DUCKTALES RETROSPECTIVE: Episode 97, "Attack of the Metal Mites"

In my comments on "Liquid Assets," I identified three key moments that I consider to be the three biggest events in the history of DuckTales.  There should be little debate, however, as to the single most shocking moment in the annals of the series.  Sorry, Joe, but it's not the appearance of The Phantom Blot in "All Ducks on Deck," as thoroughly unexpected as that was.  For sheer, jaw-dropping improbability, the blue ribbon simply has to go to the Disney Afternoon closing credits for Monday, September 17, 1990.  In that era, you may recall, all four shows in the block ran their credits at the end of the two hours, together with "teasers" for the episodes to be run on the next edition of DAft.  Wonder of wonders, the "teaser" for DuckTales' 9/18/90 offering showed material that was clearly from an episode that had not previously been known to exist.  Even what little we knew about "The Duck Who Knew Too Much" and "Scrooge's Last Adventure," the two 1989-copyright episodes that had yet to be broadcast, did not match up with the stuff we were seeing on that tiny inset screen.  This was mind-blowing enough, but then, guess who favored us with his out-of-left-field presence -- ironically, falling OUT of the audience's view when he first appeared on screen:

Dijon: "Oh noooooooo!!"

Audience:  "No wayyyyy!!"

The appearance of "Attack of the Metal Mites" led to immediate, and highly understandable, speculation as to how many additional "completely new" eps the 1990-91 season was going to deliver.  Little did we know at the time that WDTVA had contracted to produce just enough material (namely, four half-hours) to bring the total number of DT eps to 100.  Perhaps, we should have gotten the hint when "The Golden Goose" gave us its "climactic" end-of-the-world scenario, but I recall waiting and hoping for a little while longer that more new eps might, just might, come our way.  Of course, this kind of thing was S.O.P. for the era before the existence of social media and the Internet.

WDTVA might have exhibited tidy-mindedness in its decision to wrap up its DT manifest on a nice, round number, but it also evidently did not want to put any more resources into the 1990 DT eps than it absolutely had to.  Nothing in the DT "Final Four" looked as horribly sloppy as, let's say, some of the 1990-copyright episodes of Gummi Bears, but some penny-pinching is nonetheless noticeable.  Some of it is disquietingly blatant, e.g., the sequence outside the First Interfeather Bank in "Mites" in which Dijon lets Glomgold's metal-eating bugs loose to devour an armored car.  In the first scene below, the screen freezes as we hear the bugs chomping away.  In the second, the car literally vanishes in a cloud of dust before our eyes, with no transition scene whatsoever.  And, yes, the whole thing REALLY looks that bad in "real time."

Dijon subsequently appears in a sewer as the bugs go marching by, with his muzzle conveniently placed so that the animators don't have to show his mouth moving as he speaks some dialogue.  Shades of UPA's Dick Tracy Show showing Dick holding the Two-Way Wrist Radio over his mouth as he talked to his "field agents."

These mingy moments tend to stand out in the mind's eye, precisely because they are so at variance with even some of the weaker examples of animation from the series' first two seasons.  A closer look, however, reveals an even more troubling trait: a tendency to mount "normal" scenes with as small a number of background characters and other extraneous details as possible.  Consider:

(1) Dijon is generally seen sneaking around in deserted or near-deserted streets.

"Is that my cue I am hearing?"

(2) Scrooge calls for the National Guard, and ONE tank shows up.  (I'd like to think that the Goose Guard from "Attack of the Fifty-Foot Webby" would have provided a more effective response.)

(3)  For a bunch of pests who are supposedly "multiplying" -- exactly how this parthenogenetic phenomenon is being accomplished, we are never told -- the mites remain relatively few in number throughout.  A single bubble from Gyro's bubble-gum-blowing robot is apparently sufficient to trap ALL of them at once, despite what the earlier consumption of the tank and the missile might have led us to believe.

(4)  The massive media coverage of the mites' attack on Scrooge's Money Bin is handled by Walter Kronduck and a pair of cameramen and draws a vast throng of... um... ten denizens, in addition to Scrooge, HD&L, Webby, and Fenton.  And Scrooge shouldn't even BE there, because, in the immediately previous scene, we saw him fondling some of his "precious friends" inside the vault.

The simplicity of Jeffrey Scott's central plot, and the slightly shopworn nature of the subplot (Fenton reacting to the mites' destruction of the Gizmosuit by losing confidence in himself, only to come through in the end, as in "Money to Burn" and "A Case of Mistaken Secret Identity"), further add to the impression of straitedness.  It must be admitted, however, that the effects of the "stripdown" aren't quite as deleterious here as they are in "The Golden Goose," which marries an adventure tale that SHOULD have been a true epic to a razor-thin cast and sparsely populated settings.  It speaks to the overall excellence of "Goose" that the two-part finale managed to get away with it and be a big success despite the self-imposed limitations, largely due to a stimulating injection of some real "Heart."  The effects of cheapness on a modest effort like "Mites," by contrast, only serve to make the episode seem... well, a bit more modest.  GeoX observed that "Mites" "very much feels like your average early first-season episode" -- decent plot and characterizations, reasonably good action -- and that's pretty much correct, I think, even given that the visual accompaniment is a bit more poverty-stricken than we have grown accustomed to. 

Glomgold's determination to destroy Scrooge's money, rather than to simply try to outearn him or thwart one of his financial deals, goes well beyond anything Carl Barks tried to do with the character in terms of its potential direct impact on the McDuck quadzillions.  Yes, even including Flinty's attempt to shrink Scrooge's money pile with the "Jivaro Juice" in "The Money Champ."  Reduction in size is not obliteration, and the Glomgold of "Money Champ" worried about what his "dear mother" would think of him for stooping so low, even as he dealt with the witch doctor out of sheer desperation.  By contrast, Greg's invocation of Duke Igthorn's use of the wood-devouring bug Big Tooth in "King Igthorn," the Gummi Bears two-part finale, may give Glomgold too much credit, since the physical destruction triggered by Big Tooth's arrival ultimately had an impact on the entire kingdom of Dunwyn.  (Of course, you could always argue that the ingestion of Scrooge's fortune would have had just as great of a long-term economic impact on Duckburg, but that depends upon how seriously you take some of the claims that have gone before in DT.)

The use of bugs as a menace has some precedent in such Barks stories as "Donald Duck and the Titanic Ants" (DONALD DUCK #60, July 1958) and "Billions in the Hole" (UNCLE $CROOGE #33, March 1961).  For a more exact analogy, however, you have to turn to "The March of the Giant Termants" (DONALD DUCK #133, September 1970, drawn by Tony Strobl and Steve Steere).  In this story, the Beagle Boys, with the unwilling help of a kidnapped bugologist, breed bugs that can chew through metal.  Using commands from a fife, they march the bugs to the Bin and swipe some loot, only for Dewey to steal a march on them and use his Junior Woodchuck Fife and Drum Corps training to foil the plot.  The JW-inspired efforts to thwart the metal mites, we should remember, are actually every bit as successful as they were in "Termants"; it certainly wasn't the JWs fault that Dijon just happened to stumble onto the scene at the wrong time.

At the time "Mites" first aired, I was quite pleased and surprised to see Dijon reappear as a "special guest lackey" a mere month after he had been introduced to the public in DuckTales: The Movie.  Glomgold reaps the full harvest of his complaint in "Master of the Djinni" that "you just can't get good lackeys these days," with Dijon's overcooked obsequiousness and perpetual surname-strangling driving Flinty increasingly mad.  Upon further review, however, I am no longer quite so certain that Dijon should have been reintroduced in THIS particular episode.  In a sense, he actually isn't reintroduced at all, as no character except Glomgold seems to take the slightest notice of his presence, let alone recognize who he is (as, surely, Scrooge, HD&L, and Webby should).  Scrooge obliviously running over the "Dijon bridge" after the mites is only the most obvious example of this peculiar case of localized astigmatism. 

A far more troublesome example of this almost willful ignorance, at least to my mind, comes when Dijon is trying to lure the mites away from the ruins of the Duckburg Bean Factory and back towards the Bin with some metal scrap. In a sequence that lasts about 35 seconds but seems to take two or three times that long, Dijon runs out of scrap, plops the empty bag on his head, cowers for a moment in the finest "Cringing Ay-rab" style, pauses, exits stage left, returns with a new bag of metal, and leads the mites back across the screen, all in plain sight of Scrooge and Gizmoduck. It makes sense that Gizmoduck wouldn't recognize Dijon, but Scrooge???  What is the purpose of using Dijon in this role if the past relationship between Dijon and other cast members isn't going to be addressed?

"Amigos, what are you waiting for?!"

In retrospect, it probably would have been a better idea for DT to have held off on reintroducing Dijon until "The Golden Goose."  In that story, his past reputation IS a key plot point, and Scrooge's initial reaction to his presence in Barkladesh DOES take Dijon's reputation for thievery (which was, let us remember, amplified by his getaway with a pantload of Scrooge's money in DT:TM's very last scene) into account.  Dijon's soul-searching and partial rehabilitation in "Goose" would then have seemed even more meaningful than they ultimately were.  Using Dijon just to USE him... well, it was certainly nice and all, but it's hard to see what it accomplished.

Fenton's emotional travails here, as I mentioned above, should be more than familiar to the attentive longtime viewer.  What's particularly noteworthy is how quickly Fenton despairs after his Gizmosuit is gulped.  It's the Crackshell equivalent of Scrooge's passive acceptance of his fate in "The Money Vanishes" and much of the first act of "Scrooge's Last Adventure."  Fenton's meltdown is so complete that he describes his role as Scrooge's accountant as "worthless" and intends to quit McDuck Enterprises entirely.  More dubiously, he's STILL ready to resign even after he has cleverly used his Gizmo-call to attract the mites to himself and trap them with the convenient giant magnet.  Not until he captures the one missing mite "with no super-stuff" does he (rather abruptly) return to his normal self.  The character changes here are not exactly subtle, or anything close to it.

A good deal of the Fenton-Gizmo action here, of course, takes place in full view and/or earshot of the public (or what little of it could be troubled enough to be on set).  After the following concatenation of events, how could ANYONE in Duckburg, including the supposedly still-ignorant members of the main cast, possibly NOT be aware that Fenton and Gizmoduck are one and the same:

(1)  Fenton and Scrooge have their amusing little conversation about Fenton turning to Gizmoduck to save the Bean Factory right in front of Walter Cronduck and a cameraman.  Their attempts at "whispering" here can only be described as pathetic.

(2) Fenton screams his code phrase in the Bean Factory, and the Gizmosuit comes flying in from several miles away to encase him (nice trick if you can do it!).

(3) Fenton becomes "unsuited" right in front of a TV news crew, which is then seen running towards him.

(4) Fenton yells for the mites from outside the Bin in such a manner that Scrooge, HD&L, Webby, and Gyro can clearly hear him and can subsequently clearly see the visual consequences (the mites encasing Fenton in a Gizmosuit-like manner).

(5) HD&L compliment Fenton for his quick thinking without making any mention of the fact that Fenton has just revealed that he is Gizmoduck.

My best guess, if you want to know the truth, is that Jeffrey Scott, who wrote the scripts for all four of the DT eps of the Disney Afternoon era -- another sign of corporate cheapskatery, if you ask me -- was simply NEVER TOLD about the whole secret-identity issue.  The fact that we will see similar evidence in "New Gizmo-Kids on the Block" of Fenton's secret ID being accepted as a given lends some additional support to my theory, I think.  I'm not sure whether we should blame Scott so much as we should the uncredited story editor(s), who should have done a better job of making sure that Scott was up to date on the particulars of the series.  Of course, that's assuming that Scott even had a story editor.  No such credit is given, nor will it be for any of the remaining new episodes.  The phrase "we don't want it good so much as we want it Thursday" comes to mind.

I don't want to be too harsh on Scott.  Giving him the benefit of the doubt on the matter of adequate advance preparation and the unnecessary inclusion of Dijon -- which, for all we know, may have been mandated to WDTVA by Disney higher-ups in order to take advantage of the publicity surrounding the movie -- he turns in an honest, workmanlike effort here, though one that does raise a number of questions about basic biology, physics, and such (as if those issues have never come to the fore before during DT!).  All the cast members who appear get meaningful things to do, and Scott gives us one of the finest Warner Bros.-style sight gags of the entire series when the mites cross the street and discomfit the decidedly atypical Walk/Don't Walk sign:

Then, too, Act Three makes up for the rather sedately paced Acts One and Two by building up some legitimate suspense as the mites get nearer and nearer to Scrooge's vault.  I haven't a clue how the mites managed to get into the vault through the security camera, but there can be no complaints about the effectiveness of the "last-minute cavalry call," with Fenton pulling the mites away just as they are about to nosh on the top layer of coins.

For a supposed "hands-off," minimalist production, "Metal Mites" isn't half-bad.  Unfortunately, Scott would not be fortunate enough to get away with it the next time.

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"DuckBlurbs"

(GeoX)   I knew from the Wikipedia episode list that [Dijon] was going to reappear in the final two-parter, but seeing him here was an unwelcome surprise. My mind just reels that someone somewhere at some point announced "a cringing, sycophantic, avaricious A-rab stereotype? Boys, we've got ourselves a winner!" Jeez. Though I suppose if it's between him and the Ducktales Beagles, there isn't much to choose.

Assuming that WDTVA was bound and determined (or were bound and directed by someone) to use a character from the movie, Dijon was the only logical choice.  Merlock was presumably destroyed due to his talisman-less fall from the heavens, while Gene, the "boy-version" of the transformed Genie, doesn't seem to add much to the table that HD&L don't already possess.  Even Bubba is a more distinctive character than Gene.  Whether Dijon should have been introduced here, as opposed to "The Golden Goose," is another question.

(GeoX) I like the idea that Fenton can count all of Scrooge's money at a rapid rate while frantically tunneling through the piles of cash.

Fenton gets more chances to display his amazing counting abilities here than at any time outside of the "Super DuckTales" serial.  Strange; that shtick could probably have made for a number of funny side gags along the way.

(GeoX) Gizmoduck, on deploying his head-copter to save a worker from a mite-eaten catwalk: "And you thought my head was only full of brains!" "No! I'd never think that!"

I like this exchange, because it's fun to hear a Duckburgian evince a highly negative, even cynical, attitude towards Gizmoduck's doings.  In the past, Gizmoduck has been feted, celebrated, been subjected to intense media examination, and so forth.  Evidently, the novelty of having a (somewhat fallible) superhero in town is beginning to wear off, and more quickly with some of the denizens than with others.

(GeoX) Webby as a Junior Woodchuck, recalling "Merit-Time Adventure." I'm down with that.

Ditto, and I think it says something about the Junior Woodchucks' willingness to make its distaff members feel welcomed that Webby is allowed to wear blue here after sporting pink in "Merit-Time." Too bad that Scott fumbled the ball a bit by mistakenly calling the JW Guidebook the JW Manual (which was, I believe, Barks' original name for the tome).  Additional evidence that Scott was flying at least partially blind here?

(Greg) So we head to Flint's mansion and into Flint's office as Flint is talking to Dijon. That's right; they introduced this guy without any build up at all. Although to be fair; this is not his first appearance as that was the Ducktales Movie a few months earlier. However; the problem is that most fans of the series probably never got to watch the movie and thus didn't see Dijon's first appearance or origin story.

I think that it was reasonable for WDTVA to assume that most (at the very least) of the regular DT watchers had gone to see the movie.  I agree, though, that it would have made more sense to have provided a bit more background justifying Dijon's presence.  (Not that anyone ultimately noticed his presence, anyway...)

(Greg) Sadly; since Wang Films cannot animate a collapsing factory properly we quickly scene change to the sidewalk in front of Scrooge's mansion at the gate. We see Webby and the nephews (Louie) with a lemonade like stand as we discover that they are giving away free soda crackers and some of the denizens start taking them. Then we pan over to a real lemonade stand as Huey and Dewey are selling lemonade for a dollar (still better than the $2.25 lemonade in a bottle that the businesses sell; so I cannot complain) as everyone mobs the two nephews and Dewey has to tell them to relax. Huey then sees Scrooge in the window and asks how they are doing and Scrooge calls it better than expected. Then Fenton arrives with Scrooge at the window as Scrooge has the Gruffi pose and wants to do a cracker/lemonade franchise. You would think that after what happened in Duck To The Future and Yuppy Ducks that Scrooge would take the hint and NOT be trying to leech ideas off of his nephews. They are hardly shrew[d] Scroogie.

The obvious question here is: How can we square the actions and attitudes of the kids and Scrooge with the events of "Duck to the Future," in particular?  Actually, it's not that hard, though the manner in which the actions and attitudes are portrayed isn't particularly helpful.  In "Future," as the Nephews ran the second (post-Scrooge's-advice) version of their lemonade stand, they actively trying to cheat people by selling lemonade as water and were cheating their employee, Doofus, besides.  Even Gosalyn Mallard's selling of hose water as "bottled water" in a parched St. Canard in the Darkwing Duck episode "Dry Hard" didn't sink as low as this.  HD&L and Webby's saltine-cracker-and-lemonade emporium, by contrast, is... well, let's call it an example of "sharp practice," as opposed to outright dishonesty.  Scrooge's reaction to the initiative suggests that he thinks of the gambit as an example of being "smarter than the smarties."  The problem is that the characters' reactions seem to be hinting that we should put a more negative spin on things.  Scrooge rubs his hands in a conniving way when he praises the "shrewdness" of his "wee Nephews," while the kids take rather too much... well, pleasure a bit later in talking about their chili-peppers-and-water idea.  More matter-of-fact reactions by Scrooge and the kids would have cleared up the contradiction a bit.

(Greg) Then in one of those moments that annoys me; we see Louie and Webby with the water hose. Wait; we clearly didn't see Webby run in so how did she teleport over to here now?!

I simply assumed that she got a late start for some reason (perhaps she was gathering up some supplies) and ran over to join HD&L a bit later.

(Greg) Webby proclaims that the bugs will be here any minute and Huey points out that the door is made of metal and it will turn to Swiss cheese. Scrooge runs into the storage office and returns with...cement? Yeah; we are suppose[d] to buy that Scrooge had wet cement prepared beforehand just for such a moment.

It came from the same mysterious location where Dijon got the extra bag of metal scrap, Walter Cronduck's cameramen got their spare cameras, and... you get the picture.

(Greg)  So we head to Flint's mansion as Flint is checking his gold coins and then out of nowhere; Dijon appears from the open window. Even Flint demands to know about this outrage as Dijon has some news to share with him. The bad news is that Scrooge is making billions with the wrecking business which makes Flint groan in pain.

Vic Lockman would be proud of this ending... just as the late Hal Smith should be proud of that fadeout shriek.  That would have been a fitting note on which to end Glomgold's animated career, though I'm certainly not going to carp about his appearance in "The Golden Goose."

Next: Episode 98, "New Gizmo-Kids on the Block."

DUCKTALES RETROSPECTIVE: Episode 86, "Beaglemania"

True confessions time:  Boy, did I HATE this episode when it first aired.  As I've mentioned before, given the atypical manner in which I'd entered Duck fandom, I was generally in a more forgiving mood towards the non-canonical nature of many aspects of DuckTales from the get-go.  But this... THIS definitely seemed a (non-musical) bridge too far.  Too many references to contemporary mass-market musical culture, all of the Ducks being reduced to playing minor supporting roles for the first time, and, of course, the whole absurd, laughable notion of the Beagle Boys becoming rock stars.  It took a while, and a few additional viewings, before I could accept "Beaglemania" for exactly what it was -- no more and no less than the Fenton-Bubba era's version of "Scroogerello," with all the positives and negatives attendant upon that description.  Once I was able to get over that hurdle and revel in all the gleefully silly fun, I found myself greatly enjoying this ultimate example of departure from the objections of "old sourdoughs."

If I were re-rating the DT episodes today, I'd probably rank "Beaglemania" a little below "Scroogerello," primarily because writer Mark Seidenberg doesn't take quite as much care in setting up and tearing down his audacious premise as he does in exploiting it.  The idea of Duckburg hipster impresario Screamin' Sky McFly (who is finally seen in the diminutive flesh here after we heard his lip-burbling audio act in "Marking Time") running a contest to find the hottest new singing group is a perfectly fine one, as we ourselves certainly know, having been force-fed modern-day televised versions of pretty much the same concept for a decade or more.  Nor is there anything wrong with casting Duckburgified versions of popular real-world pop acts as the competition.  Even in the context of an exaggerated satire, however, it was bad form to have McFly declare the Beagles the winners of the contest without any other acts having been performed.  "The gig is up," you say, Big Time?  More like "the fix is in."  It wouldn't have taken that much for this problem to have been rectified -- perhaps a 10- or 15-second sequence in which the Beagles alternately wait for the show to finish, comment about their performance, and grouse about not having swiped the guitar full of money when they had the chance to do so.  Leaving the bridge out seems "but awfully" contrived at this remove.

Don't tell ME this guy can't be bought.

On the back end of the episode, we get what must be one of the ultimate tests of the Barksian dictum that, no matter what trials and tribulations the characters may endure during a story, things must always conclude "as they were."  The vengeful Ma Beagle's audience-aggravating anthem causes the Beagles to "bomb" for good and all... but there's still that small matter of the fortune that the Beagles had accumulated in the interim, sitting there in yet another version of a Beagle Money Bin.  And this fortune is not likely to explode, implode, or otherwise dissipate.  So how to get the Beagles back to "Square Want" (as in, "We want Scrooge's money")?  The episode doesn't know and, apparently, doesn't care.  My best guess is that Scrooge, as the Beagles' employer (!!), used some legal muscle to get the Beagles' betrayal of their fans interpreted as some sort of "breach of contract" and was able to take the Beagles' boodle away from them.  That seems rather cold-blooded, but, let's remember, the Scrooge of "Beaglemania" is willing to go beyond mere "cooperation for convenience's sake," a la the arrangements with Glomgold in "Robot Robbers" and Magica in "Magica's Shadow War," and exploit the Beagles in a mutually beneficial money-spinning enterprise.  This doesn't take Scrooge as far down the path of ethically dubious doings as have some Italian adventures of Paperone di Paperone, wherein Scrooge is known to have committed actual crimes, but there's something unnerving about it, nonetheless.  A Scrooge who is willing to cut deals with his most persistent foes would probably be capable of commandeering the Beagles' profits through clever legal means.

"Beaglemania" also suffers from some irritating production problems.  Some are of the cheese-paring variety, such as the three identical crowd-pan shots we see during the Beagles' performance of "Boogie Beagle Blues."  To be fair, many of the same characters that we see in the pans can also be seen ripping up seats and rioting during the Beagles' final, fatal gig (a sequence that seems to have been cut from the episode at some point, given the visual evidence I've been able to dig up on YouTube).  So I'll give the Wang animators the benefit of the doubt, for consistency, if nothing else. 

Rally, rinse, repeat.

On second thought, scratch that...

It's a bit harder to overlook the opening of the scene at the Dukka Records recording studio.  Before the Frank Welker-voiced engineer gives the corpulent Melvis Pigsley the go-ahead, we hear the muffled word "Take" in a voice that DOESN'T sound like Welker's.  Evidently, one of voice director David Weimers' cast instructions got onto the master tape, and no one caught the error or bothered to edit it out.  This goof is particularly troublesome in light of the fact that, while the quality of the animation in DuckTales isn't always consistent, the audio production has hitherto been impeccable.  (I'm also aware that some of the YouTube posts of this ep have sound out of sync with picture in Act Three.  I don't recall this problem during the initial episode airings, so I'm figuring that this was some sort of transfer problem.)

Sloppy framing and teetering production values aside, the remainder of the episode can best be described as one continuous laugh riot.  Not all of the jokes hit home, but most of them do, including the easily overlooked, yet nonetheless amusing, scene at the Mothers of Criminals meeting.  Here, we see a side of Ma Beagle that we've never before been privy to, namely, her twisted "pride" in her family's criminal accomplishments (which was earlier lampshaded in the "Duckburg's Most Wanted" TV-watching scene).  Ma's proclamation in "Take Me Out of the Ballgame" that "Cheating is a family tradition!" is something of a precursor of this, but her admission of shame that "four of my boys have... gone legit" adds an extra dose of irony or three to the mix.  Ma's later desire to be "Bramble Soups' Mother of the Year" in "New Gizmo-Kids on the Block" is but a pale echo of this "bad is good" theme, which wouldn't have been out of place in one of Barks' sourer stories.

We also learn here -- though the lesson won't really be rammed home until "The Bride Wore Stripes" -- that Ma might suffer a tad from OCS.  It isn't enough for her that the Beagles have become rock stars; instead, she pushes them and pushes them to "suffer for [their] art" until they finally snap and throw her out.  And it isn't just verbal nagging, either, as her threatening of Big Time with those "little piggies" makes clear.  Perhaps we can formulate a new theory as to why Ma has "as many boys as a toad has warts."  She just can't HELP herself.

Of course, the juxtaposition of the Ducks' world with that of popular music isn't exactly new.  As one might expect, the Nephews were the first of the clan to express any sort of appreciation of rock and roll, starting with a dogface simulacrum of the original rock star ("Mutilated Music," DONALD DUCK #53, May 1957, drawn by Tony Strobl and John Liggera):

I like that "weeks ago."  Yes, there once was a time when people thought that rock and roll, like mambo and other briefly trendy musical forms, would eventually fade away...

HD&L were back in fanboy mode several years after this in "The Paper Route Panic" (DONALD DUCK #66, July 1959, written by Bob Gregory, drawn by Strobl and Liggera).  This time, they were the fans (literally -- the ONLY fans) of a cowboy-hatted crooner named Paisley Mantee.  I suppose that you could drape the mantle of rock over this obsession by calling Mantee a practitioner of rockabilly.  HD&L must have really had it bad if they were willing to spend a $50 newspaper delivery prize on Mantee's records.  That's $50 in 1959 money, folks.

Carl Barks, however reluctantly, dipped a toe into the "pop pool" with his late Scrooge adventure "Queen of the Wild Dog Pack" (UNCLE $CROOGE #62, March 1966), which finds the boys enamored with the music of Tweedy Teentwirp.  Oddly enough, when Scrooge confronts the kids over the noise from their TV set in "Beaglemania," Huey holds a "boomlet box" in a manner that is disquietingly similar to the ways in which various characters in "Dog Pack" zone out while listening to Tweedy on transistors.

Perhaps more relevant to the current discussion is Barks' invocation of The Beatles in "The Great Wig Mystery" (UNCLE $CROOGE #52, September 1964), both in general theme (Duckburg having gone wiggy for moptop wigs) and in explicit mention.  If you're perturbed at the idea of "Beaglemania" showing direct parodies of Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Elton John, and Michael Jackson, consider that Barks was striking while the iron was red-hot in his own way; he composed "Wig Mystery" in the early months of 1964, when America was enduring the virulent early stage of Beatlemania.  Barks may not have shown a version of the moptops, but he wasn't above invoking their actual names for the purposes of a gag.

He could be diddling MUCH WORSE things, believe me...

During "Time is Money," the series had prepared the groundwork for the kids' immense enthusiasm over the Sky McFly show.  Indeed, Bubba's immediate commandeering of McFly phrases like "Get rude, dude!" and "Bop till you drop!" was supposed to help define his personality (more's the pity, but I digress).  That being said, I find the depiction of the kids' love of McFly in "Beaglemania" to be a whole lot cuter, primarily due to the inclusion of Webby.  After so many instances of the boys blowing Webby off for her choices of favored pastimes "just because she's a girl," it's refreshing to see her fully accepted as part of a fan-group.  And not simply accepted; Dewey even dances with her!  I wonder why Webby didn't do the "change partners" routine at some point and dance with Huey or Louie.  Perhaps Dewey's being the cleverest of the Nephews (cf. "Duck in the Iron Mask") held some sort of cachet for her.

The Beagles' performance of "Boogie Beagle Blues" is... well, unlike Babyface, Bankjob, and Bebop/Bugle's harmonizing in "Time Teasers," it'd be a stretch to call it an actual song.  In the original performance, Welker and McCann only sing the actual phrase "... and sing the Boogie Beagle Blues," "talking" through everything else.  It's easy to overlook this because of the flashy accompanying visuals, which include Burger biting through his guitar neck, the drum set being blown up, and Bouncer firing pistols directly into the camera.  In case you're wondering, no, that last bit has never been censored to my knowledge.  Presumably, the blue-pencil people would have been more offended had Bouncer fired the pistols up in the air, or, heaven forbid, twirled them around in his hands, the way Fenton did during the scene on the dam in "Liquid Assets."  The version of "Blues" that you're more likely to be familiar with, the one on the 1990 Disney Afternoon Songbook CD, has somewhat smoother production values, and Welker and Chuck McCann sing just a little bit more, but basically, it's six of one, six and a quarter (Scrooge: "Not one of mine... but I can give it a good home!") of the other.

It goes without saying that this performance would have been a perfect time to bring Bebop/Bugle back as a supporting player.  Heck, in one of that character's several incarnations (the "Scroogerello" one), he even talks in rhythm!  Tell me that that wouldn't have been a useful contribution to the production.  By this time, unfortunately, the DT writers have settled upon Big Time, Bouncer, Burger, and Baggy as THE de facto Beagle Boys, and over-familiarity has long since started to breed contempt (not that some didn't possess such an attitude about the DT Beagles from the beginning).  The constant post-season-one use of the "Feckless Four" can usually be put down to laziness.  Here is one instance in which the lassitude made the ep something distinctly less than it could have been.

Through the mysterious alchemy of instant stardom, the Beagles' song is soon "#1 with a bullet... and I'm not kidding" (my choice for the single cleverest gag of the episode).  I suppose that I should be surprised that the strongarm tactics that the Beagles use to crash the music biz -- first forcing Dukka Records to sign them to a contract by threatening to torch the recording studio, then putting the gun on the KDUK DJ to get him to play their platter -- didn't get them into legal trouble before they got involved in contract disputes with Scrooge.  It's long been crystal-clear, however, that the denizens of Duckburg (the DuckTales version, at least) can be conned or browbeaten into doing just about anything.

Ma soon takes full charge of her boys' affairs, making demands on Scrooge and hounding the Beagles into all manner of fan-propitiating activities.  We're invited to blame her for the costume changes that turn the new pop stars into what can only be called "The Village Beagles," since Big Time is heard protesting the wardrobe choice at the record store.  The truth might be a little more complicated, though; the Beagles had already been seen wearing the garish gear on the cover of ROLLING DUCK, presumably before Ma had muscled her way into the Brian Epstein role, and they don't seem to be having any problem with it there.  Actually, Big Time has much less reason to be unnerved by his costume than does Bouncer.  Somewhere, Gyro's Helper is shuddering silently, and the members of Electric Light Orchestra are fuming that they didn't think of this first.

Most of the subsequent gags, like that of the Beagles' sartorial invocations of various genres of rock music, are pretty broad in nature -- a fact that GeoX brings up as one of the ep's negative aspects.  In truth, I think that GeoX missed the point here.  The fact that the gags are broad and silly pales in comparison to the overwhelmingly bizarre nature of the episode's context in and of itself.  It's shocking enough that we got an episode in which the Beagles become rock stars and move into a mansion called Disgraceland; let's not quibble too much about authentically subversive rock-industry-satire tropes.

After being given the heave-ho by her rebellious brood, Ma resorts to the time-tested approach of a cheesy disguise, posing as ROLLING DUCK reporter Nina Quackwell in order to frame the Beagles for a robbery.  In a further indication that she's playing for keeps, Ma goes beyond the earlier fistic threat she'd made to Big Time and actually mugs the real Nina on camera in order to steal Nina's clothes.  OK, it isn't as bad as killing someone to get a dress, as the 1800s Ma of "Once Upon a Dime" did, but it's bad enough.  Ma evidently has come a ways from the days of "Robot Robbers" when she merely evaded the security guard at Glomgold's construction site.

Ma benefits from the wonders of Spandex.

The "robbery" itself has two interesting features: the victimized bank is our familiar four-walled friend, the "First Interfeather Bank," and one of the cops who arrest the Beagles is female.  The Duckburg legal system may be terminally inept, but you can't say that the city's law enforcement operatives don't practice progressive hiring methods.

Of course, in the manner of tone-deaf celebrity worshippers everywhere, the Beagles' fans aren't bothered by their arrest, and thus Scrooge and Ma must join forces in order to burst the band's balloon.  I do wish that Seidenberg had avoided the obvious trap and had had the desperate Scrooge say something less drastic than "I don't think that my bank account can take this much punishment!".  Scrooge's "entire fortune" doesn't always have to be at putative stake in order for the consequences of an episode to be meaningful.  Any reasonable loss should be enough to pitch Scrooge into panic mode, since he values a portion of his fortune just as much as he values the whole.  The oversight is less fatal here than in "Yuppy Ducks," but it's still annoying.

The Beagles' final scene with McFly is arguably the sharpest jab of all at the hypocrisies of the rock business, as McFly's cheerful attitude quickly sours and is replaced with a threatening one once it becomes clear that the boys don't have a new song ready to perform.  Ma then pounces and extracts a promise to be good in exchange for a "new" (lyrically, at least) ditty.  A rain of refuse from the indignant audience subsequently renders the Beagles "multiply-hit one-hit wonders."  They're left to lick their wounds and, presumably, to find access to their accumulated wealth barred for some vaguely plausible reason that we're apparently expected to work out ourselves.

I perfectly understand why certain folks might hate "Beaglemania."  I prefer to regard it as one of the series' boldest ventures, and, therefore, am willing to cut it a little slack on the small stuff.  Perhaps it's the sheer, unapologetic chutzpah with which the idea is punched over, but, after that initial period of fear and loathing, I came to accept the episode on its own terms... not unlike the manner in which a fair number of folks grew to tolerate, and then perhaps even enjoy, rock music when it first burst on the scene. 

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Bumper #21: "Quadricycle"

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"DuckBlurbs"

Terry Talks:  I've long wondered whether Terry McGovern based the persona of Screamin' Sky McFly on his own persona as a DJ in the San Francisco Bay area.  I couldn't find a recording of his dating that far back, but I was able to find a clip from one of his shows on the Internet oldies station, Boss Boss Radio.  (Insert blibbering lips where desired.)

In addition, here's an interview with McGovern conducted for the California Historical Radio Society.  The revelation that Terry was responsible for one of the many iconic lines from the original (and I do mean ORIGINAL) Star Wars movie will be a great "I did not know that" moment for many of you.

Dickie Bird is the Word:  Italian comics maestro Romano Scarpa plunged more deeply than Barks would ever have dared to into the pop-music waters with his original character Paperetta Ye-Ye, aka Dickie Duck, who first appeared in TOPOLINO #577 (December 18, 1966).  Like most Americans, I haven't had that much exposure to Dickie, but, judging from the fact that she's seen wearing (and grooving to) a transistor radio ring in that initial appearance, I gather that "musical fangirl" was one of her defining traits, at least during the late 60s.

(Greg) We begin this one with the STOCK FOOTAGE OF DOOM and down in the basement as Scrooge is giving the dollar bills a bubble bath and drying them on clotheslines. Duckworth just stands there; probably wondering about Scrooge's sanity at this point. Scrooge puts the dollar bill through the ringer and Duckworth pins the bills on the clothesline. Apparently; in Duckberg, Scrooge can launder money and get away with it.

At least, he has been able to since UNCLE $CROOGE #6 (June-August 1954), when Carl Barks drew him doing the same thing for the issue's cover.

(Greg) Duckworth even references Frank Sinatra and some other guy which earns a blow off from the nephews as they call Scrooge a fuddy duddy. Well screw you nephews! Frank Sinatra is awesome! Rock and roll is great; but that doesn't mean Frank Sinatra automatically sucks because he doesn't do rock and roll.

"Some other guy" wasn't too bad, either.  I might even have voted for him over Frank as "the winner of the hog-calling contest."

(Greg) Scrooge blows it off because he has work to do and the kids walk upstairs calling Scrooge more ancient than Bubba. Bubba is as confused as I am.

"My God!  I'm either a gimmick character or an unnecessary

extra Nephew.  Rock, hard place."

(Greg) So we head to KDUK radio studio (with big ass D on top of the building) and then pan down to floor level and then go inside the studio as a pig Elvis [sings] so badly that he has to mangle the words to avoid infringement.

The building is actually the Dukka Records building; the Beagles don't infiltrate KDUK until they threaten the DJ (which makes more sense, given that they'd have to sign a record contract before a record actually existed).

Is the Elvis parody here cruel, or what?  I know that the "fat-farm" and "overdressed" tropes have long since been beaten to death -- or, given that we're talking about Elvis in the context of death, maybe they haven't been -- but Melvis Pigsley doesn't catch anything resembling a break here.  You almost find yourself feeling embarrassed that Scrooge winds up hiring Melvis to replace the Beagles.

(Greg) Mrs. Featherby goes to the door and she gets MURDERED by the Beagle Boys and Ma who are running away from their fans... [Later] the fanboys and fangirls break down the door and use it as a bridge to squash Mrs. Featherby (Again; what is this no male on female contact rule again?) and head to the window. 

Remember Fenton and HD&L asking for "hazard pay" and "hazard allowances" in "The Land of Trala La"?  Poor Mrs. F. ought to consider putting in for similar compensation here.  OUCH!!

 

(Greg) Ma gives Scrooge a list of demands which Scrooge blows off because it will cost a fortune. Ma blows it off because it's in their contract and if Scrooge violates the deal, they split. There's one problem to this: Scrooge can simply end the deal now and the episodes ends in less than a minute.

Scrooge probably was scared to death of what he might have to pay in legal costs if the Beagles took him to court over the matter.  Considering that it's the Duckburg legal system we're talking about here, and considering that the Beagles once succeeded in taking said legal system over, I can forgive Scrooge for eschewing a separation, at least until the odds are clearly on his side.

(Greg) After the commercial break; we head to the Money Bin Desolate version as we go to the vault and the Beagle Boys dive into the money and the law of heavy metals has forsaken us.

(GeoX) And from there [the Beagles] become big stars with their own money bin.  Which they're able to swim in, contradicting previous episodes.

Well, they were seen swimming and playing in Scrooge's Bin in "Bubba Trubba."  Plus, they're not swimming in their own Bin so much as they're sort of wallowing in it.  No biggie, I deem.

Next: Episode 87, "The Big Flub."