#tmnt guest era

[spiderandmosquito]

A haunting story about extinction: Sons of the Silent Age - TMNT Comics/...

[viewfromthelake]

No one: No one at all: Comic writers who land a gig writing a guest issue of the 80s Ninja Turtles comic: "TIME TO GET WACKY! WACKETY-SCHMACKETY! UNGA UNGA BUNGA! DIPPITY-DIPPITY-DOOOO!" (Jumps around like Daffy Duck)

[random-tmnt-drawing-ref]

Little girl from this comic

[mrawkweird]

This month marks 5 years since O.K. KO's ending. And I won't lie, in those past 5 years there have been few, if any shows that could make me smile as often or as bright as that show did. And the ones that did ALSO got fucked over. Lookin at you Rise of the TMNT.

I just, don't think it will ever be possible for a show to feel so tailor made made our generation of 90's kids and millennials while just being fun enough on it's own to appeal to basically everyone else at the same time. Damn sure ain't gonna find something that treats Captain Planet of all things with a sense of reverence.

And REMINDER. Crossover with Sonic, BEFORE the movie and AFTER a disappointing game release. That shit was making no money they did that cause they were real fans. Packed with referefnces and certain shots even gave him fangs. THAT FUCKER HASN'T HAD FANGS SINCE 1999!

KO really does just feel like the end of an era. But that era from Adventure Time to Regular Show to Steven Universe to Gumball and all the way to KO told us something, not directly but just as important is that you shouldn't feel lesser of being a fan of all these things you grew up with. You can take that energy and make your own thing and thing will speak to others the same way, who knows it might even spread all over the world.

(I ended this shit with Sonic Adventure 2 quote, #Sonicmovie3 #yearofshadow)

OK KO really felt like a love letter to a fan's interest not just in the guest characters but how they went about making the show as a whole. It had that sort of Scott Pilgrim energy to it where you could tell certain niche details would not be there unless the person was really into it. Like, it wasn't just homework being done; you're seeing extra credit as well.

It was the show you would want to make or dream of making yourself and it did not deserve to get done like it did in the end. For the time we had it, however, it really managed to do something special and I'm glad I got to be there for it as it happened. It's a show that truly cared and that's something that can't be taken lightly.

[tawked]

A fun opposite in Mirage and IDW TMNT is Splinter's relationship with revenge and the nature of the turtles' initial tutelage imo.

In Mirage:

He taught the turtles to be instruments of revenge against The Shredder. This ends up being the core of their conflict after the Guest Era, when all of the turtles are finally allowed to mature and reflect on the fact that this was a pretty Not Cool thing to do to one's kids.

In IDW:

Splinter is concerned mostly with their safety, reacting to the belief that because they are turtles (also ninja ghost trauma) they're going to have to deal with some bullshit for the rest of their lives. He doesn't want to dwell on grudges or revenge, but his introduction to sentient life was violent, and he's learned over the past year and a half of skirmishes with Hob that violence is pretty much inevitable for some young turts out about town.

[thecomicsnexus]

The Lost Story of The River Trilogy – TMNT History

Explore the mysterious and unprintable River Trilogy—one of TMNT’s most intriguing comic arcs from the guest era. Written and illustrated by Rick Veitch, this story dives into the environmental and esoteric themes that put the Turtles in a horror-tinged battle against nature’s darkest forces. Discover the story’s connection to colonization, industrial exploitation, and why it remains in legal limbo to this day. Can this lost TMNT tale ever be reprinted?

[the-spirited-one]

Introducing: Tsunahime-oiran! My new TMNT OC!

Tsunahime is a modern-day oiran, the first in over a hundred years to officially hold the rank of oiran. (In this universe oiran are more like highly-regarded geisha than courtesans, considering prostitution is illegal in the modern era.)

Tsunahime is in truth named Leon, a transgender man who appears quite ordinary and unassuming out of his oiran attire. By playing a woman he also fulfills the description of an "onnagata," (lit. "female impersonator.") And by all accounts, Tsunahime is technically a character he puts on for his guests, a gentle and soft-spoken woman. The pinnacle of elegance and perfection. It starkly contrasts the loud, outspoken, tempered young man he actually is. Although there are moments every now and then that remind the people around him that they are very much one and the same.

He meets the turtles on the day of his grand debut as an official oiran, when they were unceremoniously dumped via portal into one of the dining rooms in his tea house. What happened next? Who knows!

(This image was created with the help of Imagine AI Art.com's AI generation software.)

[kinyau]

i’m really in my movie era right now. i’ve watched 4 movies since last tuesday (shout out amc stubs a list program) (sorry sidewalk film cinema) and i realized why every autistic parent is on some level obsessed with film/media. it is so Nice to get lost in a world that has characters and concepts that have reasons for acting and playing out the way they do. rankings below…

bottoms: 2/5

don’t even get me started on this one.

TMNT: 4/5

plot could’ve been better, but such good animation and voice acting

Perfect Blue: 3.5/5

80’s anime & its commitment to showing female abuse 😻😻😻

oppenheimer: 4/5

special guest co-star einstein???

[leleamo]

Hello, welcome to the challenge that will destroy my sanity! Just kidding, today we're going to start the

Drawing my persona and oc's in each era of TMNT!

Even though I'm only familiar with the 2012 and a little bit of the 2018 eras, I've always been curious to talk about the other versions, even if I haven't read or seen them.

That's why I started this challenge, and today we're going to start with

Tmnt from mirage! Or from 1984.

Just to make something clear, I didn't read this comic, I read the summary of the story and so on...

Let's get started!

Even though we only had two guests for today, as time went by, two more OCs joined us! (Or should I say five...?)

Persona!!

Letícia M.C, a young adult who moved from Brazil to New York, due to pressure from nosy relatives, works as a ballet teacher, wearing cute and pretty clothes to please the children, but New York is dangerous, making our girl walk around with a knife, and in one of these near robberies, she was saved by Casey Jones! Her first friend in the city, and soon she would meet April, and the turtles (with Michelangelo being the one she had a crush on)

At the end of the story, she manages not only to return to Brazil, but also to start a singing career, but she has to return to New York and discover the whereabouts of Michelangelo, who is missing...

Oc!

Rosa Jones (I wrote it wrong on the paper-) is Casey's uncle's ex-wife, ex why? for having harassed Casey when she was just a child... She was imprisoned for a long time and left there wanting revenge, but fortunately, she died from a gunshot...

She also never spoke to her son, Sid Jones, after prison.

Well, that's it, it wasn't much, but this is the beginning, I have a lot more to show! Hehehe, anyway, see you next Saturday and bye bye!

[coreybass84]

I want to make my April O'Neil half-Black and half-Chinese out of Sprite. And maybe out of spite.

Was April originally a Black woman in volume 1 of the Mirage comics TMNT?

Sorta-kinda-not-really. If you look at the issues of the Vol.1 comic, then I think you can see that neither Eastman or Laird really had a consistent design for April other than the perm she had for much of her appearances. And her general look shifted around from issue to issue, and on one occasion from panel to panel. With the Guest Era, her look jumped around even more because the different artists had different interpretations of what April looked like.

Eventually...April being a White woman kinda settled into place rather than a specific decision being made on her look.

But the trick is that...it's never really mattered whether April was White or Black or any ethnicity. Just like it's never really mattered if the Turtles were culturally White or Black or Japanese. It's only really mattered for Splinter that he was Japanese, and even that's depending on whether it's the humanoid rat or the human who turned into a rat. I would be lying if I didn't enjoy that more people see the Turtles as being culturally Black and/or culturally Japanese. Or that I don't see them that way myself. But one of the things that makes the Turtles so endearing is that so many people can and have seen themselves in them, regardless of ethnicity or gender and whatnot.

And that's something to celebrate.

[turtlethon]

With AJ Howard, I wonder if there's more to his mutant self hidden under a latex disguise or if he has a slug head with a normal body? The statue of his mutant form indicated his slug self was at least relatively human in shape, so I'm gonna assume he still has legs and fingers under the disguise, even if they're slimy.

As for J. Gordon Hungerdunger, I feel you could turn him into a playmates figure if you mutate him; undoubtably into a western setting animal like a Buffalo. Though then again that might be creeping into Cowboys of Moo Mesa's territory.

PS: The writers of the Dirk Savage episode sure knew the future when they did a plot of a powerful land mogul with his own tower persecuting minorities for his own power play!

I suppose Hungerdunger wouldn't even need to be a mutant animal to make it into the toy line, sometimes there are figures in there who appear conventionally human but every aspect of their look is turned up to 11 (like Tattoo or Pizzaface). Just make him the rootin'-est, tootin'-est guy ever, give him a comically oversized removable 50-gallon hat that's almost as big as he is, make his moustache as wide as his entire body, take that dollar sign bolo tie thing he had going on and make it a big chromed piece, go all-out.

(It's a shame that the flow of traffic in TMNT at the time seemed to go mostly one-way, we got a lot more characters introduced into the show who were created for the toy line than the other way around. Occasionally we'd get a highly requested figure like Mona Lisa and I still think it's incredible that in time they got around to sort-of doing both Super Rocksteady and Mighty Bebop, but the cartoon is full of characters and vehicles that would have made great toys, that just didn't happen - I'm tempted to compile a list, actually!)

Howard kind of got the worst of it from both sides: the requirement for his mutation to be a twist revealed halfway through his only episode meant his backstory was inevitably going to be underdeveloped, and he didn't receive a satisfactory exit. It can't have helped that he had to share screen time with Dirk Savage, plus all of the guest mutants. Maybe the Dirk Savage ep was another one from season seven that would have been better served by being a multi-part show. And yeah, something about him feels... almost like a quasi-mutation rather than a full one, closer to cat lady April rather than someone like Baxter whose transformation would be impossible to conceal. (That's actually something in itself that could be explored if things weren't so constricted: he calls himself the greatest mutant of all time, and maybe the rationale for his hate campaign was rooted in him convincing himself he's not like the other mutants. Behind the mask, he can continue to mingle in high society and act as if nothing had changed, a privilege not afforded to the people he's attacking.)

The comparison to Trump is well-observed, and something I didn't pick up on while writing about the episode. Howard is probably about as close as you could get to just putting Ross Perot in the show as a slug-man without risking legal action; giving him Richard Nixon's voice comes across as an obfuscation to be able to say he's not intended to represent any one person. But yeah, the tower named after himself and its gold interior suggests there was always a little of Trump in his NY property mogul era mixed in there too. Something that I didn't know until I was doing research to write the Dirk Savage Turtlethon entry was that Perot initially polled strongly in the 1992 presidential campaign before falling off. Trump basically borrowed his whole "I'm a successful man of industry, put me in the White House and I'll run it like a business" schtick from him, but had the advantage of not running as a third party candidate.

So I guess AJ Howard deserves at least an honourable mention as yet another Trump stand-in alongside McDonald Crump, Donald J. Lofty, Fenton Q. Hackenbrush, and in the UK Hero Turtles comics, Ronald Bump. There's probably more of these across the wider spectrum of TMNT media that I haven't discovered yet - it seems that wealthy buffoon / unscrupulous real estate kingpin / blustering con-man worked well as a foil for the Turtles at the time.

[weirdlizard26]

sorry.

[istherewifiinhell]

Wifi's (and friend) Ultimate Turtle Journey: Mirage Volume 1 skip list.

Have you ever started to get into a really popular media that you know next to nothing about? And the amount of ingrained cultural knowledge and predisposed popular opinions to have about it all left you all discombobulated? Did you then decide the best way to handle that was to go through all the media in as chronological an order as possible?

Well. Hi! I (and my companion in turtledom) did that with every cartoon, movie, anime ova, touring musical production and educational VHS we could find of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But now plumb out of media of the moving picture sort, it was time to get into comics.

This is not a list trying to make you read mirage, nor will it be a "just the good plot stuff" list. Those already exist! This is list for anyone also taking a maximalist approach to enjoying art, and letting the ideas of the people who make it flow over you. I think friction in consumption of art can be really interesting. But I will try and give you context for what that friction might be, and the lines I drew about no longer thinking something was worth my time (I never skipped tho i did occasional skim >_>). SO! Lets get too it!

Mirage 1-11, and the character micros (named after each character, published in order: Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello and Leonardo)

This is the "core text" as it were. Obviously read it. This is probably what you need if you want to get into fights on the internet too. I might recommend a pit stop to read Eastman and Laird Fugitoid, maybe after issue 4. Issue 8 is a crossover issue. You could read the micros however but read no. 9, then Leo, then 10.

#12-18 are, brace yourself. Filler. Oh the terror. I think mostly good! 12-15 all got adapted into 03 episodes. Here's the break down.

#19-21: Return to New York

#12 - A Laird turtle romp, has good character work, action.

#13 - A guest issue, but Michael Dooney's best imho, makes sense chronologically and in tone. Women's depiction in comics Advisory warning.

#14 - An Eastman turtle romp, cute Casey and April stuff, a favourite of mine.

#15 - Laird again, and adventure again. good art.

#16 - A guest issue, Mark Martin, also his strongest imho. Not very chronologically based (a time travel plot in fact) but I'd recommend this even to people who don't read mirage.

#17 - Eric Talbot, kinda of a guest issue, within its own text, non canonical, but cute. Mikey focused.

#18 - Guest issue, Mark Bodé. The plot is. Anti MSG messaging? Turtles go to China. Really truly, you can skip this.

Yes again, obviously you should read these. I like them so much. Brothers! Feelings! Murder! Its the works.

Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1-7

Probably not were they go by publication date, but for simplicity... Lighter, easy read comics, all of them were adapted into 03 btw. I say read em, I saved them up for when mainline got too vexing. But probably at least read 4 [I, monster] and 6 [Leatherhead].

#22-48. Yes, most of em. Are "the guest era". But painting this large a chunk with the same skip or dont skip brush is beyond the pale. Some of the best and worst of Mirage is in here. Lets break it down.

#22-23. Sequels to #16. Not as strong, much weirder. But if you wanted more. You've got it. Has one gag I really like, and one I really don't.

#24-26. Rich Veitch's river saga. THE frictional art of frictional art. Emotional arc for the turtles, political and spiritual messaging. Advisory Warning for depiction of an Indigenous (Of an Algonquian tribe, probably Abenaki?) character and themes of colonialism, lots of offensive language used tho also, pro land back? Mysticism abound. If you read it, lets talk!

#27 Michael Dooney, a revisit of characters from Tales of TMNT, Radical and Carnage. Now in a... spiritual battle involved in (I believe, Lakota) religion. Stuff to chew on maybe, less offensive langauge but also maybe less to say. Dooney's treatment of women hints to a pattern.

#28 Written by Stephen Murphy and with art by Jim Lawson, makes this technically canonical, and regardless. Introspective and emotional. SO FUCKING GOOD. Also an 03 episode.

#29. AC Farley, read it for the art alone. Wild plot, fun romp.

#30. Rich Veitch again, cars! the grotesque! Highway culture. Very strange, pretty fun.

#31. Mike Zuilli and Stephen Murphy. This is truly, an AU. Continued in #35-36 (Sans Murphy). Maybe interesting to check out? Weird ass hell, maybe not in a good way? The strangest Splinter and Shredder. Mysticism, ofc. 36 Does end interestingly at least.

#32 Mark Bodé again, April and a female friend in Egypt. Cursed mummies, bad outfits. Truly skipable. (Also side bar: If someone told you this is the Only issue were April is drawn as Black or ambiguous. I Disagree. Lot of artists drew her in a lot of ways)

#33. Richard Corben. Silly turtles time travel. Cute, though the art might have given me motion sickness???

#34. Rich Hedden & Tom McWeeney. This is a Parody of the TMNT. Also not very funny. Also depicts a man having delusions and the shooting himself. (As comedy. of course. and its still not funny). Extremely skippable, though despite myself, the shots were said man sees the world populated with turtle mutants are kinda nice.

#35-36. See 31.

Phew. Done. #50-62 is the City At War arc, and finale of Mirage vol. 1. Read it! And good luck skipping any of it, it's like. 5 parallel story lines across 13 issues.

#37 Rick McCollum and Bill Anderson. I. ADORE. This issue. On the record have been singing its praises. Extremely characterful of the turtles, a reptile specific spiritual journey. Sequel to a mini "Donatello: The Ring", from Turtle Soup #2.

#38-40. Hedden and McWeeney again, this time, hornier. Still not funny. SKIPPPPPP.

#41. Matt Howarth. A look into the turtles, and Splinters, dreams. Just a cute little comic.

#42. McCollum and Anderson. Pretty good, an immortal witch summons ghosts of famous people to do her bidding (kidnap the turtles!). Mild advisory for women's depictions in comics, at least their drawn cooler... I like their Renet actually.

#43. Paul Jenkins and A.C. Farley. More of that good art! Donnie in his FEELINGS. Wild premise.

#44. Rick Arthur. Sequel to "The Name is Lucindra" Turtle soup vol 2. Raph gets a female sparring partner. There's maybe some feelings involved? its fine.

#45. Dan Berger. The return of Leatherhead! Probably canonical? I like it!

#46-47. Michael Dooney. A plot thread from #9 gets picked up. The turtles time travel to feudal Japan to stop a bad guy. Doesn't get more classic that that. Dooney's depiction of women goes turbo nuclear with this tho. Renet is less garbed than very and being man handled A lot.

#48-49 You have reached normal continuity by mirage regulars again. Casey Jones has a moral quandary of vigilantism. Return of Nobody from Tales of the TMNT. The turtles say some based shit about cops.

And that's pretty much it! I'm not skip listing all the side content cause i haven't read it yet and also. If your the kinda sicko who wants to read Mirage's Gobbledygook, Grunts, Turtle Soup or Plastron Cafe... What would you need a skip list for?

Wow! Now that's really it! You did it! Catch me next time when I finally know what the fuck happened with the rest of Mirage's publishing! Or what the hell is up with image comics? Or maybe those darn adventure comics from Archie.

[mooncalfe-art]

Following up on my last ask, when I said they are implied to be separate I do not mean completely different universes, but moreso that volume 4 is a “canon hypothetical.” Both Image volume 3 and a whole lot of stories from the Guest Era of volume 1 are based in the same universe (the bonus #24 and #25 issues that I mentioned earlier do connect Image to the Mirage continuity) but are considered noncanon or, at best, “dubious” in regards to the original volume 1 turtles. There is also the multiple different future scenarios that we see that tie to Mirage, such as “After the Bomb: Road Hogs” and multiple stories in Tales 2, but are not technically the intended end to the turtles, just interpretations. Laird describes volume 4 as that, his interpretation of what happens to the turtles, and has referred to Image ans some future comics similarly. One example is when Laird compares volume 4 to being a “future scenario,” which seems to me to imply that it’s a plausible suggestion even if not definitive. Volume 4 is described as one of “some of the Turtle universes” in the 30th celebration special, as well as being called a “new story” and a “revisit.” Laird even says about Tales 2 that he hadn’t even read all the issues. Just yeah, interesting connotations on what that says about volume 4. I hope they pick Mirage picks it up again nonetheless.

Ahh I get what you mean, yeah, that makes sense. Peter definitely didn't read all the issues, I have embarrassing firsthand proof of this, lol. I did some covers and frontispieces for Mirage way back around 2007 (Bad Moon Rising and a couple other Tales issues), and I was like "yes, now I have the perfect in for going up to Peter at New York Comic Con! He'll already know who I am!" So I confidently went up to Peter at his booth/table and introduced myself and that I'd done work on Bad Moon Rising etc. and Peter said he not only didn't know who I was he also didn't know anything about the issues I worked on, haha. It took all the wind out of my sails and I was reduced to basically mumbling "yeah I love TMNT bye" and I ran away. This was only a couple years before the Nickelodeon/Viacom sale so I think Peter was pretty checked out at that point, which I don't blame him for. Suffice to say I have never gone up to another creator I love again, lol.

[tawked]

@irequirealobotomy

I agree!

I mean, it absolutely depends on the version of these characters, but my thought process here was:

The 1984 Mirage runs (outside of the Guest Era) all explore this idea by asking, what kind of man raises his children as soldiers? What does that do to him? What does that do to his children? How can love win anyway?

It asks, what happens when the war is won (the first time Shredder "dies"), what happens when the war is lost (Shredder chasing the turtles out of NYC), and what happens when the children mature beyond their father's war (Return to New York).

The narrative does condemn Splinter and eventually so do the turtles. They each have their own arc of forgiveness and learn to relate to the war in their own ways, some of them wanting to move on with their lives and escape the conflict, others adopting their father's cause as their own. It's some of the best comic writing ever, imo.

But the core of it is, Eastman & Laird (& Lawson) all do condemn Splinter. They don't make excuses or soften his actions with retcons. They are absolutely committed to this core concept that Splinter did something very fucked up to his sons, and although he had understandable reasons to do so and we are invited to sympathize with him. We are led along avenues toward forgiving him through each turtle's personal journey but the narrative never decides to abandon the idea that each turtle has been hurt by this.

Meanwhile, the Batman comics around this time were a serious mess. A lot of the harm Bruce did to his boys is one moment very overstated (Marv Wolfman and Denny O'Neil) and the next kind of forgiven. A lot of the value of Grant Morrison's run, imo, is that it seriously rehabilitates the relationship between Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne by placing Dick in a sort of mixed-reversed Bruce role with Damian, all of Bruce's 80s and 90s edgy character traits bundled into a lil boy in a Robin costume.

I agree that the current take is that Bruce was raising traumatized children in such a way as to protect them from themselves, and I really wish every official DC writer understood that, but TMNT came out of a time when the main stable of Batman writers really didn't, and preferred this idea of Batman as a socially inept, emotionally repressed obsessive who emotionally abuses everybody around him.

Both dynamics are kinda scuffed imo by the fact that these characters have been rewritten and rewritten and rewritten such that the form they take in peoples' minds now don't resemble the forms they took when they both existed.

hello

[popculturebuffet]

Ducktales: The Treasure of the Lost Lamp Movie Reviewcap! (Patreon Stretch Goal)

Hello all you happy people! And we have a special review today for two reasons. The first is that this is my second patreon stretch goal review, having hit the 15 dollar goal back in march thanks to my wonderful friend Emma, the same patreon whose responsible for the Green Eggs and Ham Reviews,  who helped me hit the 15 dollar goal.  As a result you fine people are getting three movie reviews each based on a Disney Afternoon Movie with Treasure of the Lost Lamp today, a goofy movie at the end of the motnh for  a weeklong tribute to my favorite dogmandadguy.  Extremley was going to be part of it but the length of this review convinced me otherwise, but I will be doing it this summer so keep an ear out. If you want to help me hit my next stretch goals do yourselve a favor and zip on over to my patreon YOU CAN FIND MY PATREON HERE. My next stretch goal at “OH Look 20 Dollars” would give everyone patreon and not, a monthly review of Darkwing Duck as decided by my patrons, reviews of BOTH season 2 mini series from Ducktales 87, introducing Fenton to the world and blighting it with Bubba before the 2017 series fixed him, and as a brucey bonus added last month a review of Danny Phantom the Ultimate Enemy. And if that wasn’t enough if you help me get to the goal after that at 25 unlocks another trilogy of disney film reviews, this time for the proud family and recess movie and the best kim possible movie, and dcom period, so the drama as well as Bryan Lee O’ Malley’s two stand alone graphic novels, lost at sea and seconds for you Scottaholics in the audience.

The other reason now the shilling’s done. is that the plan WAS to review this back to back with Treasure of The Found Lamp, to the point the orginal review had a whole thing about that, why it was delayed etc... but now that review’s been scrapped all together as something sudden and wonderful happened. After just kinda giving up someone came through with a translation of Della’s first apperance so presumibly i’ll be doing that as part of the build up to mother’s day, and since I still want ot do maternal instincts too, and already had to let the Floyd Gottfredson birthday special slide away as well... it had to go as I want to leave the only open space on the schedule for the lovely person who found the story for me. But this review is still done, i’m very proud of it so join me under the cut won’t you?

Behind The Scenes: Before I get into it i’d just like to note this article from SyFy Wire. It , along with articles I found via wikipedia citations, was an invaluable resource. 

The film was an experiment: It was an experiment to see if one of their tv properties could bring in theatrical money, to see if a movie made on a cheaper budget and still rake in decent money, to see if a film could be made being outsourced to several diffrent places, and to see what one of those places, their recently aquiried french stuido, could handle this kind of work. 

The film, if succesful would be the first of Disney’s MovieToons line, a series of films based on their shows. As you can tell by the fact only this movie and Goof Troop happened and the Movie Toons label wasn’t applied to that one it very much failed. While the film was warmly recevied by people who liked the show general audiences didn’t turn out for it. As a result the MovieToons label was scrapped, future projects with it were canceled.. but the stellar work put in by the french stuidio lead to it perserviering for several more decades and lead to them working on the Goofy Movie, which we’ll get to later this month but needless to say was a MUCH bigger hit with a much bigger budget. 

As for why the film failed... I have two theories. THe first is that parents were stupid back then and didn’t want to pay to see something on the big screen they could see on tv’s. This is a stupid mentality to me as generally a movie of a tv show puts in a ton of extra effort and usually goes bigger and dosen’t go home. It’s a likely theory given most liscened films of the era didn’t do quite well, with all three hasbro films tanking. And look I get Transformers the Movie is cheesy and killed a lot of people’s childhood toys, but damn if it ain’t aweosme.. and also something I need to cover at some point. Thankfully this died out by later in the 90′s with Rugrats getting a hugely succesful if flawed film, a better sequel and a third one that was also a crossover with the wild thornberries. 

And even now in 2020 we’re getting the Loud House and Rise of the TMNT movies sometimes this summer, we were SUPPOSED to have gotten the bobs burgers movie this summer but arne’t because Disney is being a dick about it.

And we got a phineas and ferb movie last year. With this trend hopefully thsi means we’ll get a Ducktales 2017 movie at some point since season 4 left a huge sequel hook laying right there to grab for a feature film.  One final note: The film was conceptually thought up as a 5 part serial like “Treasure of the Golden Suns”, “Catch as Cash Can”, “SuperDucktales” and “Time is Money, something that DOES show as the movie weirdly has act breaks. In a feature film. Yup. 

The Guest Cast:

I won’t go into the full cast since I’ve sung Alan Young and Russi Taylor’s praises PLENTY on this blog before, and I plan to go into Beakly and Launchpad’s actors when they show up in the pilot movie. But i’d be remiss if i didn’t talk about our three guest actors for our three new parts. 

First up is Merlock voiced by legend and if I had a hall of fame, hall of famer Christopher Lloyd.. I need to get me one of those. Lloyd is of course known for playing Doc Brown in back to the future but has done countless other films, voicework, and other good stuff. Among his MASSIVE filmography includes The Back to the Future Trilogy (Already mentioned it but it bears repeating), Star Trek III, Who Framed Roger Rabbit as the pants destroyingly terrifying Judge Doom, The Addams Family duology as fester, a role rip torn would ironcially play for the animated series made to captalize on said movie, Hey Arnold! The Movie, The Oogieloves in The Big Ballon Adventure (Look everybody needs money sometimes okay?), and Art of the Deal: The Movie, which was not, thankfully an ego filating nightmare made by trump himself but a film made by funny or die parodying his terrible book and having Llloyd return as Doc Brown. TV Wise he’s known for Taxi, Back to the Future the Animated Series, Cyberchase and he most recently popped up on Big City Greens. How I missed that ep I.. do know as I haven’t watched season 2. Gonna fix that later this month. Lloyd is utterly awesome, a great guy and thankfully still alive at the time of this writing, so I was happy to have him here. 

Less familiar to me but still known is Rip Taylor, a comedian known for his flamboyant unique way of speech and his marvelous mustache. He showed up in things occasionally and always seemed like the nicest guy and his passing in late 2019 truly is sad. He does a terrific job here but more on that in a moment. 

Finally we have Richard Libertini, a comedian I never really saw in anything besides this who according to IMDB was most famous for his ablility to do a foreign accent. I REALLY hope all of them aren’t as horribly racist as this one. We’ll.. get to that in a sec as it’s time for the plot!

A Treasure Uncovered:

We open our film gorgeously. The animation is great in the film, having some rough edges I chalk up to the film’s hectic production, the studio being new at working at disney properties, and the film not being meant for HD. That being said a few rough spots here and there aside.. the film looks ungodly gorgeous. Like most theatrical films based on a cartoon it takes an already great style and makes it look great. It feels like a more fluid evolution of the cartoons look and it’s a shame we didn’t get more movies in this style for both this show and others, ESPECIALLY Darkwing Duck. Can you imagine a Darkwing Duck movie with this lush animation? Hopefully we’ll get one eventually. 

So our heroes are going to somewhere in the Middle East. That’s.. that’s all wikipedia gives me and all the film gives me. As usual Scrooge is after treasure in this case the Treasure of Collie Baba, the greatest thief there ever was based obviously off Ali Baba from 1001 nights and that one Beastie Boys song. 

It’s here we find the WORST thing about the film, the thing that makes this a hard one to watch depsite otherwise being pretty good, and that makes my skin crawl knowing i’m a white man and a BUNCH of white guys, Ducktales series creator who did the voice casting for this character, the writers who wrote him, the direector disney them fucking selves who thought this was okay. 

The film has some horrible steroytping. It starts with a bunch of backgorund guys surronding Scrooge, with crooked teeth and steotypical voices. This on it’s own is odious. 

It somehow gets worse. Then we meet one of our antagonists. We meet Dijon. 

This Fucking Guy 

Djon is horribly offensive reminding me of other such luminaries in being ungodly offensive yet somehow getting put to film as Jar Jar Binks (With all respeect to his poor actor Ahmed Best, this is not his fault), Rob Schinder as a Sterotypically asian preist, Skids and Mudflap, Rob Schinder as a sterotypically mexican bandit, The Whitewashed cast of The Last Airbender, and Rob Schinder as a stereotypically asian preist. What i’m saying is Djon is an AWFUL, horribly offensive character.. and that Rob Schinder should be shot up into space, not to watch cheesy movies, he’s not funny enough for that, but instead to be sent to a satlitie that’s liveable, but also filled to the brim with spring loaded boxing gloves. Just tons of boxing gloves that feel like getting punched by a heavewight boxer all hidden... they could hit his legs, his face, his nuts, his face and his nuts, the point is he’s in constnat pain unless he moves carefully. 

And lest you think i’m exaggerating for starters this is his design. 

It just screams “vaugely but sterotpyically middle eastern” along with cowardly. The fact he’s also a literal rat is just the icing on the cake made of broken glass, shrapnel and broken DVD’s of Transformers; Revenge of the Fallen. They say if you eat a reveng eof the fallen dvd John Tutoro appears at the foot of your bed and watches you while you sleep.. and by they I mean me. It was a bad bet. I got rid of him with some insese and a bribe of five dollars. 

Oh but that’s just design.. when he talks it’s MUCH worse. His voice is like if they took Apu from the simpsons and said “This but MORE offensive”, and his perosnality is WORSE. He’s a thief.. and not in the endearing loveable rogue way but he’s a pick pocket and a running “Gag’ is that he’ll often grab eveyrthing within reahc. As the deisgn shows he’s a coward running at every opportunity. Oh and to top it all off he’s the willing servant of the white coded, given all ducks in this series are white coded and voiced bby white actors, big bad. And the actor is naturally VERY white to make this cocktail of offensivness so complete that if Disney ever got rid of this film I GUARANTEE the republcian party would be running in with accusations of cancel culture gone amok and never shutting up about this like they did the muppets. Which for the record THEY DIDN’T CANCEL THEM, YOUR POINT IS ILLEGITMATE, THEY JUST WANTED TO BE SENSTIVE YOU GHOULS. 

I do have a reason for bringing up Disney’s content warnings... most damming of all given just how DEEPLY uncomfortbale this character is.. there isn’t one for this movie. I double checked: There isn’t even wanring notes on the website. It’s just.. on there. And given just how ghastly a sterotype Djon is.. that’s not right. Seriously they DID put them on certain episodes of the show, theyk now this sort of thing is wrong and they done wrong.. but for NO reason they haven’t done so for a film released 31 years ago. Around the same time as the series and just offensive as that show at it’s worst if not more so. This is flatly inexcusable.. par for the course for Disney’s incompetence but still horribly furstrating, disgusting and shameful.. which has been the theme of the last three days really. I expect better because when it comes to putting that warning label on this stuff, they usually are better. First the scheduling mixup and now this. You already do a handful of things wrong Disney why add this to the list?!

It’s just draining not only to run into another Disney Fuckup after a weekend of dealing with one of their worst in recent memory, but just to watch Djon. To see this horrible caractrure saunter onto the screen and go on with his harmful schtick, to see that THIS is what Ducktales 87 reduced non white people to more often than not.  It’s remarkable just how throughly and awesomely Frank and Matt completely and totally reversed this. Instead of horrible sterotypes in the reboot, we got TONS of loveable people of color, an endearing latino hero, a smart african american buisness woman who takes no shit but is still a consumate professional, and an egyptian HERO with an intresting story and a strong moral code instead of this horrible reminder that racisim in media was such an afterthought not ONE person brought this up during the scyfy wire stuff or in any inteview i’ve seen. No one cared. Djon was POPULAR enough that he got three episode sin the series. THREE FUCKING EPISODES. This film could be GOOD.. but it’s just so bogged down EVERY FUCKING TIME this artists interpreitation of what Tucker Carlson sees when he looks at a middle eastern person I had to pause to compose myself and had to take a break writing this review to avoid tyiping this in all caps and using the phrase YOU RACIST MOTHERFUCKERS every other sentence. And again i’m white, I get this is second hand offensiveness.. I do... but it dosen’t mean I can’t be offended other white people were so callous about other cultures behaviors this happened.

And what makes me feel worse.. is that I just sorta... never thought about white people voicing non white characters. Things like this I noticed sure, I realize now part of the reason I didn’t like this movie the first time I saw it was this alex jones version of a looney tune, but I do feel shame for not noticing or caring long before this. Sure I loved it when a character of color got played by a person of color.. but I didn’t realize just how deep that problem was and how LONG it went on for before the outcry post george floyd and the call to action lead to most shows still going course correcting. It’s why stuff like this extra botehrs me: because THIS was just as okay at the time. No one blinked twice about this and odds are the creators involved still haven’t. And that.. that’s just terrible and it hurts to think about and  I still have most of the movie to go.  

The Pyramid of Peril:

So we do get a gorgeous unvewling scene of a box Scrooge found out about from Collie Baba’s horde that should lead them to the treasure. This scene reminds me of Indina Jones.. and I bring this up because the poster was specifically made to mimick an indinia jones poster, to the point of getting drew struzan to do it. THe creator of Ducktales objected..l but I do not get WHY. While I”m not sure if he had yet, Speilberg flat out admits the Carl Barks comics were an inspiration for Indina Jones, with the iconic bolder chase coming from a similar scene in one of Barks Stories. Gotta cover that too. So yeah I don’t get not wanting an indina jones style poster when both were inspiried by the same work and it’s just simple logic and it looks so neat. Thank you. 

Scrooge finds seemingly just clothes.. and a map. Jeff Dunham’s Most Racist Puppet reports to his master, Merlock. Merlock is a.. meh villian. Christopher Lloyd does try.. but Lock is your standard evil overlord wants to take over the world type. He dosen’t have much depth, or personality and only his style saves him from dragging the film down along with Dana Carvey’s most racist disguise in master of disguise. He does have a deent shape shifting gimick and being played by Christopher Lloyd means he’s acted TREMENDOUSLY. Alan Young was apparently in awe watching him work and that’s wonderful to hear. The guy did his best. Weirdly Merlock would show up in tons of other works, mostly video games.. but even weirder he NEVER showed up in ducktales 2017. Both Djon and Gene would, Djon thankfully renamed we’ll get to all of that tommorow thank god. I need it after this. But Frank has outright said they didn’t use Merlock because there simply wasn’t anything they could do with him they couldn’t dow ith magica. My likely guess is the might of found a way to revamp him EVENTUALLY, it’s not like radical revamps weren’t there thing come on, they just had way more stories with Magica and didnd’t get around to it before the show was canceled. Just make him some sort of evil god or something. it’s what I might do. There’s a lot of angles with him. Though I would’ve still gotten christopher lloyd back. I mean most of the recasting is good but he’s still alive and deserved a better shot at things. 

So Merlock sends Djonn to go with scrooge as his guide to find the treasure, as there’s something of imense power within it. And I gotta ask WHY does Merlock need a minon. No really. This isn’t a situation like reboot magica where he’s trapped in another realm. He can shapeshift into any animal. We only see him use falcon, rat, cockroach and bear but theoritically he can become anything and bear alone is still a LOT. Why does he need this sterotype even other sterytopes ar eashamed of? The film dosen’t NEED Djonn. Just let Christopher Lloyd monologue and leave this post 911 propogranda cartoon at home. 

So our heroes nad rejected jar jar prototype head into the desert, and seemingly find nothing before finding a small pyramid all while Merlock follows desecretley as a mighty hawk. 

Scrooge makes the boys and Djon dig... because they clearly forgot the “work hard” part of his ethos. 

Our heroes unveil the pyramid... and while Merlock SAYS he searched the desert and I get it’s hard to see thourgh all of that.. the dude is immortal, had decades to search and had Mickey Rooney there on standby to force him to go comb the desert. I have an artist rendering of that hang on

So our heroes enter the pyramid and it goes.. really how you’d expect: there’s a bunch of traps our brave explorers have to pass, the boys minintpret a juinor woodchuck saying about loosing your marbles to mean using the ones they actually have which geninely comes in handy as they trip the traps and Rob SChinder as a carrot stumbles into one. Also launchpad is wearing a hawaiin shirt and shades. This has no baring on the plot, but it does bring the movie up a notch in my book and I question why the reboot never used this outfit. Then again they also never properly used Donald’s Quack Pack Outfit (Which bad show or not, is objectively awesome), or his Quack Shot Indiana Jones Riff Outfit, so  it’s not like there isn’t a presdecnt for not giving a character a cool costume change from a previous medium. I really should do a top 12 missed opportunities list for the 2017 cartoon.. the ideas for stuff are really piling up. 

OUr heroes eventually find the treasure which has insidiously clever security the more I think about it: at first I thought it had none, just a pit with some... scorpions? I mean their supposed to be but they look like they crawled out of the same stygian hole in the sky Doofus crawled out of. And if your asking me “wait which Doofus” the answer is both. Both these abominations crawled out of a stygian hole in the sky.

But the treasure is on a platform surrounded by scoprions with the only way out being the trap filled way they came in. Unless someone comes in with a full team and a bunch of lootin sacks, they aren’t getting out with EVERYTHING. They can steal SOME of the treasure but there’s no way to get any signifigant portion... and the team thing itself is an issue, something Collie defintely predicted being a thief himself: while some thieves can work well as a team, hence why we have four oceans movies 3/4 damn good, and for the record 12 is the bad one, 8 is how you do a soft reboot and a female led reboot right, a good chunk of professional crooks will turn on each other or try and swinldle... and tha’ts dangerous in a trap filled temple but hey some criminals ain’t so smart.  If they all were Rudy Gulliani wouldn’t have two razzies for preparing to pull his pants down, and have waved his phone around on tv like a dare for future adminstrations to arrest the shit out of him would he? 

But Scrooge has his family so they get loading. But not before Webby finds the lamp. Not knowing about it Scrooge has no intrest in it, but Webby does. We also get a really simple but hilarious gag where SCrooge dickers over the idea for a second.. before Webby picks up a Jeweled tiara to possibly take instead. The best gags to me are often the ones that just let the character’s perosnalities take the lead and bounce off each other. It’s why when I reviewed the four lilo and stitch crossovers recently I harped on character interaction as their biggest weakness: it’s what MAKES a good work for me. It’s why my faviorite comics and shows often follow a loveable group of disfunctional misfits. I like a group of big personalities who despite in theory should NOT be able to work making it work anyway. And it’s honeslty what’s made Scrooge last so long: Scrooge on his OWN is awesome.. but iwth the boys, donald, and in the case of this series and the reivival Webby and Launchpad, with people to bounce off of who he contrasts heavily with, from Launchapd’s buffonery to Webby’s inehrent sweetness in both versions, to the boys genuine honesty and sense of adventure.... it makes him truly stand out. He’s a great character on his own, don’t get me wrong.. but it’s the people around him that give him chances to show WHY. A good character on it’s own is fine and dandy.. a good character with other good characters around them is where it gets truly special. 

Merlock naturally bursts in and in a VERY Black Heron move needlesly outs what micheal bay sees when he closes his eyes as a bad guy... no really he grabs the guy with his talons as he captures the treasure and reveals he’s a bad guy. I don’t even get why keep Djonn alive. He’s done all Merlock possibly could’ve needed and Merlock is ruthless... this makes no sense and only happens because they need Djonn for later in the plot.

Our heroes barely escape, rafting out on the platform itself in a thrilling sequence.. but it’s the one right after that catches my attention. Scrooge utterly defeated, having searched for this treasure for forty years and unresponsive to everyone else. The anmation, coupled with the incomprable Alan young’s acting makes this the highlight of the film for me. Beneath the armor of wealth and skill.. is only a poor old man who just lost something he’s been chasing after most of his life. Scrooge tries his hardest not to be vunerable and both shows and the original comics all use that so when he truly is devistated like this, and i’ts belivible since this treasure is a personal goal of his and as someone who has had things that they seek out specifically, loosing them always hurts. It hurts to ALMOST reach a goal only to have it crumble out under you

But while this alone is good.. what’s next makes it great. Webby sweetly offers up the lamp. Scrooge turns it down, and her genuine gesture reinvgorates him and reminds us of who he is “I’ll find it if it takes another 40 years”> Scrooge may be bitter, mean and selfish a lot of the time.. but deep down, he’s a good man and one who will not give up, and a momentary setback can only stop him so long as long as he has his family to remind him of who he truly is.. and what’s truly important. It’s genuinely sweet and to me is also a reminder of why 87 Webby is a good character: Shes’ not perfect, her main personality trait is often Girl Sterotype”.. but she’s a genuinely sweet small child with a huge heart. It’s telling that while 17′ Webby is almost completely diffren,t and far better, that heart remains her biggest strength. Sure her reboot self could kill a man nad no one would ever find the body, but it’s her heart and empathy that makes that possible and makes her Webby.  That inherent loving nature is what makes Webby webby wether she’s a toddler having a tea party or a tween getting ready to intergoate a guy with a meat tenderizer while saying ‘Cute girl stuff”. 

Gene Genie Let’s Himself Go:

It’s a few days later and this is the point where it REALLY becomes obvious this was written as a bunch of episodes. Though to the film’s credit while it does ake this feel like a compliation movie as a result... it dosen’t hamper the film’s quality, condiment from Rush Limbaghs’ hot dog stand does that just fine, but once you notice it it’s impossible to unotice it. Weirdly though it seems chunked up into four episodes rather than the usual five, likely cutting down an episode, though I can’t see where they cut out material frankly if they did and i’ts just as likely they woudl’ve had to make one to fill in the space.

So Scrooge is in a mood, being grumpy with his secretary Mrs. Featherly, quackfaster in all but name, and having to be sent home. So while Duckworth goes to fetch him Webby polishes her treasure at long last readying for a tea party, something the boys roundly reject because their sexist little twits and swo were the writers or executies who assumed all little boys act the same. It’s easily my biggest pet peeve with the series as a whole: anytime this crops up with the boys it turns them into the worst dicks imaginable. It’s telling this, being mean about her wantin ga tea party with her surrogate brothersi s TAME. Normally they’ll say she can’t do things because she’s a girl or mock her hobies outright instead of just be mildly dickish. And while she dosen’t look much younger Webby is VERY CLEARLY, in this series anyway, supposed to be say 5 or 6 to the boys 8-10. 7 at most. SHe’s a small child and while it is realistic for older kids to bully younger ones, it’s not fun to watch. It’s why I get annoyed at all the big sibling bully characters.. some work, but most aren’t fun to watch because there’s nothing funny or intresting about it. It’s the same deal here. 

Thankfully that quickly goes away as the lamp moves when Webby rubs it and does so again to prove it did move. Huey finishes it and we’re introduced to Gene, the best part of the film.  Gene is a Genie and he takes a second to dart around before messing with the appliances in the kitchen, as he was last around during the time 1001 Nights Came About. Cleverly though, and so we thankfully don’t have 80 dozen fishout of water jokes that have already been done before. As you can probably guess i’m not a huge fan of time travel fish out of water stuff. Now from another dimensoin or planet, i’m on board with with Star Vs, Steven Universe and Sym-Bionic Titan being great examples of this, as is the comic resident alien. (Despite having the wonderous Alan Tuduk the show sounds way more mean spirited and misses the entire point of the comic as given by the author in the credits, i.e. that the alien is supposed to NOT be a threat and just be gently waiting for a ride) The inverse is also good with Amphbia and owl house, taking a human and plopping them into our world. But time travel stuff just usually runs the same beats of “look at the shiny thing” and what not. The only time i’ve sene something SIMILAR work is with thor where their society is SIMILAR to vikings time but still it’s own thing.. it also gave us a classic gag in..

So yeah i’m glad they dropped this and instead had a clever way around it: Gene reads the encylopedia at the mansion. Granted it’s Scrooge so I don’t know how current it is and given this came out in 1990 thus HOW racist it is. It’s not a questoin of IF it was, but how much.

But having caught up the kids confront him with the fact he has to grant wishes. This lamp runs on what I now realize are Aladdin rules: Whoever currently holds the Lamp is the Genie’s master, they only get three wishes, and that dosen’t reset if it changes hands. The only big diffrence from the usual is Gene dosen’t have to TELL them about the wishes like Genie did, and Gene very begrudginly agrees to it. He also seem’s phsyically pained when doing so. 

So since all 12 know about him, each of the kids gets a wish though it seems unfair with HDL. Their one person, they shoudln’t get 9 wishes just because their brain is spread out over three bodies. 

This film continues the weird simliarties to Aladdin by attaching rules though they instead come up as a result of our heroes talking rather than the Genie just flat out tleling them: both share the “you can’t wish for more wishes” thing, a common rule in these stories and usually only broken nowadays as a clever twist as the rule is SO common place, not having it is a twist. But it is there for a reason: to limit the sheer power of a reality warping wish. The wishes can also only go so far. In a nice line, when Huey, Dewey or Louie suggests wishing for peace one earth, Gene says “No pipe dreams’ He can’t bend people or reality on THAT scale. He can bend reality as we find out, but it’s smaller scales like turning someone’s possesions over ot someone else, warping the bin into a castle, or bringing inanitamte objects to limited life. Still HUGE feats worth of a genie, so Gene’s power isn’t so nerfed it’s unusuable, but it does explain why his evil pervious ownder Merlock, more ont hat in a bit too, didn’t just wish to have eternal dominon over the earth or something. Gene can do just about anything but he can’t change the world on a fundemental level. 

And I do LIKE having rules in wished based stories like this, I chalk it up to growing up with Fairly Odd Parents... though they eventually went too far in the oppsoitie direction, pulling rules out of their ass to suit the episode, instead of simply having some very standard, very understandable rules that still pose challenges but don’t outright cheat so the episode can happen. 

So Webby does her first wish.. and wishes for a Baby Elephant, something Gene is against as he prefers they keep the wishes small: otherwise he gets found out, and the fight over him begins. So one of the boys wishes him away. Or Webby does. Point is it’s gone though not before Beakly sees it and Scrooge smells something is up. Our heroes try to hide gene, but gene thankfully simply dresses up like a modern kid and thus is able to pass as a friend of there staying for the night. 

So with the rules established and what not the kids find a clever solution: they simply go a ways away from the mansion into the woods, far enough from town to avoid any suspcion, and same iwth the mansion and just wish for all kinds of stuff: a giant bunch of ice cream toys, standard kid wish fufillment but it’s nice... in part because the kids treat Gene like one of them. Wihle they STARTED asking him about the wishes, this starts the bonding process. Soon he will be part of the hive mind.. SOON. 

Until then though after using another wish to make scrooge not mad at them for coming home late and missing dinner, that night we find out Gene’s backstory.... and it’s an utter tearjerker. As it turns out Merlock wants him back because he’s Gene’s former master and as you’d guess.. it was NOT a happy existnace, used contstnatly to do horrible things with no power to stop himself. Pompeii and Atlantis were both directly Merlock’s fault and it was only Collie Baba stealing the lamp that put an end to his hell. He also answers the two obvious questions botht he audeiince and the boys have: How the hell is Merlock still alive and shoudln’t he be out of wishes then? The first is simple. Unlike pretty much every DBZ Villian whose WANTED to do so, Merlock wished for immortality first chance he got, taking the Zamasu route instead and thus leaving him free. 

As for the wishes thing it turns out his amulet, in adition to shapeshifting, also gives him extra wishes becuase fuck it. 

But the boys sweetly offer to protect him. 

The next day, Apu’s Cousin let’s Merlock know the maps in the mansion and Merlock has him help sneak in with Merlock taking rat form. This backfires as Mrs. Beakley notices the form and chases after him with a broom

Meanwhile Webby has her tea party with Gene after he and the boys played cops and robbers earlier, and he’s bored.. though nicely not because it’s a girly thing, but because the stuffed animals aren’t alive and she naively has him fix that. This leads to 

Which sadly is jsut scrooge vs a duck toy but admit it, you want that movie for Disney Plus yesterday. Call Charles Band Disney. CALL CHARLES BAND! 

Whelp Scrooge Still Sucks:

Scrooge takes for a turn for the obnoxious in the next part, but i’ts fine by me as it’s part of the plot. Naturally this reinactment of Cult of Chucky has lead to Scrooge finding out about the Genie. To his credit, Scrooge is tactical about his wishes. As said by the Duck himself “I could wish for a diamond, no the world’s biggest dimaond, no ten world’s biggest diamond, no a diamond mind, no the MINING INDUSTRY!”

The sheer power this gives him is TERRIFYING, both because of his status.. and because unlike the kids who all wished for simple kid stuff and used up their wishes quickly, he both gets how much he can do with this and could conquer the world economy if he truly wanted to. 

The obnoxious part comes in as he treats Gene as not a person, figuring he’s just there and forces him into the lamp despite the kids protests after Gene grants his first wish: Collie Baba’s treasure. It also dosen’t feel like the wishing nor him using the lamp to get the tresure back goes against his hard work ethos: for the former while he is getting all this magically, he’s still having ot use his wits to get the most out of it, and he did earn the lamp itself square. For the latter, he already earned the treasure square too and had it stolen. He’s onlyg etting back what’s by all rights HIS. Granted he plans on giving most of it up for a tax break but still it’s his by right. 

However the reason his assholery works is twofold: first it’s Scrooge. While he’s not a TERRIBLE person, in the comcis and this cartoon he isn’t a GOOD person either. He DOES have a good heart and will usually do the right thing, but his first instnct is always to get more money and to be a cantakerous old bastard to eveyrone and everything. While he’s subtly grew out of “I hate eveyrone and everyone hates me” as his guiding principal, it’s still his defualt reaction to most situations. But he first relents by letting Gene attend the party, part of why the Collie Baba thing stung so bad was that he’s told the historical society he’d get the treasure for years only to come back empty handed, if shrunken. But he still manages to have a good time while Asok and Merlock infiltrate.. well I’mRunningOutofINsultingNIcknamesCanYouTell steals the silverware. Yes... that.. that really happens. 

Look we’re almost done, i’m almost free of this racist mummies curse. Let’s continue. Gene sees melock and freaks and drags SCrooge with him and while at First Scrooge is cranky...

No but now I want a Donkey Kong Country crossover too dammmit. And to talk about those games. Another thing for the list. But Scrooge is righ tot be a bit surly...

Okay now your just pushing it. As Gene whisked him away without telling him anything other than vauge worries... but then he gets a full idea of why Gene’s so terrified when Merlock shapeshifts into a bear and starts breaking the door down. Eh, could be worse. 

Gene shrinks them to escape and Merlock leaves thinking they fled but leaves Skids Minus Mudflap to go look for them. Scrooge sneaks out but bumps into a cart running from the photo you see when you look up stereotype on google. I mean I assume.. let’s try it. 

Huh you know I HOPED but I never expected... 

So Google Proving My Point plans to give his lamp to the master because of his weird Torgo-Esque obession with helping a man who clearly wants to murder him but takes his sweet time doing so because plot, and Gene figuring this COULDN’T POSSIBLY go as bad as Melock getting him urges the dummy to keep him and make his own wishes.

This goes about as well as you’d expect....

Wiped Out With A Wish:

Scrooge returns home to find Watto has wished to take his poessions, fortune, everything and Scrooge gets thrown in jail for breaking into his own house. We get two great moments back to back. The first is Scrooge lamenting loosing his fortune in jail, and realizing the sheer power and risk of the lamp, especially since he worked hard to earn it, every bit of it.. and Sam Wilson’s 70′s Backstory came in and took it all in an instant. 

The second is Scrooge’s family coming for him, including Launchpad , Beakly and Webby obviously and bailing him out. Though Beakly is UNGOLDLY annoying in this scene, sobbing hysterically and adding nothing and it’s not nearly as funny as the  film thinks. Turns out Goliath getting buried wrapped in chains threw them out. 

Scrooge takes a bit to rebound from all this.. but eventually realizes something: he knows the security of the bin inside and out. He had it put in after all. So it’d be easy enough to break in. So they gotta break in to break out the lamp, undo this nightmare, and END THIS MOVIE. Seriously this review has taken two days  as is I do NOT want to miss my invincible review. 

So they break into the bin, and it’s a tightly paced Scene, scrooge going in one way while the kids go the other and we even get a nice callback as the marbels come in handy to get past one of the traps. It’s just a good scene. it’s only real flaw is that Launchapd just sorta disappears as does Duckworth despite the fact their in a plane, and the bin later gets turned into a floating castle. Kinda a plot hole to not have Launchpad crash in to save htem just saying. 

Scrooge eventually does get to Djonn, whose been ignoring the imminent threat of Merlock while Gene sweats it out... and this backfires horribly as Merlock hitched a ride as a roach (Though there was a hilarious scene of him getting fried constnatly by lasers when Louie went through a laser hallway, as while Louie had the directions, it dind’t take into account passengers on your head. 

So Merlock remanifests in full gets the Lamp and unleashes his wrath on Tin Tin in the Congo and turns him into a wild pig. 

Not you sweetie. He then forces Gene to turn the castle into a fortress and float it back to his home in parts unknown. It’s a DAMN cool scene with impressive and horrifiing animation as the bin melts and crumbles into thte castle and the kids barely make it up the stares as they shift and disolve. Really top notch stuff.

Scrooge stands up to Merlock... and this naturally goes poorlyw ith Gene begging Merlock not to respond.. and Merlock having him blow scrooge off the top of the forgtess storm eagle style, though scrooge understands. And this is the true reason why scrooge being a dick didn’t bother me so much. Because it helps create a great contrast between him and Merlock. Both thought of Gene as a tool rather than a person.. but Scrooge grew to realize he was wrong and what he was dealing with wasn’t some magical goodies creator.. but a child forced to constantly grant wishes, in sheer agony to do so no less, likely so sick of it because again and again and again people used him as a slave to get what they wanted and to hell with what Gene wanted. He realized he was terrible for making this poor boy into his slave simply because that’s his job. In contrast Merlock could give no shits and is a malevolent monster who glefully uses Gene despite the pain the wishes put him through and his protests. It’s why Gene is the best part.. he’s  athroughly likeable, throughly inncoent character with tons of personality and a truly tragic and horrifying backstory and Rip Taylor acts the hell out of every scene with the guy. 

Thankfully the marbles come in handy one last time and Huey, Dewey or Louie snipes the lamp away and a struggle for it insues between Scrooge and Merloc mid air. it’s fucking awesome.. and it get sbetter in how scroogewins. He simply gets rid of Merlock’s amulet, taking it then throwing it. Grante dhe COULD’EVE used it for unimited wishes.. but it was too risky to do that and as we’ll see in the ending , Scrooge realized the Lamp was too powerful to keep around for much longer and too much of a tempting target for his rogues.. not that we see them this movie as the crew wanted it to bea ccesaible and thus kept hte cast to the main cast from season 1 and just made new vilians and a new supporting character, but still. 

He does use his second wish though to undue the damage Merlock had done and the bin and clan mcduck are returned to duckburg in good condition.

Time for our ending, which is genuinely and wholly touching. With the lamp too dangerous to use Scrooge considers just sending it to the earth’s core, which horrifies the kids as it’d mean Gene would be trapped there forever... if the molten lava iddn’t just outright destory the lamp and probably kill him. But Scrooge.. isn’t the bastard he likes to potray himself as. Instead he makes Gene into a real boy. He gives the poor kid HIS wish, which designrates the lamp and undoes all the spells... so Merlock is PROBABLY dead but he does return for some games so maybe not? 

And so we end on two things: Gene happily playing cops and robbers with the boys finally free.. and Birth of A Nation grabbing all the loot he can in his patns and running off. Ha ha ha thank god i’m done with this prick. And no I will not be looking at his ducktales episodes unless I have to. 

Final Thoughts:

This movie is OKAY. It has a solid plot, gene is a wonderful chacter, the animatoin is pretty prettay pretty good, and the voice acting as usual is excellent, with Rip Taylor being the standout. 

But as my paragraphs of rage shoud’ve made Clear Djonn is just BAD. Easily the worst character i’ve encountered in my year of reviewing and some of the worst writing i’ve ran into. And that writing includes a goblin man voyerstically forcing two teenagers to make out, making jokes about santa renaming himself Clem the sceneafter he tearfully confessed to letting the elves and ms. claus die, accidental transphobia via the u-men, and Bryan Lee O malley thinking we needed more than one volume of Julie Powers being around.  This was disgusting, even by 1990 standards and especially by 2021 standards and it drags the film down considerably. Without it the film is okay.. with it the film is just VERY hard to watch any time he pops up.  He made getting through the movie a nightmare and while I pause a lot becaue it’s a bad habbit I did so more simply because as I said earlier in the review I could not stand him. 

It makes it a hard film to recommend. If you can stomach the racisim, then it might be worth it, but be aware of what your putting up with going in. But if you can’t.. there’s no shame in that, it’s carbombya levels of bad. Which yes was a real fictoinal country. It was so bad Casey Casem quit transformers over it. True story. So yeah, it’s an okay film, on par with the series at it’s best for the most part.. but Djonn just spoils it for me. 

If you liked this review, like it, share it around that sort of thing and if you want MORE disney movie reviews, in addiiton to the goofy movie one later this month, if you help me hit my 25 dollar stretch goal on patroen.com/popculturebuffet, i’ll do reviews of the Recess, Proud Family and Kim Possible MOvies (Well so the drama anyway), so help me out would you and i’ll see you at the next rainbow.