Random Roar: Nostalgia Chipwreck

 

Growing up in the late 1980s, early 1990s, I remember looking forward to Saturday Morning Cartoons.  The one downside for me was that in Revelstoke, most of the networks showing them were from the East Coast of the United States, so they’d start well before the sun was up.  I don’t know why we didn’t carry more networks from our time zone, it was a kind of unfair thing to do, especially to us children.  We pretty much had to rely on both VCRs and whatever CITV in Alberta had picked up to broadcast.  The worst of it was, when taping something new, if we didn’t like it, we lost a week’s worth of shows on the competing networks.

The Disney Afternoon was a concept that I thoroughly enjoyed.  Although most of those East Coast networks broadcast the weekday version and thus I almost never got to see it because of school, CITV broadcast a Saturday version and I watched it every week almost without fail.  It represented a much more convenient way to watch cartoons on a Saturday because it aired in the afternoon instead of the morning, and for its first several years, Disney routinely knocked it out of the park, creating hit show after hit show.

The Disney Afternoon ran for most of the 1990s, but admittedly was starting to lose its creative quality as the company went from developing new and inspired shows to cranking out something new out of obligation.  Whereas early shows included DuckTales and Goof Troop, later shows included The Shnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show, Quack Pack and The Lion King’s Timon & Pumbaa.  It was like there were two different creative teams in charge during the start of the Disney Afternoon and during the end.

To me it felt like a bad idea at first to reboot DuckTales.  To me, there had never been anything wrong with the original series, and there was always the possibility that they would ruin the show by meddling with it.  Then the show turned out to be awesome.  Mostly.  I mean, there’s a couple things I could criticize about it, but it’s still a very good show.

Unfortunately, this raised the specter of remaking the entire Disney Afternoon.  Or at least, the early shows.  If DuckTales was such a success, what was keeping the rest of the Disney Afternoon from being just as successful in their new forms?

Well, first of all, it really depends on whether Disney wants to mimic the production schedule they were once able to keep, especially if they want to stick with the same three season format that most of their bigger shows have used in recent years.  Instead of airing several shows at once, the new DuckTales has aired independent of any other Disney Afternoon property.  Now that it’s over, this might pave the way for a reboot of the next show on the list, Chip ‘n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers.

This approach, though, will mean that Disney would have to skip over several less liked shows or else keep the remakes going for at least a couple decades, and I’m fairly certain no one’s demanding a remake of The Shnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show.  But that said, if every other show in the Disney Afternoon were remade, many of the original audience would either not survive to see the end of the remakes or they’ve already outgrown the later shows unless Disney severely improves the storytelling used in shows like Aladdin.

Another thing to keep in mind is that DuckTales pretty much referenced nearly all of the shows in the Disney Afternoon, from giving the Rescue Rangers a new origin story to having the air pirates from TaleSpin show up in present day.  The writers might be tempted to work within the confines of DuckTales continuity, and while this sort of thing works for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, much of the original Disney Afternoon lineup would lose a lot of their original identity if they were to take place within the same continuity, especially with how they were incorporated into DuckTales.

One way they could get around it is to treat each show like their own separate canon, like they used to.  There’s even modern precedent for this: DuckTales aired at about the same time as Legend of the Three Caballeros, and the latter referenced the original DuckTales rather than the new one, suggesting loose ties to the classic series, like how Darkwing Duck had loose ties to it as well.  It would be an incredibly valid choice to ignore the Rescue Rangers origin story presented in the new DuckTales and come up with one possibly closer to their own original origin story, and then set a new version of TaleSpin in roughly the same time period of the original series instead of setting it in present day with the DuckTales version of Don Karnage.

Whether or not this would even work is another story entirely.  If the same creative team behind DuckTales were to develop and make a new Rescue Rangers series, it has the potential to be great.  But this is the company that also made The Lion Guard, and we all saw how they handled the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? style Rescue Rangers movie that literally just dropped onto Disney+.  It’s clear that not everyone working at the company has the same eye for quality.

If the DuckTales team ends up working on something else, then dear God, please don’t let the movie’s writers help make a new Rescue Rangers series.  The movie’s jokes felt incredibly forced, and some of them even skipped telling the joke and went straight to explaining the joke.  There were also such a large amount of references, it felt like the movie was subscribing to the Ready Player One school of cinema.  Ultimately, it felt soulless and I would hate for a rebooted television series to feel the same.

To me, the biggest reason why we should leave the Disney Afternoon well enough alone is that every show (with the exception of The Shnookums and Meat Funny Cartoon Show) is currently available on Disney+.  There’s no real reason to make another Rescue Rangers when there’s already a full series of Rescue Rangers sitting there waiting to be watched.  No matter how good a new TaleSpin is, it will never be quite like the original TaleSpin.  And I think everyone just wants a continuation of both Darkwing Duck and Gargoyles in their original continuity instead of a pair of remakes, and the chances of that happening at this point are slim.

Perhaps we should leave the Disney Afternoon well enough alone.  We don’t even need to look at it through nostalgia goggles because we can watch the original line-up whenever we want.  If the new Rescue Rangers movie is any indication, not every property needs to, or should be, revived.