The Money Vanishes
This is a fairly straightforward plot, although it takes a bit of setting up at the start. The Beagle Boys don’t give poor Gyro time to think when they go for his teleporter ray. The principle works well enough though. Even if the TV advert was a little contrived and silly, it’s a comic cartoon so this can be more overlooked than if it had happened in, say, Defenders Of The Earth. It’s a good showcase for Scrooge’s love of his fortune.
Superdoo!
Yes, Doofus is the sort of minor character you either love or hate. I guess on some level I’ve always empathised with him, and I have strong memories of this episode, so it was always a strong candidate for me. Also, it’s noteworthy for being one of only three episodes not to feature Scrooge at all. (One of last week’s episodes, Hero For Hire, didn’t feature the nephews, they were absent from I think seven episodes in total.)
The aliens do indeed have a Yoda-like word order. Although my favourite joke is actually when they’re blowing up the dam:
PURPLE: How long until dino-blast?
GREEN: Ten flarn.
PURPLE: Ten flarn???
[KABOOM]
GREEN: Maybe nine.
I just love the way a flarn is obviously a very small unit of time, what was the green one thinking? - and the green one acknowledges that maybe the number was an overestimate, making no comment about how short a time he’d set it for.
Duck To The Future
Yes, obviously getting its title from BTTF - curious Wilycub you drew the parallel with BTTF2 - which had not been made when this episode came out! But you’re right, the alternate future where the villain is in control. Gyro actually doesn’t help any in this episode, we see his older self, with the memory span of a goldfish. The Time Tub originally appeared in his only feature episode, “Sir Gyro De Gearloose” - which I did consider in place of Superdoo, for the record, and again, is notable for the absence of Scrooge. (The only other episode to omit Scrooge is “Launchpad’s Civil War”.)
This is Scrooge’s episode, where he learns, as he often does, that there are more important things than money. If you watch the series as a whole (something I strongly recommend), you’ll see that Scrooge does actually have a strong work ethic. Yes, he’s greedy, but he believes in earning his cash fair and square. But I digress.
Magica has some memorable episodes where she tries to steal the first dime Scrooge ever earned. (The story behind that dime is in the episode “Once Upon A Dime” btw.) This is one of her more successful attempts, in which we learn that during the intervening years she got in with Scrooge’s nephews.
That brings me to the one major inconsistency. Webby and Doofus are ordinarily the same age as the nephews, but in this nightmare future, they seem to be a good twenty years younger!
This is an episode I remembered well from my youth again, but the one thing I forgot was that Huey, Dewey and Louie actually did ultimately turn on Magica when she mentioned that it was indeed Scrooge they were after and what she’d done with him in the present time. I always remembered the nephews as the bad guys in this one, I’d clean forgot they came good in the end. And of course Professor Launchpad McQuack teaching his “crash course” . . . they did a few jokes on that theme in the series, but the best one was in the movie, which we’re doing next, so you’ll see for yourself!
It was actually difficult to pick a good representative selection for this series. Even if I did focus solely on season 1, there’s still so many episodes that are worth seeing. All the ones I’ve mentioned up there for a start!
It’s always amusing to watch the Beagle Boys and their various antics, whether they are trying to get out of jail (with a shovel “hidden” in a cake) or trying to steal Scrooge’s money.
It’s not bad, but the same basic plot has been used many times in many cartoons that I’ve seen. The weakest/most ignored character miraculously gains great powers which go to their heads and then eventually they lose the power but not before realizing their true worth and the value of their friends. I think there was a Smurfs episode which had a similar plot and even a He-Man episode as well.