“The Most Dangerous Game Night”

(Note how skillfully I deny this title its aggravating faux-clever punctuation. I may like it overall, but DuckTales 2017 has many flaws, and the usually-terrible titles are one of them. There's been very few decent ones so far.)

So being a Duck fan, I have dutifully followed Disney's attempt at doing to the Disney Comics Unvierse what all the big boys with their superhero comics are doing to theirs — e.g., make a reboot that brings in the fans of the original but liberally changes characters and tone to draw in a fresh audience. 

DT17 is strange and occasionally-irritating, but it's very well-made, often funny, sometimes moving, and it's clear from Francisco Angones's blog that the people involve care. Unlike brave, unfortunate GeoX over at Duck Cartoons Revue, I don't have to force myself to watch new episodes. 

Case in point, the Season 2 opened that dropped in yesterday, The Most Dangerous Game Night.

This was… a weird episode to begin a new season with. For one thing, it's your standard 25-minutes fare, whereas the Season 1 pilot, the abysmally-titled Woo-oo!, was double-length. This is unfortunate, as the DuckTales 2017 writers tend to do much better with double-length episodes than regular ones — Woo-oo! and The Shadow War, to me, were probably among the best (if not the best) of Season 1, simply because the plots didn't feel quite as rushed as they usually do. 

Moreover, it hardly sets up anything at all. It has some character development for Louie, true, but that comes to a natural (and well-enacted) conclusion by the episode's close. Aside from the ill-defined monsters-of-the-week that are the Gyropuddlians, a tribe of microscopic cavemen living in McDuck Manor, the episode features only the established cast. Complete, it must be said, with Donald Duck, which bodes well for this season (as Donald was much too often absentee in the previous one). 

Speaking of the whole cast, refreshingly, the episode remembered to include Duckworth. This show's version of Duckworth, as you may recall, is a ghost, and in this episode they're drawing more on the consequences of the "ghost butler" idea than they are doing anything with Duckworth's general character… but to be fair, his brief, ghost-gags-based appearance was funny. As is his relationship with Mrs Beakley, continued from their brief interaction in his first episode. 

As for Gyro, it is necessary, if you want to get anything out of him at all, to accept that he is not Gyro in this show, but rather his evil twin-brother from another dimension. Seriously, dye his hair pink and you'd pretty much get a slightly-more-subdued Mad Ducktor.

Mad Ducktor being Gyro's very own, delightfully-insane Mr Hyde

from a series of Italian Duck Avenger adventures. Look him up. And let's hope

the (sigh) Fresh And Modern folks, somewhere in the inscrutable

recesses of their heretic skulls, find the inspiration to bring him 

to American shores while doing him justice. 

In this episode, his determination to become the God-King of the Gyropuddlians using his Micro-Phone/shrinkray is a particularly stark contrast to Gyro's attitude, never anything but kindly, towards the Microducks when he crossed their path in the DuckTales Classic episode where they appeared. But as far as this "megalomaniac mad-scientist barely held in check" character goes, the writers and actor wring a lot of humor out of him, here and elsewhere. 

Modulo the villainous tendencies, this episode even dispenses with Gyro's cool, 'snooty' Season 1 and brings back some of the joyful exuberance of his comic self. This iteration of DT17 Gyro may not be the Gyro we usually know, but it's not hard to imagine him starring in Think-Box Bollix or Hobblin' Goblins. 

…Oh, I figure I should probably say something about that opening scene. 

The Indiana Jones ripoff as Scrooge & Co. retrieve the Idol of Cibola is obviously a nod to the fact that the similar sequence in Barks's Seven Cities of Cibola inspired the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. So this adaption of the Cibola tale (albeit brief) that redesigns things to look more like their Indiana Jones counterparts is bringing things amusingly full-circle. 

Thing is, the novelty of this was largely lost on me, as it was, I think, on most other Disney comic fans. That Barks's treasure-hunt stories directly inspired Spielberg & Lucas for Indiana Jones is, I suppose, kind of cool to those who first hear it, but it is "entry-level trivia" for Disney comics afficionados, of about the same level as "Barks kept drawing scripts for Disney comics even after he retired" or "the Phantom Blot's face is meant to look like Walt Disney's……… probably?". 

Still, I suppose it will have looked clever and witty to new viewers brought to Duckdom by DuckTales 2017 and who are only now starting to catch up on their classics and the associated lore. This is a joke for which I just wasn't the intended audience.

As for the "woah — wait-what? — aaaaah!" joke that goes with it, it is, in itself, well-executed, and it furthers Louie's character arc in the episode, but… people, showing amusing self-awareness about the medium like this would work better if every single adventure story you've done so far wasn't already full of that sort of ironic self-awareness. For God's sake, on his very first adventure in Episode 1 of Season 1, Dewey was already acting casual about a "basic death-trap". 

…and that's a wrap on my review of The Most Dangerous Game Night. I'll be back soon with more.