Naughty Ducks Dream Adventures

No, that’s not the middle line of a haiku. That’s the Japanese title for DuckTales.

You have to admit: it’s evocative. There apparently exists a semi-translated version of the original NES DuckTales video game floating around online, which has an ending in which Scrooge tells Huey, Dewey and Louie that there is something in the world that is more precious than money or hidden treasure. And it’s the following:

I mean, you’re kind of a dick if your argue with the sentiment or point out that it’s not something Scrooge McDuck would ever say, but you’re allowed to quibble with the grammar. This mangled bit of English was memorable enough that it actual spawned a whole retrogaming website. So that is neat.

And yes, by the way, there’s also Japanese lyrics to the DuckTales theme song:

Half-Man, Half-Dog, All Wrong

Ren & Stimpy creator John K keeps a blog on which he discusses various matters relating to cartooning. From reading it somewhat regularly, I’ve learned that there’s a great deal about animation that John K doesn’t care for, and he usually has a well-thought-out argument for why the given thing shouldn’t be the way it is. Last month, he took on a subject that I’ve quietly pondered since I was a kid: Disney’s dogmen.

You know what I’m talking about if you watched Ducktales — and no, I never expected to be writing about Ducktales with such frequency in 2009. The show featured a few dogmen prominently: Duckworth, Scrooge McDuck’s stuffy buttler, and the Beagle Boys, the group of criminals who are constantly trying to steal from Scrooge. They’re clearly not ducks, as most of the Ducktales characters are, but they’re not fully dogs — at least not in the style of Goofy or Pluto, those two canines who populate Donald Duck’s universe and, thus, could presumably have reason to meet Duckworth and the Beagle Boys.

left: beagles boys. right: duckworth. left and right: horrifying dog men.

left: goofy. right: pluto. left and right: cartoony dogs that nonetheless look like dogs.

As John K points out, the dogmen are pretty damn horrifying. Grotesque in the traditional sense, they have human faces with dog noses placed on the vaguest hint of a snout. And sometime not even that. Some have strange, floppy, fleshy ears. Others have more human-shaped ears. Either should rightly creep you out.

I have always wondered why these creatures exist, except maybe to suggest some species-based social hierarchy in which white-feathered waterfowl dominate the dogmen. John K puts forth a good theory:

Can anyone explain why this existed? The only thing I can come up with is that conservative cartoonists felt a bit guilty about drawing regular funny animals that walked and talked (because that makes no sense) — but their jobs demanded it. Donald, Mickey, Bugs and all the animated cartoon stars were very cartoony and easy for the audience to suspend their disbelief, but maybe not so easy for the more conservative of the comic artists — so when they got to create their own incidental characters from scratch, they naturally drew more "realistic" and sensible humans in clothing — but then — so as not to alert Walt to it - at the last second, they would paste a dog nose or pig snout onto the human to trick their bosses into thinking that these were also funny animals that matched the style of the popular star characters.

It’s probably more likely that it was unconscious conservative auto-pilot drawing, never realizing how much more bizarre half-way cartoon characters are.

The reason I suspect conservatism as the culprit is that if it wasn’t, there would be many funny variations on the idea.

How about a realistic dog that stands on his hind legs but has a human nose?

Or a man with Crab eyes? A filter-feeding flesh colored shark that walks on realistic human legs with no pants, but a tuxedo jacket and a duck beak on top of his head?

How about an eel in a Burka? I mean, this could go on and on. It has limitless potential for fun.

Something worth thinking about, at least if you’re still plagued by memories of Ducktales.

The original post generated quite a discussion, with commenters weighing in on this and that below. One of the thats merits a mention here, I felt. The concept of dogmen wasn’t just limited to Disney franchises, and the proof is Betty Boop’s first ever appearance, in the Talkartoon short “Dizzy Dishes.” Boop pops up at a singer in a restaurant club populated by anthropomorphic animals. She looks more or less the same as to what she looks like today, save for those creepy, fleshy, floppy dog ears. Wikipedia claims she was initially designed to be an anthropomorphic dog.

She shows up at about the 2:20 mark. I have provided a still below for the lazy and impatient.


I’d like to think this explains Betty Boop’s bizarre head shape, but I’m not sure it does.

Smoke Monster Beta

Now I can’t remember what directed me to this particular YouTube clip, but I found myself here regardless, watching the first third of a Ducktales episode titled “Nothing to Fear.” (Click over to the YouTube site if you actually watch this through. The remaining two thirds are there — minus commercial breaks!) In it, a strange black cloud hovers over Scrooge McDuck’s estate and somehow manages to bring to life the fears of anybody unlucky enough to be standing under it.

(Please note: If you do actually want to watch this video, be forewarned that it may play rather loudly. Blasting the Ducktales theme from your office may not be the best way to earn the admiration of your boss and coworkers.)

The whole point of drawing online readers attention to the clip is the relative similarity between this as-sinister-as-Disney-gets raincloud and the smoke monster from Lost. It works, I suppose, even if the similarities probably don’t offer any insight into how Lost writers might try to explain this roaring, chattering, magpie-imitating, tree-felling entity that may or may not have taken the forms of a black horse, the undead Mr. Eko and resident therapist Harper Stanhope. In fact, I honestly doesn’t have any real bearing on Lost, because if the last episode’s big reveal is that the whole show — the plane crash, the island weirdness, the time travel — was merely port of a ploy on the part of Magica De Spell to get Scrooge’s Number One Dime, then I can’t even begin to tell you how many hours of my life I’ve wasted.

However, I can at least offer this: I have the vaguest memories of this episode, but for all I know the Dharma spooks put them in my brain during those years I don’t remember.

EDIT: Immediately after posting this, I found that the Number One Dime has its own Wikipedia page. Should I be surprised? Saddened? Spiraling into a Ducktales-spawned wiki-hole?

ADDITIONAL EDIT: I feel this blog of all places should make a note of the greatness of the name of Scrooge’s arch-nemesis — the equally Scottish but ultimately evil megabuck duck Flintheart Glomgold. Of course, few members of Ducktales’s target audience would have ever realized.

THIRD EDIT: Yes, by the way, I did fall into that aforementioned wiki-hole.