like comic book spoofs to make it stand out on it’s own. I think my favorite part is when Donald merely yells at the boys to “Clean up your room!” when fighting them, just to have the nephews fight back. Donald is still Donald and even at the show’s most mediocre can be the best part of the series.
On the other hand, though, a lot of the episodes are not like what the rest of the show is. There is some variety in the show occurrences, but not in a way that I think is for the better. Some episodes will take place in Duckburg and occur almost sitcom-like. There’s definitely some Goof Troop influence in the series, which does make sense since Jymn also was responsible for that as well as this and DuckTales, but I don‘t think that Quack Pack ever reaches the same heights as Goof Troop on it‘s worse. I say this because the show can turn into a paranormal investigative series nearly as fast, sometimes taking the ducks as far as the other side of the earth. Donald and Daisy’s news crew jobs often contributes to the adventures this time. Sometimes they go to the Far East to record an archaeologist’s clay army, or they will just stay at home and try to rehabilitate a previous enemy. I think adding in odd stories like these don’t do the show any favors, since it’s obvious that Disney was trying to cash in on the surreal factor that was going on in the mid 90’s and would peak later on when Ripley’s got back in top form with the public, but it fails in that regard as well.
Overall, it seems like Quack Pack tries to be quite a few different things and fails at all of them. It tries to be a successful part of Disney’s television animated canon, but fans of DuckTales and kids in general didn’t like it(only 39 instead of the typical 65 episodes were made, and syndication wasn‘t as kind to Quack as some of the block‘s other programs). It tried to be a wacky, goofy kid show but wasn’t really wacky or goofy, and certainly wasn’t very funny. It tried to have a lot of peculiar situations handled in classic Barks fashion but lord knows that couldn’t happen. Quack Pack overall just wasn’t a very good show and was quickly forgotten. You could possibly blame it on too much executive meddling, or too much tinkering with the basic formula, but overall I just find little about the series to praise.
While writing this review, I decided to rewatch some episodes of DuckTales, Chip ‘N Dale Rescue Rangers, and Aladdin. These still hold up and even at their dullest were still more fun to watch than the average Quack Pack. There was more heart put into them, as well as stronger writing and more careful character definitions. It’s a shame that the block started to end around the time Quack Pack hit the scene because the Disney Afternoon did end on a rather weak note with it.
Like Goof Troop, three random episodes were put together in one volume, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a chance for the rest of the show to be released. If you are interested in collecting any of the show, this disc is the best chance you have.
Originally posted on Thursday, July 1, 2010.