May 3, 2024

Duck Tales: Not Your Grandfather's Donald Duck

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I bought as many Gold Key Disney comics as I could find: the anonymous artist (later identified as Carl Barks) sent Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, and their three identical-triplet nephews on rousing adventures:  The Lost Crown of Genghis Khan, the Mines of King Solomon, the Golden Fleece,  the Fabulous Philosopher's Stone, the Flying Dutchman.  Come to think of it, I first heard of those legends in Disney comics.


It was a masculine world of high adventure, with no women and no references to heterosexual desire.  Donald, of course, had a girlfriend back home, but she rarely appeared in the adventure stories, and neither Uncle Scrooge nor the nephews displayed any heterosexual interests.

Gold Key comics gradually disappeared during the 1970s, but in 1985, fledgling company Gladstone started publishing Disney comics again.  In West Hollywood, my regular Saturday night routine was to cruise at Mugi, the gay Asian bar, then stop at the Book Circus for a pile of Gladstones. I liked the reprints of classic Carl Barks stories from my childhood. The European versions of the Ducks were sometimes interesting.  But I didn't like Don Rosa's new comics: he gave Uncle Scrooge a passionate, life long romance with Yukon show girl Glittering Goldie. Yikes!


Between 1987 and 1990, the WB broadcast DuckTales, with animated versions of the stories.  Donald Duck is absent, and there are many new characters, including the housekeeper Mrs.Beakley and a girl, Webbigail, I guess to draw in a female audience.

I didn't watch; I was usually busy on weekday afternoons, and besides, I was afraid of what they would do to heterosexualize the beloved gay icons of my childhood.  Have Uncle Scrooge torn between Duck versions of Betty and Veronica? Have Huey, Dewey, and Louie compete over who would bring the it-girl to the school dance?

Now there's a new version of Ducktales (2017-),  with many differences to adjust to the changing times:

1. Donald is back.  He still speaks with that impossible-to-understand Clarence Nash voice from the 1930s cartoons.

2. Mrs. Beakley is a secret agent/bodyguard, not a dowdy housekeeper.

3. Huey, Dewey, and Louie are differentiated into nerd, teen operator, and a third that I haven't identified.

4. Their parents were never mentioned in the comics (except their mother, Della, wrote a note in an early Carl Barks one shot).  Presumably they were dead, which is why Uncle Donald was raising the boys.  But now Della is back. Apparently she was an astronaut, stuck on the moon for several years.

5. Their Boy Scout-like club, the Junior Woodchucks, was boy-only.  Now it's gender-inclusive.  .

6. In the first episode of Season 3, Huey and Violet, a regular rival who has appeared in four previous episodes, compete for a major Junior Woodchucks prize.  And we find out that Violet has two dads!

They have no speaking parts, but they're very obvious,drawn to stand out from the other characters, both wearing "I'm With Dad"t-shirts.  First they are sitting with the other parents during a presentation; then they appear in the background during a sports day; and finally they come up onto the stage to congratulate Violet on winning the prize.


Ok, it's the third season, and as far as I can tell, neither they nor Violet appear in any later episodes.. Not a lot of representation.  But seeing them share the screen with Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, and the nephews isamazing, as if Duckburg has been gay-friendly all along.

8 comments:

  1. SO much cuteness in this post! ^.^

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  2. WB? You mean Fox? There was no WB in the 80s.

    I don't remember any romance plots from the cartoon. Even spin-off Darkwing Duck didn't have his own Catwoman or Vicki Vale, to my knowledge.

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    1. I don't actually remember the network. I thought the WB predated Fox. I was just worried about Disney heterosexualizing the Ducks, like they did Goofy. Also Johnny Quest was heterosexualized in the 1980s, giving Dr. Quest a wife and Johnny a girlfriend.

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    2. 1990s for Johnny Quest, but, yeah. Part of it was also the realization that girls are also a market, but being unable to think of girls outside of romantic bonds. So, in the 90s, you get these heterosexualized versions of older cartoons.

      Goofy's son did buddy bond with Pete's son, IIRC.

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    3. There was a surprising amount of fanboy shipping of Max Goof and Pete's son (forgot his name). Ans a surprising amount of homoerotic fan art with Max nude or aroused. I could never figure out the interest, but then, I'm not into furries.

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    4. All I saw was buddy bonding.

      I should probably start a companion blog or something, because my childhood had a lot of cartoons. Too many to really lost here.

      Have you done 1992's X-Men? Or Batman: The Animated Series and its Batgirl-sized dose of heterosexism? I know you've done Power Rangers.

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    5. I'm sort of limited to cartoons that I've actually seen, and I never really watched superhero cartoons or read superhero comics. I always found it annoying that a story lasted through multiple issues in different titles, and referenced events from even more issues.

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    6. Basically they aged Barbara Gordon (who was originally a politician) down to the same age as Dick Grayson so they could date. Oh, then she cheats on him with Bruce.

      A lot of it was to erase Teen Titans. The Bat folks were a little triggered by Batman being in a nadir, one of the worst-selling DC titles in the 80s. (So you get things like the Outsiders and an ersatz Robin. Like, seriously, Jason Todd was basically Dick Grayson's personality and backstory pre-Crisis.) While Teen Titans kept DC Comics out of bankruptcy.

      Thing is, Teen Titans is also full of gay subtext. More so actually than Batman, and that fan base is pretty much convinced half the Bat family or more are bisexual.

      But there is a lot of good stuff in the Timmverse: Harley Quinn (and the Harlivy ship) got their start here. This was also the first adaptation with multiple Robins, and with Nightwing, though I do think they were going for "Batman hates aliens" (part of the anti-Teen Titans sentiment in the Bat-office) at the time, so the name's origin (a Silver Age Superman story) is never mentioned.

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