November 26
17. SKY PIRATES…IN THE SKY! Our big Don Karnage episode! We took heavy inspiration from the original TaleSpin pilot where Don Karnage had a big musical number about himself and ran with it.
This was actually before we’d hired the amazing Dom Lewis as our composer, but we knew we needed instantly catchy, hummable earworms to board to, so we turned to my old pal @andybeanmusic. If you want a song to get stuck in your head, turn to Andy.
Don Karnage was another one of those characters that we were itching to get our hands on. Again, I love a blustery egomaniac…to no one’s surprise.
In keeping with our casting ethos, we were so lucky to get to work with @jaimecamil as Don Karnage. “Evil Rogelio De La Vega” is as close to a perfect character description as they come.
It also made all the sense in the world that Karnage would become Dewey’s archnemesis. Two showboating adventurers with a flair for the dramatic. But as we’ll learn in Season 3, there’s one person Karnage hates more than Dewey.
We had two big conceits going into this one that got cut. The first, from episode writer @madisonbateman, was that the pirates were actually a failed theatre troupe first, and they fell into crime to try to bankroll their productions.
The other idea I had was connected to that: perhaps “Don Karnage” was a title, like “The Dread Pirate Roberts” in Princess Bride. Whenever an understudy mutinies against the current Karnage, they would become the new Captain Karnage.
The logic being that the events of TaleSpin had occurred in our show’s past, so each generation got a different Don Karnage. It was a cool conceit, but ultimately nothing came of it. Would still love to try it some day.
The writers worked really hard to justify Dewey’s disappearance in the first act. And by “worked really hard,” I mean “painstakingly analyzed the first act of Home Alone”. That movie actually had a big influence on Dewey’s narrative in this one.
All the musical numbers in this proved INCREDIBLY difficult to execute, because most of them involved CG vehicles as well.
@theironwrist isn’t a fan of doing musical numbers in episodes, and the process of executing this one may point to why.
Also he hates fun.
There was a heated debate in the Writers Room about Karnage’s disguise in this episode. Originally, Karnage was going to dress up as a little old lady lost in the jungle for some reason.
We bailed on that for a couple of reasons: we’d seen that joke before, and “haha it’s a man in a dress!” is a dated concept that we didn’t want to further it more. Also, someone came up with the name “Tom Karnage” and it stuck.
November 27
18. THE SECRET(S) OF CASTLE McDUCK! If you’re going to deal with Scrooge, you’re going to want to go to Castle McDuck at some point. And that means reckoning with the extensive history of Clan McDuck.
We tried to incorporate as many different McDucks from every kind of media possible. We started with Rosa’s line as a template, but added McDucks from the original DuckTales series who ran afoul of druids…
…as well as Black Donald McDuck, who got golf banned from Scotland by throwing a temper tantrum while playing against the king. We referenced that bit of Barks lore in “Missing Links of Moorshire!”
Our hope had been to get Alan Young to play Fergus, Scrooge’s father, in this episode. Sadly, he passed away before it came time to record.
We were VERY lucky, though to get the incomparable @grahammctavish to play Fergus. He provided that ridiculous temper with that beautiful sincerity at the end. Graham had actually played David’s brother in a play not too long before we recorded.
I’ve also loved Ashley Jensen since I first saw her in Extras, and I love her even more now that she’s played Downey. Again, if we’re going to Scotland, we’re going to cast some real Scots.
There was some controversy amongst the writers about keeping Fergus and Downey alive, especially since Scrooge finding out about Downey’s death in “Life and Times” led to one of our definitive images of Scrooge that we had up in our writers room.
Ultimately, the decision was made because this is primarily a show about FAMILY, and the opportunity to see how Scrooge interacts with his parents in light of how he’s acted with the kids up to this point.
But both the demon dog and the secret origin of Scrooge’s #1 Dime was taken from Rosa and “Life and Times”.
“You treat us like the plague.” “Come now, that’s unfair TO THE PLAGUE.” may be the greatest exchange in the history of our show.
This ep was also a chance to get into some real Goonies-type hijinx with the boys…before the truth comes crashing down.
We knew that this was going to be the episode where Huey and Louie find out Dewey’s been hiding information about their mom. I honestly don’t think we knew how they would react until we actually got to breaking that scene.
It ended up proving a bit of an emotional Rosetta Stone for the trio; from this point on we knew that Huey could easily shift into confrontational older brother mode and that Louie had a hidden sensitivity that would play a big part in S2.
We could have harped on “Dewey’s betrayal” for a while, but ultimately we liked the idea that even this couldn’t tear the brothers apart for too long. Plus, we knew we had a bigger “betrayal” coming up and wouldn’t want to overshadow it.
Scrooge having a clump of hair named “Whiskers” as a pet is peak @Bob_Snow.
19. WHO IS GIZMODUCK?! We may have introduced Fenton in “BUDDY System,” but this is where we get to find out who he really is.
One of our goals in evolving Fenton was to make sure he was entirely informed by the fact that he’s Latino without being solely defined by it. This episode explores all the things he thinks he’s supposed to be and how they inform who he is.
Is he a scientist? A lowly intern? A hero? A son? Is going from Fenton Crackshell-Cabrera to Gizmoduck a form of code switching for him? He has limitless potential, so how can he settle on just one thing.
The answer to those questions is that he is all those things. He is GIZMODUCK.
Or, put another way, “he is everything he’s learned and more”. And that’s how you connect Lin back to Lin. Thanks for playing “One Degree of Lin-Manuel Miranda”.
The million things the Gizmoduck armor can do was the perfect fit for Fenton’s character. He may not easily stand up for himself, but whenever he’s defending the limitless potential of the armor, that’s what he’s doing.
Our original pitch for the character was “Peter Parker meets Iron Man”. This was before the MCU actually had Peter Parker meet Iron Man.
I loved the chance to depict Fenton’s background organically, easily switching between Spanish and English, dealing with his strong Latina mother’s expectations of him (while watching telenovelas, of course).
Mama is in no small way based on every Latina mother I knew growing up. Entirely loving, a little judgy, incredibly protective, and often INTENSE.
A big breakthrough for us occurred when I texted @TheOneCMag and said: “What if Mark Beaks was a little bit racist?”
Microaggressions are a very real problem, especially amongst the "entitled cool". In an ep where Fenton manages what everyone expects him to be, Beaks calling him “amigo” once he’s unmasked puts an unfortunately real-world spin on those "expectations".
In the cold open, when Fenton says “Ok, this is happening now BYYYYYEEEEEEE!!!”, we were initially gonna have that “BYYYYEEEEEEEEE…” last all the way through the opening titles. Lin even recorded a minute long version of that “BYYYYEEEEEEE!”.
Remember how I said the network gets antsy if a story doesn’t focus partially on one of the kids? One of our ways to address that was to pair off the adult characters we want to tell stories about with a kid sidekick.
In other words, if it’s a Launchpad story, you’ll probably see Dewey in it. If it’s a Fenton/Gizmoduck story, you’re going to see his biggest fan Huey. This was a way for us to tell the stories we wanted while still providing a kid perspective.
“Waddleduck” is, objectively, the greatest song ever written.
I don’t think I realized until late in the game that the “Gizmoduck gets rid of a bomb” sequence parallels the end of “The Dark Knight Rises” which parallels my favorite scene in the Batman ’66 movie.
November 28
A very special #DuckTales #RewriteHistory today, as I’m feeling particularly thankful to work with this crew on this show. So here’s some development work that started it all.
This is the infamous “Murder Board” @theironwrist and I came up with early on when developing the characters, detailing key personality traits and connections.
We knew we were looking at a huge ensemble of characters, and figuring out a few key connections amongst them all would open up tons of storytelling potential. We always knew how one character would react to another in the early days.
One of our ideas in adapting these iconic cartoon characters was to find three-dimensional explanations for the cartoony traits everyone knows. Donald’s temper, the boys troublemaking tendencies, etc. This helped us track them.
You’ll also notice the words in orange by the villains. We wanted each of them to be a dark reflection of a trait typically associated with Scrooge.
You’ll notice some old ideas that never made it too, like Daisy’s role in the ensemble (which I’ve talked about) and the idea that Bradford hired Launchpad hoping that he’d get Scrooge killed in one of his numerous crashes.
Here’s a very early sketch of Beakley by @theironwrist. She was originally described as “Mary Poppins meets Helen Mirren in RED.”
Some early Fenton and Gizmoduck designs. I gotta imagine this was some combination of Youngberg, Tim Moen, and Tapan Gandhi.
In development, we called in a bunch of our favorite artists to help us crack the looks of certain characters. Alex Kirwan helped with the lineup at the top of this entry.
Here’s an early Donald, Della, and Scrooge from Alonso Ramirez. I really loved the black and red motif that made them feel like a hero team.
And this is probably my favorite piece of dev art, by @theironwrist. A perfect character vignette that tells you everything you need to know about our heroes.
November 30
22. THE OTHER BIN OF SCROOGE McDUCK!, in which one of our more ridiculous plots gets mashed up with one of our darkest plots, all to establish Lena’s POV at this moment.
We wanted to access Lena’s worst fears to get her actual POV on Magica. Initially, we were going to do this using a McGuffin called the “Grim Nimbus,” a cloud that made all your worst nightmares come true.
It was an interesting way to reveal pieces of everyone’s characters by revealing their deepest fears, but it was scrapped for a few reasons: first, there would be massive personal revelations for all characters that distracted from Lena’s story.
Second, we already knew we were going to deal with some heavy, emotional “worst fears” stuff in the next episode. Also, it was VERY close to an original DuckTales episode’s plot.
It was important to us to establish that Lena has nowhere to turn to. She doesn’t want to serve Magica, but she can’t tell anyone the truth or she fears they’ll turn on her too.
That’s why we needed the ridiculous Gavin/Tenderfeet story paired with this one: to remind Lena (and the audience) that Scrooge and family are tenacious monster hunters.
Scrooge’s reaction to finding out the boys have been hiding Gavin foreshadows his reaction to finding out the truth about Lena in the finale: despite his history, he’d ultimately accept one of the kids seemingly monstrous new friends.
I don’t think Scrooge would have been so charitable at the start of the series. The fact that Louie’s able to win Scrooge over with a sob story about family shows that he’s grown some in all the right ways.
In the very early stages, Lena’s goal wasn’t to steal the Dime, but instead to help Magica invade Scrooge’s dreams, where he had imprisoned the sorceress.
The idea was that Scrooge would have a giant skylight in his room with a pattern drawn on it that turned out to be a dreamcatcher that protected him while he slept. Lena had to figure that out and break the skylight.
This unfortunately led to a million questions: does Scrooge not sleep when he’s out of town or travelling the globe? Maybe we should put the dreamcatcher inside his hat? Does that mean he always has to wear his hat to bed? It was a mess.
We scrapped it in favor of having Magica trapped in the #1 Dime; it made way more sense to connect her to the totem that she’s always wanted since she was introduced. The mystery became not WHAT she was after, but WHY.
Though let me tell you, it was a bear keeping one half of that dime hidden for a whole season.
A note: NEVER refer to the #1 Dime as “Scrooge’s Lucky Dime”. That’s a common mistake, but Scrooge doesn’t believe in luck. Magica only assumes the dime is lucky.
A couple of quick easter eggs here: in Lena’s nightmare, the #1 Dime is kept in a replica of Scrooge’s classic “Worry Room”. Makes sense as this is the main source of Lena’s worry.
Webby is of course turned into a doll version of herself from DuckTales ’87.
Also, notice the amazing work @JohnAoshima’s team did w/ the Magica shadow stuff, including the puppeting of the Webby doll. John’s team kept finding interesting ways to show how powerful she’s become. Our animation team knocked it out of the park.
That photo of Donald and the boys that Gavin threatens looks pretty familiar.
Speaking of Gavin, we used to get a lot of notes about Louie storylines making him “unlikeable” or a “bad example” because his strength lies in conning people. So we ended up pitting him against much worse con-men, both here and in “Toth-Ra”.
But the good news is we finally got to do a “What if ‘Harry and the Hendersons,’ but Harry’s a jerk?” story that I’ve been wanting to do for years.
Fun fact: despite my tendency to write jerky characters for him, @samriegel is, on top of being the best Voice Director in the business, an unbelievably nice and supportive guy. He's just THAT good an actor.
December 1
23. THE LAST CRASH OF THE SUNCHASER! The core idea we had from the very beginning of the series. Something happened that split up Scrooge and Donald for good, and no one in the family ever talks about it. It had to be Della.
This was another ep where I was like “It’ll be easy! It’s a bottle episode!” Cut to @JohnAoshima having to build a complete 3D model of the interior of the Sunchaser so he could track seven characters and compose every shot.
This one was a heartbreaker to write. If you’ve done all the right setup, your finale should fall like dominos. Luckily, that was the case on this one. Tons of sweet sweet payoff. And tears.
We were originally going to be way more slavish to the conceit that they were hardly able to move without tilting the plain, but it would have made for a visually boring episode.
There were a lot of conversations about the scale of the Sunchaser in this one too. Originally, we had the Submarine in the hull instead of the jeep, but there was no way to physically make that work.
One of my greatest professional joys was forcing four of the greatest comedic actors working today to memorize the END CREDIT Darkwing Duck saxophone theme.
Sean Jimenez requested to come up with the names of all the “crew” in the Darkwing credits, disappeared into his office for an hour, and emerged with pages of made-up “90s Animation Crew Member” names.
I was very nervous that the third act of this episode only had one real joke in it: Launchpad offering to pause the Darkwing tape. But it’s what the episode needed.
The big Scrooge flashback monologue in Act 3 was a page and a half long. David nailed it on the first take.
The fight was…hard to write, emotionally, because no one was a hundred percent right. Scrooge is lashing out like a trapped animal; the kids aren’t saying anything he hasn’t thought himself over and over again.
The wound was too fresh for the boys to listen to the entire story. After losing Della, this is the worst thing that could have happened to this family. This scene should play like a car crash in slow motion; there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
I love the moment where Launchpad yells at everyone else. Take-charge LP don’t have time for your family melodrama, he’s got PLANES TO CRASH.
Was very proud of the full family “WAIT, WHAT?!” in this one.
And, of course, the last shot in the episode...
...mirrors Scrooge’s very first appearance in the comics. “Everybody hates me, and I hate everybody.”
December 2
24. THE SHADOW WAR, PT 1: THE NIGHT OF DE SPELL! Breaking a two-parter raises a bunch of questions off the bat: namely, how the hell do you balance it all? Do you break it as one big episode? Two smaller episodes?
Us being us, we decided to do it THE HARDEST WAY POSSIBLE. We broke the story so that each individual episode adhered to our typical story structure AND the 44 minutes somehow adheres to that structure as a whole. We are dumb.
We also needed to keep this first part manageable and roughly contained to give our art team WAY more time on the second part. Magica may be the biggest effect in the whole thing, not including the Shadow Vortex.
I am a real sucker for stuff (events, shots, lines) from the first act coming back in the third act; there’s a lot of “Cornetto Trilogy” in my DNA. You’ll get a ton of callbacks to the pilot in these two episodes.
Particularly the idea that the boys are finally gonna take that big trip to Cape Suzette that they tried to take in the pilot. Only now, compared to everything they’ve experienced, it does seem like quite such a big adventure.
I was delightfully surprised to see the TaleSpin logo and the Sea Duck in the final design of the Cape Suzette Brochure. Excited to actually see her in action in Season 3!
Being the two “outsiders” of the family, it made sense that Webby and LP would team up to try to keep this family together, because they have enough distance to not be caught up in it, but they’re part of the family too.
Cut for time: a montage where Webby and LP buy food, decorations, and a bounce house for the dinner, only to reveal that all of those stores were in one strip mall. The bounce house survived to final cut.
As I mentioned before, this particular story line started with the OG DuckTales episode "Magica's Shadow War" as a jumping off point.
The Scrooge/Magica plot was an opportunity to put these two archenemies in a position to sympathize over their family troubles. Magica almost wins Scrooge over to her way of thinking: family is a headache and easily thrown away.
Her attempt to get him to give up the Dime is what snaps him out of his desire to throw away his past and get back to basics. That Dime represents his lifetime’s experiences, and also, as he now knows after “Castle McDuck,” the importance of family.
Also, we got to sort of do a whole episode of Catherine and David together. Sort of. @KimikoGlenn did an AMAZING job of channeling Catherine’s performance in this episode.
The DuckTales crew firmly believes that the best way to signal that a character has hit rock bottom is to surround them with old pizza boxes. Scrooge sits on a literal cardboard throne of failure.
It was important that Donald have the final word that convinces the boys to make up with Scrooge. Even when they’re finally all praising him above Scrooge, Donald realizes this family needs to be together. If he can bury the hatchet, so can they.
December 3
25. THE SHADOW WAR, PT 2: THE DAY OF THE DUCKS!: This is the big one, and also our first shot at a massive, full-team event. We didn’t realize that we would have to, you know, try to top it every season.
The narrative goal here was to take Scrooge off the table in order to prove that the family had grown as adventurers…and as a family. And each of them has an opportunity to shine at what they do best. Scrooge’s true strength is his family.
That’s why the second part is called “Day of the Ducks” and not “Day of the McDucks”. They are every bit the epic adventurers that Scrooge is.
As such, it felt like the right time to use the “Barksian Modulator,” that would allow everyone to see (and hear) Donald as every bit the hero Carl Barks made him out to be by allowing him to say anything and everything with passion and conviction.
When trying to find the PERFECT voice for Barksian Donald, we knew we needed someone epic and funny and full of gravitas. Our exact words were, “We need an Avenger.” @rejectedjokes replied, “I know an Avenger.”
I cannot believe how lucky we were to get @DonCheadle for this incredible, epic performance. He was 100% game for anything and totally got the noble and ridiculous aspects of it; he even did a full “Squawk Rage”. He is, in all respects, “The Storm”.
He also volunteered to do an interview for the event, which resulted in the single greatest interview chyron known to man. He also improvised the entire interview. We should really have him on again…
Our note for Webby after she finds out Lena betrayed her hero and mentor Scrooge: “Webby goes full Wolverine”.
The showdown where Magica was first trapped in the Dime takes place on Mt. Vesuvius as a nod to her comic origins.
There was initially a much longer competition between Manny and Bulb to see who could take out the most shadows, with Manny pleading “I really need this job, man.” It was very Gimli and Legolas.
I will always look for opportunities that Fenton is just as formidable without the Gizmoduck Armor, if not even more so. Plus it allowed Donald to go toe-to-toe with “Gizmoduck” to prove what a badass he is.
I really lobbied hard to have the stairway scene be a classic cartoon “white eyeballs in darkness” scene. See? Sometimes I do try to make things easier!
I love how competent Donald is in his element, and how well he knows the kids. He’s learned since the pilot that the best way to get these jerks to do something is to tell them they can’t. Also, sweet life vest callback.
When it came down to the final showdown, we knew it had to be Magica vs. the kids by themselves. And each kid had to fight by exemplifying the core trait that we assigned them in the earliest stages of development.
Huey is “brains,” (“smarter than the smarties”), Louie is “mouth,” (“sharper than the sharpies”), Dewey is “guts,” (“tougher than the toughies”) and Webby is “heart and fists” (“earns her way into this family square”). Combined, they equal Scrooge.
Our note for Louie burrowing through the money to con Magica: “Louie goes full Bugs Bunny”.
Lena’s sacrifice was hard, but necessary to prove herself free of Magica. And we knew her story was nowhere near over. What can I say? Friendship is magic.
Another callback from the pilot we couldn’t resist: “Huey, Louie…the third one.” Only instead of “Curse me kilts, have I missed trouble,” it’s “Curse me kilts, have I missed you.” That, as we say, is growth.
And, of course, one last parallel to the pilot as Dom beautifully blends his theme for the Della Mystery with the Moon Theme. "Mom?" vs...
"Boys...?"
Please keep spreading the correct order and letting @disneyplus and @DisneyPlusHelp know that you’d like Season 1 of #DuckTales in the right order. If it’s fixed by the time I finish Season 2, we’ll reveal TOP SECRET S3 info...some big juicy stuff from a new episode.
And, what the heck, if it’s fixed by Christmas, I’ll throw in a MASSIVE SECRET FOR THE WHOLE SERIES. It’s a Christmas Miracle!
Submitted December 03, 2019 at 02:40PM by mrsmuckers https://ift.tt/2P6415y
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