It had too many legs, to begin with.

Forget “Launchpad is the most emotionally mature character on the show.” Launchpad is the ONLY consistantly emotionally mature character on the show, except maybe Donald, who’s emotionally 5,385.

Some month late brief thoughts on The Duck Knight Returns:

1. Somehow this episode managed to go exactly where it looked like it was going and still leave me shocked. All the hints are there—the chainsaws, the way Jim’s voice keeps dipping into the Negaduck range, the unnamed-til-the-end actor who’s a little too familiar—but when Launchpad convinces Drake to become Darkwing for real, and THEN we drop down into the sewers to see Jim go full Negaduck, my thirty-something year old butt is just:

Every time.

2. I love new Drake! I get the criticism that he’s much nicer than the original Drake Mallard and therefore feels like a different character, but there’s plenty of the old Drake’s characteristics on display. He’s still a gigantic dork, he’s still theatrical (Launchpad just puts himself between that apparently completely functional death ray and the director, while Drake takes the time to get in costume and do a dramatic entrance), he does the whole “shout gibberish and just launch yourself at the bad guy” thing, he’s still a gamer, and he’s got traces of the old Drake’s ego. He has a framed picture of himself in his Darkwing costume on the wall of his trailer, for goodness sake. It’s just that his ego isn’t as dominant as the old Drake’s was, at least, not in this particular episode. The whole third act had Posiduck versus Negaduck vibes, so it’s possible that while we were seeing Jim sliding towards his worst, we were also seeing Drake at close to his best. Besides, this is Drake Mallard who’s a good decade younger than the original Drake, who hasn’t spent who knows how many years living in his hideout, who still talks to people who aren’t supervillains or SHUSH, who has a civilian life, and who still actually goes by the name Drake Mallard. I actually kind of like to think that the original Drake was a little more like this (his try-hardy high school days in Clash Reunion notwithstanding) before he started being Darkwing full time in the years leading up to meeting Gosalyn. Mostly I’m just excited to see where they end up taking this version of the character.

3. The effects animation was just...really nice. Smoke is hard to animate. Explosions are hard to animate. That explosion at the end looked so good. Oh my gosh.

4. Scrooge hasn’t seen a movie since the 1930’s because of course he hasn’t.

5. Launchpad’s and Dewey’s interactions were pure gold.

6. I don’t know if it was intended to be this funny, but the trailer for Darkwing: First Darkness had me on the floor.

7. Launchpad’s and Drake’s interactions were also pure gold.

8. Maybe it was Drake’s cartoonishly high pain tolerance, maybe it was Negaduck talking directly into the camera at the end, maybe it was the overall atmosphere, but this felt less like an episode of Ducktales 2017 and more like an episode of the original Darkwing Duck, and I am okay with this.

9. I love that they’ve made Jim/Negaduck a tragic villain and I hope he gets a redemption arc.

10. Seriously, you don’t allow a character a moment of regret, let him sacrifice himself to save two people he doesn’t even really like, and then let us see him turn around and look at the explosion that’s about to kill him with THAT expression if you’re not going to give him a redemption arc.

11. Also, regarding Jim, I think the in-universe Darkwing Duck may have started as a show, and definitely ended as a show, but I have a pet theory that at some point in the middle it maybe wasn’t just a show and that Jim wasn’t just an actor. Maybe. More on that in another post.

12. Drake exists so Gosalyn probably also exists and I am hyped for her to show up.

13. If you told me Frank became the co-producer and head of story on Ducktales 2017 just so he could write this episode, I’d believe you.

14. I used to hope there would be a Darkwing Duck reboot just because I wanted it. Now I hope there’s a Darkwing Duck Reboot in the works because I have no idea how they’re going to deal with what they’ve set up in this episode without taking away from the rest of the show.

15. So...as far as anyone knows, a guy dies in a fiery explosion on set and Drake and Launchpad are the only ones who seem to care? And why did they even have a fully functional death-ray on set? Why did the chainsaws have real chains? For a studio that only exists to make office safety videos, it’s got some pretty bad office safety practices.

16. Launchpad might be a doofus, but he’s also the most emotionally mature character on this whole show.

Just realized that I completely missed the Gravity Falls anniversary/Stan Twins’s birthdays.

A little clip from a project this semester. We all had to model an animal, animate it, and put it in an environment, so this was modeled, rigged, and animated in Maya, textured in Substance Painter, and then lit and rendered in Unity. (Sorry about the quality—I actually recorded it from the computer from my phone, sine it was sort of still a WIP at the time)

These are from a while ago, but I was trying to figure out what a pre-fallen balrog might look like, and decided they might be multi-winged seraph-like fire spirits at one point (I’m firmly in the camp of “balrogs had wings before they fell and after falling only have shadows that are like the memories of wings” in the “Do balrogs have wings?” debate).

I’ve always been kind of entertained by the thought of what older, scary Irish and Gaiman/Clark style fairies might think of pigwidgeonry and I have two OC’s who sort of joke about it, but this barely-a-joke mess is all I can think to draw right now so *yeets this into the ether*

And, in other news, in the time I was gone I went back to school to study animation and game development and, having just finished up my sophomore year, I’ve learned three very important things:

1. Everyone is a gigantic nerd and I love it.

2. Building CG models is hard but super fun, my dudes.

3. Imposter syndrome is real. I still have no idea why they let me in.

My sister, who has listened to TAZ: Balance at least four times all the way through has still never made it all the way through Magnus’s death scene, because she always listens at work and the second she hears, “Travis, how does Magnus die,” she takes her headphones out so she doesn’t start crying in public.