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"An enjoyable assortment of cartoons that push the boundaries of animated adventure. "

An enjoyable assortment of cartoons that push the boundaries of animated adventure.English - Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono seems a little outdated especially for an animated release.
I had never heard of Ducktales - Volume 1 until MovieWeb asked me to review it, but this ended up being a very wealthy (no pun intended) viewing experience. Essentially, Donald Duck has joined the navy and sent his nephews to live with their Uncle Scrooge McDuck. This volume doesn't focus on that so much as the adventures that the nephews (Huey, Dewey and Louie) get into, much to the dismay of their Uncle. Okay, what would a show like this be without a "father figure" to try and reel these boys in? Also, when you set up a show with a "miser" like Scrooge McDuck and place him around 3 rambunctious kids, you are basically asking for a lot of trouble and headaches.

In 1987, I don't know what I was watching at the time but it wasn't Ducktales. This light look at "family" through the art of animation and ducks was overall very entertaining. While I doubt that I was really the intended audience for this box set, I can appreciate the animation and the stories enough to really get "into" what I was watching. Not a bad release from our friends at Disney.

No extras came with these DVDs.

 
The Look
Full Frame - 1.33:1. It seems that anything with Donald Duck, or in this case related to Donald Duck, is more colorful and full of life than most of the Disney creations. Don't get me wrong, as a studio that was and often is at the forefront of this medium (at least they used to be), pretty much all of their name brand creations stand out. However, there is something about these ducks, and Huey, Dewey and Louie in particular, that is just different. I think it's a combination of their animated movements and the colors that were used to render these characters. These guys just seem "more alive" and as such they stand out.
  
 
The Sound
English - Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono. Okay, I know that this show is from 1987 but I would have thought that the sound would have been of a higher quality. I was able to hear everything fine but I sort of thought that things would have been in stereo? After all, this was the late 1980s and while we aren't totally where we are today as far as technology goes (actually, we weren't even that close), I just thought that most TV shows, especially one from Disney, would have been moving more in that direction. Like the characters themselves, the sound is animated enough to make the core audience of viewers not care about the technical specifics.
  
 
The Packaging
All 618 minutes of Ducktales - Volume 1 comes housed on 3 discs inside this somewhat clunky set. I am huge fan of the look of this cover. There is a lot of purple mixed with soft greens, reds, blues and yellows. The back features more shots of our Ducktales Friends, a description of this show and some technical specs. Inside is a listing of the episodes and overall I found things easy to negotiate. I guess my biggest problem with the packaging is I wish the discs could have been better housed, to make for an easier entrée into my DVD collection.
  
I loved that this show didn't have any sense of needing to be in a time or place. By this I mean one episode might find our fearless ducks searching for the Fountain of Youth and in another one they could somehow be launched into outer space. Now, I know that animation has the ability to defy many laws of physics, and this is precisely why people like it, but for a show like this that seemed "rooted" in reality, at the end of the day it truly wasn't.

Ducktales - Volume 1 was a fun DVD set that I think would appeal to many younger people today. In fact, watching it I was reminded of the adventurous spirit that made me love these sorts of cartoons when I was a kid.


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Reviewed: December 2nd, 2005
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