The early ‘90s children’s cartoon show Darkwing Duck seemed to have trouble making up its mind. A spin-off from Disney’s excellent DuckTales cartoon series, Darkwing Duck waffles between trying to maintain the same level of kiddie adventure and suspense that DuckTales did, and being an all-out, silly, borderline Tex Avery-style cartoon. Not only that, but the show can’t seem to make up its mind about its main character either.

Is “the Terror that Flaps in the Night” a gadget-wielding superhero ala Batman, a noir detective ala The Shadow or a secret agent ala James Bond? Is Darkwing Duck merely meant to parody these types of heroes or should he be able to stand on his own? Is he a genuine hero with honest-to-goodness crime-fighting skills or just a bumbling Clouseau-esque goofball who inadvertently ends up saving the day?

These are the questions I’m left pondering after rewatching what used to be one of my favorite cartoon shows as a kid and witnessing contradicting evidence of all of the above in the 27 episodes comprising the show’s second DVD volume.

Unfortunately, to my adult eyes, the show has lost much of its luster as these nagging questions and incongruent inconsistencies darken my enjoyment of Darkwing Duck.

Though a few of the characters carry over from DuckTales, the same sense of adventure (inspired by Carl Barks’ Scrooge McDuck comic books of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s) does not. Instead, the sense of “danger” and suspense that usually revolves around a protagonist placed in harm’s way becomes void in Darkwing Duck as the Tex Avery rules of cartoon physics come into play. In the episode “Heavy Mental,” Darkwing finds himself trapped beneath a giant anvil that’s poised to plummet at any moment.

Any tension is sadly missing, though, despite the show’s attempt to use the situation to create such, because earlier in the same episode the audience witnessed Darkwing comically squished beneath an even larger falling house, which he survived by springing back accordion-like. Indeed when the anvil does eventually fall and land on the episode’s villains, they miraculously survive and only suffer the minor inconvenience of taking on a pancake’s dimensions.

Why, then, should we worry for Darkwing’s safety at all? In other episodes he’s comically zapped into dust then appears fine in the very next shot. The fact that the show insists on trying to keep a sense of peril with an anything-goes-in-a-cartoon attitude makes it hard for an adult to get into. It didn’t seem to bother me as a kid, but I was probably just too happy to be at home watching TV instead of at school to care, now that I think about it.

DuckTales was the first of Disney’s syndicated afternoon cartoon shows, followed by Chip ‘n’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers and Tale Spin each year afterwards, eventually being paired with Disney’s Gummi Bears as a two-hour block of children’s entertainment dubbed “The Disney Afternoon.” Darkwing Duck and each following year’s successive cartoon series being churned out by Disney’s TV cartoon unit began to skew much more towards loony “cartoons” than the previous, distinctly old-school Disney animated efforts. The shows went from honest-to-goodness adventure tales that incorporated humor to jokey, hokey ‘toons that tried only for cheap laughs. Darkwing Duck was the turning point.