922 Constance.

This is another one of those pages that will make a lot less sense if you haven’t read the original story that starts the comic. Starting at about page 151 Thomas finds something out that leads, essentially, to his relationship with Carol. Some people absolutely understand why Thomas acts the way he does when it comes to exgirlfriends, others are completely flummoxed. It seems to be one of those things that you either get, or you don’t. The fact of the matter is that people handle loss in many different ways, and sometimes that way is very destructive.

I’ve been working on the duck scale of coolness.

Howard The Duck (movie/comic)

Magica DeSpell

Darkwing Duck

Scrooge McDuck

Daisy Duck

Launchpad McQuack

Mighty Ducks (Various)

Maui Mallard

Ducktales Extras

Count Duckula

Daffy Duck

The Duck Triplets

Donald Duck

Duckman

Wade Duck (U.S. Acres)

Yakky Doodle

Rubber Duck

Howard got such a high spot on the list only for getting to frolic with an almost nude Lea Thompson.

Yeah, this stuck with 8 year old me.

Easily the best part of that movie, which I freely admit isn’t saying much. There’s a huge Disney showing on this list. They really have the anthro duck market locked down. This is just a preliminary list based on the order I thought of the characters.

Maui Mallard is, apparently an alter ego of Donald Duck, but I never knew that because the North american release makes no mention of that. I only ever saw the box. So I always thought he was some random Disney Duck from a show I never saw. It turns out that in every other release it’s explicitly stated that Maui Mallard and Donald are one and the same. Of course not being Donald is what makes Maui so much cooler. Except now I know he’s like some sort of Chris Gaines persona. I’m not sure if he should even be on the list now.

Generally speaking I hate all the Looney Tunes characters, but the newest show has warmed my frozen heart. They are almost fresh and tolerable in that incarnation, which sets Daffy far above Donald on the list.

20 Comments

It is wonderful to see us getting back to this particular subplot, I had wondered where it was going.

On your short list of notable ducks I can’t believe you forgot GIZMODUCK! (It has to be capitalized as its always shouted by him) He was the Robocop-esque superhero from Duck Tales. His alter egowas a lowly accountant be he became an almost bumbling superhero with his techno armor and a single wheel instead of legs.Way better than Yakky Doodle IMO.

“Belief without evidence” is the definition of “faith”, so that’s not implied: it’s explicit.

… That said, people fudge stuff constantly in actual conversation, so it isn’t unrealistic for Carol to phrase it that way. Ironically, it’s actually a pet peeve of mine when people try to correct dialog that’s written to be naturalistic as if it was supposed to be formal language… So I guess what I’m trying to say is: I’m an ass. :P

I was wondering about Gizmoduck myself, but, given his ridiculous cameos on Darkwing and the fact that he just plain “is” Fenton Crackshell, he loses cool points.
I did note the absence of Goldie, though, Scrooge’s long lost shotgun-toting love.
What about that crazy science guy? Ludwig Von Drake? I guess they could all be considered “Ducktales extras” but I remember them well enough on their own.
I used to love Duckman. I taped it whenever it came on and watched them over and over. I didn’t always appreciate Klasky Csupo animation, but I always trusted the writing.
I am a cartoon fiend, though. Thinking back on it, those were some great cartoon years. If it was animated, I would give it a go.
I remember wanting to get the Darkwing Duck action figures but they were expensive or you couldn’t get Drake or something. I don’t know. My memory is fuzzy on those things. It sounds like something I would balk at, though– “How can you have a Darkwing figure and not have Drake Mallard?!? Am I just supposed to pretend he sits around in his costume all day?”. It was the same reason I couldn’t get behind the Zartan figure with his mask. I was always like, “He’s still wearing the same clothes. How can they not tell? The president does not wear bare midriff shirts!!!”.

I agree about Ludwig. He started some time in the 60s, well before ducktales so shouldn’t be lumped in as an extra.

I’ve also always hated when they make the one figure that has some of each person, like superman wearing Clark Kents glasses, or prince Adam with He-mans sword.

Meanwhile, Jo’s sneaking up on the other side of the counter, about to rain powdery death on the both of them.

I’m sorry but Howard the duck lost cool points with me cause of the movie. Seriously, once you’re in a film with duck tits, you kind of lose a bit of coolness factor. I mean try and say that word with a straight face, it’s impossible.

Personally I think you need to include- more of the Darkwing Backups, Negaduck, Gosalyn or even Herb Muddlefoot..

Not to mention Plucky Duck, “you no push the button I push the button” Elelator go down the hole”..

And how can Rubberduck be on the bottom of the list– his alter ego was Byrd Reynolds– and in the 80’s who was cooler than the Bandit.

Actually the American release says “Donald duck as Maui mallard” in the opening sequence. But i don’t think Donald is Maui. I think for the game they had Donald “act” as Maui so the story could be told, the truth however is that a long time ago Maui had existed and this happened to him. Leaving his memiors behind so someone would know his story….. But that’s just my thoughts.

-_-;

Could someone please fix the comment system?
Its failure to actually post the comments is getting beyond a joke.

Needs more Arne Anka, Alfred J. Kwak, and Irwin the Disco Duck. Disney may have the lead, but it’s not *that* much of a lockdown…

On my list Donald is over the Triplets and Daisy is last place, because she is a backstabbing golddigger. Seriously, how often she left Donald only because Gladstone had a hotter car or invited her to a fancy restaurant, RRRRR!
But maybe that is a trait of here which was more prevalent in the Pocket Books (Europe), which I read as a kid.

OH! It did eventually post my comments. That was what happened.

Anyway… you missed Deadeye Duck from Bucky O’Hare.

… =3

Not that anyone’s likely to read this, but for those of you who don’t understand that thing about ex girlfriends, I’d like to help shed some light on the subject. I will discuss it largely from a neurological perspective, since that’s the explanation that makes the most sense to me, but I’ll start with something I’ve observed first.
I’ve created a theory based on how people sometimes undergo radical personality shifts when someone close to them dies. It has to do with memory. As we all know, a memory usually consists of a sight or sound or maybe even a touch that is often closely linked to a feeling (often whatever you felt at the time). Seeing or hearing similar things can bring the memory to the forefront of our minds, as can feeling a similar way. It is also widely accepted that our personalities are largely made of and/or caused by our memories. Which is why someone will seem to be a different person after losing a large chunk of their memory. But memories aren’t static. Every time you recall something, the signals that pass through that part of your memory affect it a little, usually changing it to incorporate a little of what you’re feeling as you recall it. Normally, this is a passive effect, that takes a long time to make any big changes. But when you get some new information, you may look back on things and see them in a new light. This tends to alter the feelings that you associate with that memory to fit your new perspective.
If you’ve known someone a really long time and have a lot of happy memories with them, you could say that much of the happiness in your personality comes from them (or from those memories, anyway). When that person dies, you look back on those happy memories and you think “I’ll never be able to do this again. I’ll never see him/her again”. This sentiment is a very strong one, and a very sad one that emphasizes the futilities of life and the things that make a person want to give up. And your memories change. The more you think about that person and the memories you have of them in that light, the more those memories are stained by that terrible hopelessness. If it goes on for very long, you wind up changing all of your happy memories with that person into sad ones. If you have a really really bad case, you could even start to associate the very feeling of happiness with despair. Then, every time you think about anything happy, you overwrite it with despair. This is how people become suicidal.

The same thing can happen with your feelings about someone you used to like. It’s especially likely if they dump you, and it’s made worse if they are apathetic after the fact. Those same memories of tender love and happiness that made you so fond of the person are tainted by the breakup. Thereafter, especially if you still feel strongly for them, their apathy causes you to feel the frustration of being neglected. And frustration leads to anger; Anger leads to hate; Hate leads to suffering. All of which are negative emotions that will reinforce your bad memory associations until the only thing you can remember about them is how angry they make you and\or how much it hurt when they broke up with you.

Neurologically speaking, brains are made of neurons (as we all know), and the neurons work together to form a structure called (oddly enough) a Neural Network or neural net. The basic concept of a neural net is that any information is interperetted by every neuron it passes through, with each one making a tiny part of a decision, usually starting with decisions like “is this big enough/important enough to make this neuron fire”, then progressing to “which way should this signal be sent? does it belong here or over there?”, until finally enough of the right neurons fire to cause something to happen. And here’s where it gets tricky (and also really cool). Once this has happened, some kind of feedback is given to the neural net, based on what it did. Usually it’s either “this decision made good things happen” (positive feedback) or “this decision made bad things happen” (negative feedback). When the feedback is positive, every neuron that fired to make that decision gets altered slightly to make it more likely to fire the same way next time. If the feedback is negative, they’re altered to be less likely to make that decision. Thus, over time, with many cycles of decision making and feedback, the network becomes smarter and smarter until (given that the rules don’t change) either the system makes the perfect decision every time or it makes it most of the time, but the complexity of the neural net isn’t enough to fully solve the problem.
Of course once you integrate memories into this system, it becomes clear that whenever you remember something, a certain pathway of neurons that is unique to that memory is activated. When you remember something happy (like kissing someone) and then something bad happens (like that person breaks up with you), it causes that unique pathway to receive negative feedback. That negative feedback can either cause the neurons to not fire when presented with whatever made you remember (so you forget about them), or it can change the way they fire to tend towards other sorts of negative things, like anger (so you start to hate them). Naturally the more often those neurons receive negative feedback after firing, the more they adapt and the more the effect grows. Eventually, when something sparks a memory of a person (like hearing their name), none of the neurons that represent good things about that person fire and all of the one representing bad things fire, so you can only remember what you hated about the person.

Basically the more you think negatively about something or someone, the more you come to associate them with negativity. So when people say that the difference between being happy and not being happy is thinking happy thoughts, they are (as annoying as it is to those of us who aren’t happy and don’t want to believe them) absolutely right. The more you think happy thoughts about something, the more you associate it with happiness and the more likely you are to be happy when thinking about it. That’s why it helps to “look at the bright side” as they say. When you think bad thoughts about your work, but then you remember that you have to work to get paid and you have to get paid to buy cool stuff, then you can associate work with the feeling you get when you buy something cool. And work becomes that much cooler in your mind (quite literally). Therefore if you love what you do, you’ll be doing what you love. And if you do what you love, you’ll love what you do.

And on that note, I think I’ll bring this post to it’s long overdue conclusion. I hope someone enjoys reading it as much as I did writing it, and that they learn something that will help them.

That said, it’s really late where I am, as I write this, and I’m tired. If I were much more tired I might make some spelling mistakes or even cease to understand what I’m talking about (I have to be really, really tired for that to happen, so we’re probably safe for now). But I should hit the sack anyway. Good night. Or whatever happens to pass as a farewell whenever y’all happen to read this.

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