DVD Review: Darkwing Duck - Volume 2

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.

Article Author: Sombrero Grande

This writer is a member of The Masked Movie Snobs, a collective that fights a never-ending battle against bad entertainment.

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