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Let it immediately go on the record that Launchpad's first on-screen landing is A SUCCESS! The second one, in the Okeefedokee Swamp, does land the Ducks in quicksand, but LP still gets the gang down in one piece. To say that Launchpad's debut is the most significant one in this episode, however, is to state the obvious.
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I can easily imagine him assuming the role of the pig lady who kept impeding Donald's progress in Barks' " A Duck's-Eye View of Europe" (WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES #273, June 1963) by regularly bumping into Scrooge, HD&L, and Launchpad in the most unlikely places. The closest he would ever got to a trip would be when he bumped into Magica De Spell at the airport during " Magica's Shadow War." Unlike Quacky, I think that VVH could have reasonably been used more often than he was, albeit only as a gag character. VVH would fare a little better, getting several speaking roles in the series, but even his "perpetual traveler" role would be undercut by the fact that we never saw him outside of Duckburg. Evidently, even at this very early stage, the DT crew were already rethinking the whole idea of making Quacky any sort of major player (though he would get a clever bit at the start of " Home Sweet Homer" and, much later, would even appear in a couple of comic-book stories). Without that self-defining shtick, he just looks like some homeless duck who wandered into Scrooge's mansion from off the street. Heck, Quacky doesn't even stand at an angle in his first "crowd scene," which rather defeats the purpose of using him in the first place. Well, he might have worked better as one of Herb Muddlefoot's long-lost relatives. Gladstone, of course, would later get a featured role in one ep and an extended walk-on in another, so I find it somewhat ironic that this classic Barks character is the one "new guy" who mysteriously disappears from the proceedings in mid-stream. Granted, said players make no real impression on the proceedings, but you can sense the DT crew trying to get the audience acclimatized to the looks of these folks. In retrospect, the opening "Scrooge's birthday party" scenes, which seemed either pointless or mystifying at the time when "Sweet Duck" was originally aired in mid-season, look like a tentative, toe-dipping attempt to give the audience a soft-pedaled introduction to several new players. Their plot line is "thin" (GeoX) and their wrap-up of the story is decidedly perfunctory and unsatisfactory ( Greg), but some high-quality animation and background work from TMS help with the mood-setting.
GUMMI QUICKSAND VISUALS SERIES
The idea of centering a late-80s animated series around a crotchety, old, cane-toting, Scottish-accented duck was unusual enough now they have to go and remind viewers of just how old he is? By contrast, writers Ken Koonce and David Weimers, who will come to cast two very, very long shadows over the course of the development of DT's style of humor, play things fairly close to the vest in their first go-round when it comes to verbal fireworks they concentrate on the development of mood and atmosphere, as opposed to packing the script with one-liners. Launchpad's persona at this early stage is still under construction, and it's intriguing to witness the ways in which his performance in "Sweet Duck" deviates from the future template of "good-natured, crash-prone incompetent." The theme of a despondent Scrooge feeling his years and rushing off to try to find the long-lost Fountain, only to ultimately discover that (all together now!) "you're only as old as you feel," seems as cut-and-dried now as it did 25 years ago, but you do have to give DT some credit for grasping the "age" nettle at such an early stage. "Sweet Duck" isn't a classic by any means, but it's gained a bit of gravitas with time, not least because it features the debut of Launchpad McQuack and the brief appearances of several other series players, some culled from Barks ( Gladstone Gander) and some emphatically not ( Doofus, Quacky McSlant, V acation van Honk). GeoX correctly IDs the Florida swamp setting and the Fountain of Youth as the two main similarities between the stories I would also posit that the old swamp dweller's use of a conquistador disguise may have been inspired by the presence of the two young-old soldiers Pedro and Pablo in Barks' story. " Sweet Duck of Youth" is the first such example to be produced - a tale flavored with essences of Barks' story " That's No Fable!" (UNCLE $CROOGE #32, December 1960) but, shall we say, pointing in a completely different direction. Speaking of Barks adaptations: When writing our DUCKTALES INDEX, Joe Torcivia and I coined the awkward, yet apropos, neologism "semi-adaptation" to describe the occasional DT episode that contained bits and pieces of Barks material but did not count as a flat-out adaptation.