Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[Eric] [Continued from Part 1] Brian Cummings played *** Drake. Alive at age 65. Miriam Flynn: Gandra Dee (Fenton Crackshell's girlfriend) is alive at age 61.
Rob Paulsen is Gladstone Gander. Alive at age 57. Rob Paulsen is also very well known for Animaniacs.
Corey Burton is Ludwig Von Drake. Is alive at age 57. I think I remember Corey Burton as Gruffi Gummi. He's the guy Gummi who's always mad. [Editor note: He also played Dale in Rescue Rangers.]
Richard Libertini. He plays Dijon in the DuckTales Movie. He's alive at age 79.
The youngest person on here is age 53.
And the ones who didn't quite make it...
Hal Smith. He played Flintheart Glomgold and Gyro Gearloose. He died at age 77 in 1994.
Joan Gerber is Mrs. Beakley and Glittering Goldie. She died in 2011 at age 76.
Hamilton Camp who is Fenton Crackshell and GizmoDuck). He died in 2005 at age 70.
And Kathleen Freeman: Mrs. Crackshell (Fenton's Mother) died in 2001 at age 82.
So this is the last time we are going to see all the voice actors all together.
It's actually quite a miracle that June Foray and Alan Young are still with us.
[Niem] [lost] [setup question about origin of Alan Young as Scrooge and Mickey's Christmas Carol]
[Eric] Yeah, so Mickey's Christmas Carol was the very first time they got Alan Young to voice Scrooge. Mickey's Christmas Carol I believe was actually kind of a proving ground for Disney to start testing the waters again in [muffled] animation.
This is Michael Eisner's kind of rise at the Disney company. They were re-fine tuning and trying to bring back animation. So Mickey's Christmas Carol was sort of an introduction.
And Alan Young's performance was so convincing as Scrooge that it was probably motivation of how they believed they could build an entire series around Scrooge and Alan Young.
[Niem] Do we have the time to acknowledge that Carl Barks and the amazing Walt Disney Uncle Scrooge Comics he did back in the day, the 30's and 40's?
[Eric] Yes, thank you for doing that.
[Niem] [lost]
[Eric] So Carl Barks wrote a lot of his comics during the Depression. They were trying to find various forms of entertainment that people could afford. So a comic would go for 5 cents or something. [lost]
[Niem] And back in those days they didn't really credit artists and writers very much. So kids that got those comics saw there was a difference between some of these Scrooge and Donald Duck comics and they starting referring to him as "The Good Duck Artist". So that's how people knew Carl Barks before they knew his name. [muffled].
[Eric] You can actually Google "The Good Duck Artist" and that will get you Carl Barks.
So Niem, do you know any other famous Duck artists renown for doing Duck comics?
[Niem] Sure, there's William Van Horn [muffled]. There's also Don Rosa of course [muffled] still with us.
[Eric] You should probably elaborate. I bet a lot of people don't know who they are.
[muffled] For me, I actually didn't know about any of them until you introduced them to me. All I knew was DuckTales.
[Niem] Right! So I guess when DuckTales had come out there were some episodes that reminded me of the Carl Barks comics. So it turned out they were based on his comics. I was collecting a lot of comics in that era and I started seeing these ones really nicely drawn, highly detailed comics, done by a guy named Don Rosa.
And he trained as an engineer. I don't believe he ever took art lessons. He was just a huge Uncle Scrooge fan and started drawing and writing his own Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics.
And he became famous among comic fans, particularly in Europe, where his comics were reprinted over and over again.
[Eric] You should probably talk about the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck because it is such a big, giant, pivotal project in his career and his rise.
[Niem] Yeah, so that was a big project he did in the early 90's. Where he filled in all the gaps that Carl Barks had done with Uncle Scrooge's character and life story, spread out in all these different Uncle Scrooge comics.
And he said, 'I can make a time line of all these stories and fill them in with my best imagining of what happened. Fill in the blanks. How it came out.' So that's exactly what he did.
He put together The Life and Times. He put it out over period of a year or so. And it's an amazing collection of comics.
[Eric] There was actually an old DuckTales episode, "Once Upon a Dime", which also tried to recap Scrooge's life story.
Of course, instead of doing it in multiple issues, they did it in one cartoon episode.
The Duckburg Times, which I mention in my 25th Anniversary Retrospective, they were pretty harsh on that episode, because there were a lot of details they didn't get right.
I didn't know any of this stuff until I read Rosa's stuff. But even looking back at it though, I'm actually still impressed that DuckTales managed to get as much right as they did.
Mostly just because of television pressures, time schedules, and the fact that "Kids watch anything, who cares?" [mentality] "We can change anything that we want, and nobody is going to be able to call us on it."
I'm actually surprised they tried to do as good of a job as they did. I thought it was a pretty well done episode. Certainly the characters like the parents, McMama and McPoppa were a little silly, but I'm not going to hold all that against the episode.
[Niem] That's funny. I vaguely remember that episode. Is that on DVD somewhere?
[Eric] I don't know if that one actually made it to DVD. So the problem is that a lot of the DuckTales episodes have not been re-released. There are 3 sets of DVDs.
And they did a pretty terrible job transferring the images so the quality isn't that good. And then there are no bonus features. And the episodes are just kind of randomly put together in no particular order.
I don't remember if that one was on the DVD or not.
[Niem] Well, it probably exists somewhere in torrent land.
Yeah, you made a good case for the re-advent or re-awakening of TV animation, thanks to shows like DuckTales.
I remember a time when it was marketed more for selling toys, like G.I. Joe. And they created a new paradigm.
[Eric] You just made me think of... I think I remember the top toys or the top children's television programs of 1985. And I believe transformers was number 1.
DuckTales came out in 1987. So, sort of a very interesting time period.
If you actually look back at the Transformer cartoons, you can tell, compared to the amount of money and production quality they put into DuckTales, it's not even close.
And then, one thing I think DuckTales failed upon, was being able to market and merchandize the product. This DuckTales game is actually the exception.
And when it comes to video game cross-franchising, typically the video games are awful. The video games are always terrible. Look up "Ghostbusters: The Video Game".
That's one of the examples of how typically bad these franchise licenses are. And DuckTales really just broke that stereotype.
But it's just this really unusual situation for DuckTales all-around.
You also got me thinking of the Happy Meal for DuckTales.
[Niem] There's a DuckTales Happy Meal?
[Eric] There was I think. I thought you were the one who told me about it.
They had 4 little toys of characters in different vehicles. I think I remember that they are very expensive collector's items now.
I never actually got my McDonald's Happy Meal. I'm sad.
[Niem] You know [lost]
[Eric] You didn't get that gem. [teasing]
[Joe] [lost]
[Joe] [lost] I make it through alive
[Eric] So one thing I noticed on easy is we're losing half a heart instead of a full heart.
[Joe] It does seem like we get hearts a lot [lost]
[Niem] You know I always thought the focus [muffled] the cane. It was never in the comics or in the cartoon, having this device.
[Eric] The one possible exception was "The Masked Mallard". I don't remember the weapons he had, but I thought there was something about his uh...
He had some sort of jumping ability, though maybe it was in his special shoes. [lost]
I actually did watch some of the WayForward pre-production trailers. I saw on somebody's computer screen, a rendering of the Masked Mallard. 67 00:12:39,000 --> 00:12:42,000 I'm wondering if he's going to make an appearance in this game or not.
[Joe] [lost]
[Eric] I heard that the people that bought the USB traditional Nintendo controllers, because they want to use an actual authentic 8-bit type controller...
It's like an actual Nintendo controller except it has USB on it...
There are reports that it doesn't work with this game and they have to use the x360ce thing also. I'm not sure if they've gotten it to work yet.
[Joe] You know, for PC games, you really are the best off with [lost] keyboard type controller [lost] like the I-PAC [lost] let you remap [lost]. Since it is keyboard, you get to use the raw input instead of [lost]
[Eric] You shouldn't have crushed that rock. You could have used it to kill the snake.
[Joe] Yeah [lost]
[Eric] I also think it is ironic that Windows came out with DirectX for Windows 95, I forgot exactly what year...
[Niem] [lost, about getting a treasure chest?]
[Joe] I don't know if it's going to let me go back
[Joe] [lost, about the head]
[Eric] The head never did much in the original.
[lost]
[Eric] I vaguely remember the original. It's been many many years since I've played it. I don't remember these moving-in pillars. I think I just remember the head.
I don't remember the head being difficult. I think it may have been one of the easiest bosses.
Honestly, I didn't think it was going to be that hard. The control is bad and we're really rusty. I actually don't think this is that hard.
I was just commenting... so, my gamepad has always worked in Windows with no problem. It's only recently, now everything needs to be an Xbox 360 controller. And now I must resort to emulation. And it's really annoying.
I find it ironic that Mac has had pretty much no gamepad support whatsoever and we're on the eve of them finally delivering a gamepad API and I find it ironic that Windows has pretty much just broken theirs.
We got an achievement
[Niem] [lost]
[Eric] Maybe we should actually be looking at the Money Bin pile first and see if it goes down every time you buy something.
[Niem] [lost]
[Eric] [lost]
[lost]
[Eric] Skeleton loading animation
[Joe] Webby's ribbon seems really big.
[Eric] Yeah, I think it is. So one thing they talked about was in designing the game, the character proportions had to be changed from the television because they were trying to deal with bounding boxes and the proportions actually match closer to the original NES game.
And the problem I guess with the traditional animation is when everything is long and stretched, the collision boxes get very difficult.
I also remember reading some other game design article where they were talking about platformer type games or games in general, and picking a smaller, disproportionate character was actually advantageous for a lot of different reasons.
The jumping just seemed to work better when you squatted down the character a little bit.
So I think what we're seeing is a disproportionate Webby with maybe her original bow size?
Let's see what's to the left.
[Niem] [lost]
[Niem] [lost] I didn't realize they would have all these characters [lost] voices [lost]
[Eric] So Webby's voice sounds exactly as I remember it. I don't think Russi Taylor's voice has changed any.
The paintings are kind of interesting. It looks like the eyes are kind of following you. But actually, that is an optical illusion from what I read.
The way they did it was it is very "Haunted Mansion" style. So in the Haunted Mansion, they have that same effect.
But obviously the Haunted Mansion predates a lot of modern technology, or at least the original one I remember.
One of the tricks they used was they created a concave painting. So it's not a flat painting, but it actually has a curvature.
So as you walk past it, it looks like the eyes are moving.
[Niem] [muffled] caves in?
[Eric] Yeah
One thing I noticed earlier when I first saw the preview for this. They showed Alan Young at the beginning of this level and I noticed none of the lips moved.
I guess they didn't take the time or decided not to animate the lips.
Does that mean we'll have to do another Remastered in 25 years?
I know lip-syncing is a hard problem. [muffled] So I'm not sure, would it be better to see flapping lips that didn't really sync with what they are saying or is it better to just keep the lips shut?
[lost]
[Eric] Ball and chain
[lost]
[Eric] Two for the price of one
[lost]
[Eric] Ah, one of the life ups. We needed that.
That's interesting that the wall just disappears when you get near it.
I thought about the old Zelda game. You really had to just keep pushing on it and it never really revealed itself.
I remember the Second Quest in the original Legend of Zelda, I got so stuck on the walk through the walls thing, because it didn't work like any of the other walls you could walk through.
But in the Second Quest, you actually push on it for awhile, and then it will let you through.
The First Quest you could bomb the walls, and at the very end, there's this Ganon wall you just kind of slip through with no resistance.
It just threw me off. I didn't get it. I gave up on the game for a little bit. I came back and I stumbled upon it.
[Niem] [lost]
[Niem] [lost] [about the colors of the nephews]
[Eric] Yeah, so Dewey is in blue and Louie is in green, though I think some of the television specials or maybe some of the shorts in the movies may have picked a different scheme like yellow or something, instead of green or blue. I can't remember.
I need to comment on the mine cars that we passed. I remember one of the jokes about the mine cars was that in the original game, when you first meet it, Huey, Dewey, and Louie are in the car.
You jump in. Then you jump out before it goes off a cliff, just like that. But Huey, Dewey, and Louie disappear. Everybody thinks they are still in the car. What a lousy uncle!
So do you guys remember the Indiana Jones and the, uh
[Joe] Temple of Doom
[Eric] Yeah, Temple of Doom arcade game? With the mine car chase sequence, er... was it a chase sequence? I thought it was.
[Joe] Yeah, it was pretty much a chase sequence. And recently [lost] and I guess the Wii U [muffled], are doing a lot of mine cart stuff.
[Eric] Yeah, I think I would have been able to tell that that was not the original Beakley voice.
I don't know who they got to do it.
We'll have to watch the credits to this game to see if [muffled]
We'll have to watch the credits to this game to see if [muffled]
I bet there is a chest on the other side.
A million! [looking at score/money]
[Niem] We're back at the beginning [lost]
[Eric] [lost] jump in the mirror
I really like the background [lost]
[Niem] [lost]
[Eric] So I think even The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker with the cel-shaded look, it really did blend in better.
[Joe] In some respect, it is the way things are drawn. [lost] did 2D art [lost] now they flat out modeled them [lost, suggestion to go all the way and model everything in full 3D models, but do it in a way that everything looks traditional 2D and then fits in]. But due to the nature of this, it would have been a lot of work to make 3D models [lost]
[Eric] In one of the commentaries I saw from WayForward, was actually about Street Fighter, Street Fighter 4 I think, and how all the characters were actually 3D models now. But one of the problems they hit was they now had polygon perfect collision boxes and they actually found that was not what you wanted for collision detection.
So they had to put back in the old big giant bounding boxes to give the people the behavior they wanted. And I think the topic that came up was the "toe hang" in this game.
So to be able to stand on a ledge just by a toe, that's much harder to do with a polygon collision.
[Joe] [lost, there are ways to deal with it] even if it was 3D [lost]
[Niem] They could have made these cut-scenes a little faster.
[Niem] Oh well [laughter]
Right or left?
Up... and then to the left
Did the original game have a map?
[Eric] I don't remember.
[Eric] I don't remember the coins from the Amazon stuff, so we didn't need a map for that.
[Niem] I noticed that one little room there [muffled]
[Niem] [lost]
[Eric] Let's see if we get to go into the mirror ourselves or if they do it for us.
[Eric] [lost] let's go to the [lost]
That rock will probably get the chest.
That was disappointing.
So that was the legendary June Foray. She's 95 years old now. She started in radio, which if you think about it...
So she's crossed from the radio era, into the full motion picture era, into the television era, and now she has made it all the way to the video game era. That in my opinion is a very impressive career.
You might remember June Foray from Looney Tunes. She played Granny from the Tweety Bird cartoons. She played Witch Hazel sometimes in the Bugs Bunny cartoons, the ugly green witch always cackling.
Later, she became most famous for Rocky and Bullwinkle. So she played Rocky. She played Natasha Fatale (the main villainess). And then she pretty much did all the fairy godmothers, and evil witches, and all the little boys. I'm not sure if she did Sherman, but I wouldn't put it past her, from Mr. Peabody and Sherman.
So this lady is a legend.
So she got onto DuckTales and she did Magica De Spell and Ma Beagle.
[Niem] lost
[Eric] I think that's how they setup the series. I think I do remember reading a complaint about Magica's voice because June Foray was not the first person to voice Magica.
Actually, no. I'm not sure about that. But I think I remember there was a description or something about what Magica's voice sounded like, and it was supposed to be like an Italian accent.
[Niem] Whereas she made it sound like a Russian or Romanian accent.
[Eric] Yeah.
Hey, no music.
I think that's what happened in the original.
[Niem] It makes it more creepy.
Whoop, I've got to be a little more careful.
[Eric] You've got full hearts now.
[Niem] Oh, man. Wow.
[lost]
[Niem] This is a harder boss battle as well, with the bird flying around.
Yeah
[Niem] Nice
[Niem] Well done!
[Niem] She's a tough old bird.
[Niem] [lost]
[Eric] On hard, I could actually see this being kind of a problem
[Niem] She wanted that Number One Dime
[Eric] So I remember there were a lot of fun episodes in DuckTales, were about Magica trying to steal the Number One Dime.
We were talking about "Duck to the Future" earlier. So the whole reason they sent Scrooge into the future, was so she could steal the Number One Dime while he was gone.
And that's where we saw *** and Webby married and grown up. And Professor McQuack, was very old. Thick glasses.
[lost, question about what Launchpad taught]
[Eric] I don't remember. I think I remember something about a "Crash Course".
[Niem] Gyro is kind of a cross between Bill Gates and uh... who's the landlord in "Three's Company"?
[Eric] Don Knotts
[Niem] Mr. Furley? Is that his name?
[Eric] Yeah, I think that was it. [laughter]
[Niem] He's some kind of... stork.