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popculturebuffet · 3 years

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Darkwing Double Feature: The Quiverwing Quack and Paint Misbehavin (Paint Misbehavin Comissoned by WeirdKev27)

Greetings darkwings of the night! It’s time to return to our daring duck of mystery for a third double feature! This one’s been a longtime coming.. as in since around black friday when I did a comissions sale. As usual Kev was my only customer and he bought both Splatter Phoenix episodes... and I shamefully admit this one has sat in my queue for a while as I wanted to finish the justice ducks retrospective first, as I also wanted to cover Quiverwing Quack’s first appearance, on my own time, and I wanted to save doing any Negaduck till I got done with Justice Ducks. And that’s where errors were made, as I PAUSED said retrospective forgetting I both had this review sitting in my queue, and that I really didnt have that much left to go on it. SO yeah this took WAY longer than I usually do for a commission, and I apologize for that and i’m happy to correct it, with this, along with the freebie I gave him at the time, coming out tommorow i’ll finally be caught up and promise this won’t happen again. So with my needed apologizes out of the way, let’s talk about why this is a double feature. Simple: Paint Misbehavin is Quiverwing Quack, Gosalyn’s superhero alter ego’s, only other appearance on the show. It would appear in the comics.. in a fashion.. but we’ll get to that. So it dind’t feel quite right covering one without the other, especially since this version of gos is a fan faviorite of many. So does our archer live up to the hype? Let’s get dangerous under the cut and find out.

The Quiverwing Quack:

This.. may be the best Darkwing i’ve seen so far. There is some competition of course, but this one is easily the frontrunner. It’s hilarious, has a really great and intresting plot, few faults, and is just.. about as good as this show can get. I could end that here but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t, so let’s get into why.

The episode starts with a fairly typical day for Darkwing: Fighting Negaduck, hilariously as always, and mocking his arch enemy for only being Public Enemy #2 behind Dr. Slug, an oft mentioned but never seen in an actual episode villian that’s apparently one of DW’s deadliest foes. So already we have a great motive for Negaduck, who usually just has the motive of “destroy darkwing’ or do evil, though to the show’s credit, just looking at the summaries for his other eps alone, they NEVER ran out of ideas for the guy or forgot he was as clever as he was ax crazy.

But just as he’s about to beat darkwing, Gosalyn arrives with an archery set Launchpad purchased for her and easily holds him down. And rather than be greatful Drake is mad at her and feels the arrows are too dangerous which.. fair those look to be real arrows but not the time or place. Gosalyn however is angry her dad stopped her and is chafing both under his overprotectivness and feeling this is about ego, creates her own crime fighting alter ego Quiverwing Quack, dragging Honker along as her sidekick Arrow Boy. He dosen’t WANT to get into hero work, but he’s afraid she’ll pulverize him if he dosen’t. HA HA.. GET IT.. BECAUSE SHE’S A GIRL AND IT’S NOT LIKE GIRLS CAN ABUSE BOYS HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHAAAAAA

Yeah as you can tell that bit hasn’t aged well and is the one down note in an otherwise great episode. And I do mean great. Because this essential conflict works perfectly and is expertly built on what we’ve already seen of the characters.

For starters Gosalyn forming her own hero identity feels like a natural evolution of her character. It genuinely feels that, given her love for adventure and of her dad being a superhero, that she’d take the next step in wanting to follow in her footsteps and put on her own costume eventually. Her making her OWN rather than something derivitative of darkwing also perfectly fits both her anger at her dad’s overprotectivness and her own individual nature. The costume itself is.. okay pretty simplistic, with an early green arrow style hat and some gloves and boots.. but while I didn’t like it at first It’s grown on me a bit, as I realized it feels like the kind of a costume a kid would throw together and given Gosalyn dosne’t have her dad’s backing, it makes sense the costume would be slapped together. Grante dit dosen’t explain her trick arrows, but given we’ve seen gosalyn is pretty talented and that she can easily acess Darkwing’s lair, it’s not a huge stretch to say she went into her dad’s lair while he was gone, took some suplies and made the arrows herself.

And i’ll freely admit i’m a sucker for a good archer hero as Hawkeye is easily one of my faviroite superheroes. Which granted is a sentence I know will probably baffle anyone who hasn’t picked up a comic with clint, or has but it was written by brianmicheal bendis, as in the movies up to Endgame you could easily replace him with a block of wood with a purple h painted on it and no one would notice the difference. And other archer heroes like Arowette, Speedy, Kate Bishop, Arsenal and Green Arrow are also on the whole pretty fucking awesome, as is the Young Justice Cartoon version of Artemis and the JLU version of Green Arrow. So this was kind of a slam dunk for me and the fact Gos’ costume comes off as a combination of Hawkeye and Green Arrow, having Ollie’s hat but Clint’s purple color scheme and gloves with no sleeves aesthetic, just makes me all the more on board for this.

What truly makes the episode though is Darkwing, whose internal conflict is masterful to watch. While his being overproective isn’t anything new to the show, this episode takes it in a more dramatic directon: While there’s still a few jokes the episode gives some very painful reasons why he’s like this: He dosen’t want to loose his baby girl, both figuratively in her growing up and becoming more self sufficent.. and literally in her dying. It’s a terror any parent faces and it makes him sympathetic: While he IS overreacting at times and would be better off training her and helping nurture her while still keeping her safe, so when she DOES run off to do her own thing she’ll be ready, you can’t blame him for not wanting that, for wanting her to just stay home, stay safe and stay ALIVE. The comics, which i’ve read some of and will cover here at some point, make this hit HARDER as during the second arc, where we meet a bunch of Darkwing Ducks from other dimenisons.. and one of them is Quiverwing Duck. You can probably guess just by the name what happened to his Gosalyn after years and years of working together.

So the risk .. is very real. Loosing her is VERY possible. Being a kid to teen superhero is a VERY dangerous line of work as with less experince and being a possible target if you have any mentors, and sometimes you genuinely DON’T make it. Cypher, Jason Todd Robin, Ultimate Peter Parker, Synch, Danny Chase, Kid Devil, Skin, Wallflower, Icarus, Genisis.. the list goes on, and on, and while MOST of them came back even then the ones that did didnt exactly lack in scars: Jason was never the same after the joker’s beating and Doug, Cypher, had severe trauma he never adressed. The danger Darkwing fears is VERY real.. but is a danger she faces ANYWAY by rushing in and acompanying him. The tragedy is traning her would at least give her a fighting chance as it’s clear from the above that Quiverwing Duck’s Gos died not because she wasn’t ready or because her dad din’t train her.. but because , like MOST of the heroes above.. she died a hero saving the world. And the show recognizes this even if it doen’t mention the death because the show has to have limits and it was the early 90′s, wiht Darkwing’s fears also being that she’s growing up. He knows sh’es capable of this.. he’s just tearful she’s growing up.. and that she could be gone. It puts his overprotectiveness from other episodes in a much more understandable light, and makes it clear that while it comes from a good place it’s not really healthy: As the episode shows, Gosalyn thinks ALL he sees of her is a baby to be coddled and protected and not as her own person, and while he’s right to protect her.. he’s gone so far in it and in dismisisng her again, and again AND AGAIN, that he’s given the poor girl a complex. Leaping into danger alone isn’t the answer.. but when we get to the climax of the episode you can see why it’s gotten this bad. It’s suprisingly layred for what’s normally a pretty simple character conlficts. Here there’s no easy answer and even while by the end Darkwing’s accepted she’ll be a hero someday and both earnestly apologize, ther’es no real resolution. And sometimes.. that’s okay. It’s something they could’ve revisited had the series gone on and we did get at least one sequel episode at least and the comics do explore the issue of gosalyn being a kid hero and drake’s overprotectiness, with his issues there being why he retired and ended up badly straining his relationhip with gosalyn and ending , for a while, his friendship with launchpad and relationsihp with morgan as well as his costumed career. But obviously as I said we’ll get to that another day. But as an episode.. this one is truly excellent and one of the best the series put out, with plenty of humor but the more complicated dynamics at play BUILT on what we’ve seen before, including Gos rightfuly supsecting dakwing’s against her due to his own ego at points, are what elevate it to the series best. So how’d they follow it up?

Paint Misbehavin:

This one’s in an awkard middle place, where it’s FAR better than the previous splatter Phoenix Episode but not as good as “The Quiverwing Quack”. Still it’s a pretty fun episode all together. So the main plot is that Darkwing and Gosalyn are at cross purposes because Darkwing is overshadowed by Gosalyn, in this case at the local comic con where Gosalyn, returning to her Quiverwing Quack guise, is the big new thing while Darkwing’s practically ignored.

Yeah no way around it this is a rehash of “Whiffle While You Work”, same basic conflict, just with suprheroing instead of a video game. So naturally at first it annoyed me especially since they had a debate over who was better, Darkwing’s old traditional hero or Gosalyn’s new very 90′s hero. This.. goes about nowhere and is just cringe inducing for me as a comics fan, whose not against 90′s characters but acknolsges the vast majority got better LATER under new writers, with the exception of some such as superboy, steel, kyle rayner and impulse, who were fresh out of the package. Thankfully.. the episode pushes past this and it ends up being a better version of Whiffle While You Work, as Drake isn’t as overbearingly obnoxious as he was there: Here Gosalyn is just as egotsitical, at one point trying to lead him away from a crime scene, and it’s only when they finally work as a team that they become unstoppable. It does say something though that Darkwing has genuinely grown as his objection is pure ego instead of overprotectivness like last time and he willingly lets her tag along even if he’s trying to show her up. It’s not the BEST conflict, and it ends with egos clashing, but while this part of the episode is recycled.. at least it’s recycling an episode that genuinely wasted the idea and using it better. Darkwing being jealous here is FAR more understandable as he’s been a hero far longer and while his ego is way too big for his head, it’s understandble to be a big pissy, and agian he dosen’t go nearly as far in how he treats gosalyn. He just wants to show up his own daughter and he’s shown as fully wrong for this. Not great but far better than before. What IS great and what makes this episode fun, is Splatter Phoenix, whose even better than last time. I attribute this to the change in voice actors. While Dani Staahl was excellent.. her replacment is far better and far more notable. It’s SCTV’s andrea martin... who i’m realizing most of you have probably never heard of.

Or know what SCTV is. It was before both our times trust me: it was an early 80′s sketch comedy show that had a unique premise as the sketches were all programs for a fictional tv station, and there’d often be wraparounds about what was going on at the station that oftne led to sketches or impacted them: From dealing with sponser issues brought on by the Moral Majority, aliens, the russians hyjacking their signal, and forging checks from Fred Willard’s account, yes that was a plot and yes he was indeed a guest star, there was no end to the number of shenanigans in and out of program. IT was really good stuff with an all star cast: John Candy, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Cathrine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Joe Flarhety, Martin Short, and of course Martin. Even Harold Ramis was on the show for it’s first season. It was just a damn good time and if you can find the dvd’s or clips on youtube I recommend it. My point is Martin is vastly underated and really deserves better than she’s gotten, and this eps proves it as her energy really adds to Splatter’s astetic and really fits the show like a glove and it’s a shame the show ended shortly after this episode, as it would’ve been nice to see her return in the role. But for a one shot she’s UTTERLY awesome, and Splatter gets to do far more this time as her brush has now expanded to be able to create, so we get helicopter cats, pumpkin dogs, a pink gorilla with a toaster for a head and when told superheroes always win she creates her own, absract man, with a hand for a head and a weird body and I just want to see more of him. He even skips off with Launchpad’s faivorie hero, bascally mr rodgers as a weasel, after launchpad draws the guy in. I want to see this gay couple fight crime with love and existetaalism dammit!

But yeah she’s just fun, as is her vandalism of various art works including making the dogs playing poker into skeletons.. which I now want a picture of for my room because that is nice. SHe also brings back the art shitfts from before in little ways, transforming darkwing into abstract art and to blocky art at diffrent points with her brush. And that’s what puts this episode over the other: The creativity is still there but without the whole “Honker being gaslighted” plot that I still hate to this very second, it’s allowed to be fun and fancy free and with Splatter out in the open she’s allowed to get a LOT more ambitious and thus the writers and martin get to have a LOT more fun with the gimmick.

So while I do feel the episode’s a bit crowded, as they try to cram in both splatter phoenix and this super feud between family into the same space and both episodes would’ve been better served seperatley, i’ts so fun with clever use of the magic brush by our heroes and what not I can’t help but love it. I don’t love the climax though as splatter gets turpentine spilled on her by gosalyny and .. melts for some reason. Because she’s made of paint now even though that was never a thing before? Not to mention the fact our heroes just killed a person...

So yeah the ending’s a bit wonky but it’s a fun episode with the return of a great villian, a decent of played out main conflict and some great gags and fights in it. All in all i’m glad I got comissioned for this one and finally tackled it. Good stuff. So that does it for this. We’ll be back to darkwing next week just in time for valentine’s day.. and back with Negaduck too. Until then it’s been a pleasure.

#darkwing duck #drake mallard #gosalyn mallard #launchpad mcquack #negaduck #jim starling #splatter phoenix #paint misbehavin #quiverwing quack #honker muddlefoot #reviews #disney #disney plus

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