One of the Ducktales reboot's biggest strengths was its ability to tell an ongoing story across numerous episodic adventures, a trick its creators learned from famed X-Men writer Chris Claremont.
In a Vulture recap of Ducktales' best episodes, showrunners Matt Youngberg and Francisco Angones broke down how Claremont's approach to what they classified as "self-contained serialization" influenced their show's direction alongside the 1987 Ducktales cartoon and Uncle Scrooge comics. "We knew that we wanted every story to be a complete beginning, middle, and end like those Chris Claremont X-Men comics," Angones explained. "You could get a full story within one issue, but you could also see all the entanglements of all the other narratives that they've been seeding for years, and that idea kind of evolved to how we viewed DuckTales in general."
"Claremont was a really good inspiration [for us], especially… because the down time was just as important as the adventure time," Youngberg continued. "Even things like Modern Family were influences … But luckily there had been such great groundwork that was already laid with the original series that we just asked, 'How do we mesh all of these influences together?'"
Ducktales, which recently concluded after three seasons, followed the adventures of Donald Duck's nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie during their stay with Donald's Uncle Scrooge McDuck (voiced by David Tennant), as they explore the world for new treasure and adventure. As a reboot, the show simultaneously modernized its classic characters personality traits while paying homage to various Ducktales media from the original cartoon, comics and NES video game in its episodes, with each season hinting at grander mysteries related to the disappearance of the nephews' mother Della Duck and the villainous organization F.O.W.L. Ducktales also subtly dropped hints of Scrooge and his family existing in a semi-shared universe with other programs from the Disney Afternoon lineup, directly and indirectly referencing classic cartoons ranging from Tailspin to Darkwing Duck to Gargoyles.
Based on the 1987 series of the same name, DuckTales stars the voices of David Tennant, Danny Pudi, Ben Schwartz, Bobby Moynihan, Kate Micucci, Beck Bennett, Toks Olagundoye, Tony Anselmo and Paget Brewster.
Source: Vulture