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Quote from user: Dutch Duckfan Down UnderDuckTales question: If Donald joined the navy, the nephews go to their closest living relatives. Isn't that their parents? Of course we don't know what happened to them, so they may not be able to take care of their kids anymore. But aren't their any other relatives other than Scrooge? I don't know much about this, but could they have moved in with Gladstone or Fethry? Or Grandma?
Would YOU leave kids with someone like Gladstone or Fethry? Honestly, Grandma would have been a better choice than Uncle Scrooge, but that wouldn't have made nearly as much fun a TV series (see any issue of Grandma Duck's Farm Friends...I'll take DuckTales over those any day!)

As for fitting DuckTales into Barks' continuity...it just wasn't meant to be done. Both DuckTales and Barks' work contradict themselves sometimes. Until Don Rosa came along, continuity in Duck stories was never really a big issue. While he has drawn many good stories, I think that his continuity obsession really ruined some of the fun of these comics.

Quote from user: JLGI just want to chime in here on the original topic before it drifted off to Grandma, since the "compatibility" issue has always interested me a lot.
I've always felt that the DuckTales and Barks universes can pretty easily be combined using the principle of Broad Brushstrokes, as TVTropes.org puts it. I don't think there's any reason that both "versions" of the Duck world coudn't exist in one, "combo" universe, as long as things are kept broad and not too focused on specific details (like the Money Bin looking different). In my mind, DuckTales took place in a world where the Barks/Rosa stories all happened, and where Scrooge taking the boys in represented a family reconciliation after a brief but acrimonious falling out (thus his initial reluctance to take them in). Anything that contradicts that, as the direct Barks adaptation episodes do, I just write off as, itself, tangential alternate realities. The Barks stories took place when they were written, and Ducktales takes place in the late 1980s. As long as the non-aging thing doesn't bother anyone (which it really shouldn't, since it's taken for granted in so many other contexts), that explanation works fine as far as I can see.
This is a very fair-minded way of looking at the DuckTales vs. Duck comics issue. The only tetchy point is probably the idea of a family spat producing the negative vibes that we got at the start of "Don't Give Up the Ship." What might cause such a drastic estrangement? Donald asking for 75 cents an hour?

Quote from user: JLGThe unique Beagle Boys of DuckTales? Well, the Beagles are a pretty large family, aren't they? Perfectly possible we just never happened to focus on those particular individuals before that point. Launchpad? Well, wasn't it Joe Torcivia who doped out some kind of timeline for when Scrooge initially hired him---sometime in the early 1970s, after the Barksian era was over?
Joe and I presented this theory in our DUCKTALES INDEX when we commented on the episode "Launchpad's First Crash." We argued that, based on the evidence of Launchpad's age, Scrooge must have hired him in the mid- to late 1970s. The problem with this explanation is that Scrooge claims during the TV adventure that finding the Lost City of Diamonds WILL (emphasis on present tense) make him the richest duck in the world. We had to stretch to accommodate this factoid and were ultimately reduced to arguing that Glomgold must have momentarily surpassed Scrooge in money-count at some point during the 1970s. That was a rough period for $CROOGE comics in America, what with the lack of new stories. Perhaps Scrooge's empire hit a brief period of "malaise" to match the Carter era, and Scrooge needed the jump-start provided by a new adventure with LP in order to get back into the swing of treasure-hunting and get ahead of Flinty once more.

Quote from user: JLGIronically what really gets in the way for me is the recent DuckTales revival comic (which I haven't read yet but heard was pretty bad), since I had always figured that DuckTales as a scenario ended in 1995, the last year any new DuckTales material appeared in print until just now. To my mind, after that was when Donald was finally discharged from the Navy, the boys moved back home, and Mrs. Beakley's services were no longer needed.
The kaboom! DT comic DID complicate matters, assuming that one actually took it seriously as an extension of the DT (and Darkwing) world. Of course, they were fairly complicated already. There was at least one story printed during the Disney Comics era ("Coffee, Louie or Me?") in which it was explicitly stated that Donald had returned from the Navy. I figured that that was when things began to return to "the way they were," with Mrs. Beakly and Webby moving out, and perhaps Duckworth getting another butler job as well. But new DT comic-book stories continued to be produced for several years after that. Unfortunately, I don't think that there is a satisfactory resolution of this issue.

I'm afraid my comments here make it sound as though I dislike Ducktales a lot more than I do, but what the hell: even aside from the obvious discrepancies, I don't think the show should be considered to be in the same continuity as Barks because it's not flippin' good enough. You can't put out as many seriously half-assed episodes as Ducktales did and then expect to be mentioned in the same breath as one of the greatest cartoonists ever. That's just ridiculously presumptuous. If the show HAS to exist in the same continuity as some comics or other--though I'm not sure I see why it should--I'd put it with the increasingly leaden seventies Gold Key/Whitman stuff. Hell, that even resolves the issues with the individuated Beagle Boys, as Vic Lockman was all about creating novelty Beagles.

Quote from user: DebbieQuote from user: Dutch Duckfan Down UnderDuckTales question: If Donald joined the navy, the nephews go to their closest living relatives. Isn't that their parents? Of course we don't know what happened to them, so they may not be able to take care of their kids anymore. But aren't their any other relatives other than Scrooge? I don't know much about this, but could they have moved in with Gladstone or Fethry? Or Grandma?
Would YOU leave kids with someone like Gladstone or Fethry?
No... why do you think I mentioned them? That could make for a 'fun' What If episode... (I know they're not good parental figures, but Donald doesn't have many other close relatives.)

Quote from user: GeoXIf the show HAS to exist in the same continuity as some comics or other--though I'm not sure I see why it should--I'd put it with the increasingly leaden seventies Gold Key/Whitman stuff. Hell, that even resolves the issues with the individuated Beagle Boys, as Vic Lockman was all about creating novelty Beagles.
What's with those novelty Beagles anyway? It takes the entire Beagle-ness away from them. Part of their identity is that they're so identical, and that they refer to each other by their number. Lockman/DuckTales Beagles don't have that, and that's why they're not "real" Beagles to me. (I do support the Italian theory that the Beagle Boys is a world-wide organisation, because that just makes them more badass.)

Quote from user: GeoXThe specialty Beagles are the thing I hate most about Ducktales.
I remember a letter published in the letter column of Disney Comics' DuckTales title in the early nineties from a reader who asked why the DuckTales Beagles were heterogeneous, unlike the comic book clone Beagles. Editor Bob Foster's response was something to the effect that on the printed page, we had the luxury of reading the Beagle Boys' prison numbers to differentiate them from one another, whereas on the screen, they moved around too fast and they needed to look different from one another so we could tell who was who. To which I countered (and still do) why do we need to distinguish them from one another? Part of their charm comes from their cartoony sameness (as well as from their pointless masks, but we've had that discussion before. They are, essentially, one character. Like Huey, Dewey and Louie (Rosa's joke with the Beagle Boys laughing at the nephews for being identical cracks me up every time). For the same reason, it always amuses me when someone says that Dewey is their favorite character. I can't tell if that's meant to be tongue-in-cheek or not.

Quote from user: kimba_1962The only tetchy point is probably the idea of a family spat producing the negative vibes that we got at the start of "Don't Give Up the Ship." What might cause such a drastic estrangement? Donald asking for 75 cents an hour?
When I was younger, as you may remember, I was somewhat obsessed with reconciling Duck comics-DuckTales continuity. But over the years, I've completely "mellowed out" on that issue, and it's no longer a pet cause of mine, heheh. "Don't Give Up the Ship" plays much like "Christmas on Bear Mountain" -- at least the impression that's given is that until now, Scrooge has been a miserly, misanthropic relative who preferred to keep his distance from Donald and the nephews, and they rarely if ever saw him.

Also, there's the nephews becoming Junior Woodchucks over the course of "Treasure of the Golden Suns", and Donald's stated reason for joining the Navy, "to see the world!" If "Treasure of the Golden Suns" were in the same continuity as and subsequent to all of Barks stories (and not to mention thousands of Duck comic stories from the world over), I suspect that as far as "seeing the world", what the Navy had to offer would pale in comparison to his experiences on all those adventures and treasure hunts his uncle dragged him along on! :)

As for last year's short-lived comic book revival of DuckTales ... I'm not even touching that one! ;)

I treat Ducktales the same way I treat Batman The Animated Series, as its own entity. I don't try to recon them, nor do I feel the need to. I like different interpretations of characters and do not feel like I need to take stabs or make backhanded comments at either to prop up the other one.
For many of us, Ducktales was what exposed us to Carl Barks. Without Ducktales, there is no interest in the comics. I still enjoy the show. In fact I am watching it right now as I type this message.
Now if only Disney would release the fourth volume of the series.

Lars,
Oh, it was Quacky McSlant who I thought resembled Fethry. I've never heard of Quacky McSlant until now. Thanks for confirming who it actually was!
-- Ryan