Review: Ducktales “Let’s Get Dangerous!”

Overview(Spoilers Below)

Scrooge and his nephews visit the town of St.Canard through an invitation with a businessman named “Taurus Bulba” (James Monroe Iglehart) who manages to win Scrooge and Louie over with the reveal of the “Ramrod”, a giant machine that evidently creates matter from nothing, but Huey not easily being the fool, immediately figures out there’s more going on behind the scenes. Meanwhile, Launchpad and Dewey excitedly visit their friend Drake Mallard who is slowly establishing himself as the town’s Superhero, Darkwing Duck, and later encounter a young girl named Gosalyn (voiced by Stephanie Beatriz) who’s in need of his help…

Our Take

This was one hell of an hour-long special as it was not only a love-letter to Ducktales fans but also the fans who grew up with Darkwing Duck like myself. From the major shout-outs of his classic villains, to how the story even handles Darkwing meeting Gosalyn compared to the original cartoon as both shows started with Taurus Bulba. Surprisingly, Bulba’s updated performance in the reboot is a lot more unnerving as he represents a different kind of evil compared to your standard blatant supervillains which is also thematically relevant in this episode about the proverbial masks people hide behind.

We do somewhat see a comeback with a few of the classic Darkwing Duck villains, but even more surprising is how they’re written in such a plausible way that it makes sense within this special. While the original show was subtle with the Batman parodies/references, they understandably can’t get every cast member back from the classic cartoon, but I did enjoy every moment whenever it was cleverly thrown in.

But aside from the awesome fanservice, we also get a major change in the status quo as one of Scrooges longtime business partners, Bradford Buzzard (Marc Evan Jackson) causes a major turning point compared to past episodes that revealed in Season 2’s finale he was a member of the evil organization F.O.W.L. which has been an overarching plot during the course of Season 3 and Bradford might just be one of the smartest villains in any cartoon, even if he isn’t subtle about his motives against Scrooge which he casually reveals to Huey Dewey and Louie at one point.

As a whole, this was quite a fun one-hour special and whether or not we’ll see Darkwing again in future episodes, I look forward to it!