Hacker Cinema
DuckTales
2017 · TV series · 23 min episodes · 3 seasons
Created by Francisco Angones, Matt Youngberg
The adventures of billionaire Scrooge McDuck and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, their famous uncle Donald Duck, pilot extraordinaire Launchpad, Mrs. Beakly, Webby and Roboduck. Adventures and hidden treasures are everywhere, in their hometown Duckburg and all around the world.
2 positive4 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
I'm not sure there's ever been more options for good shows that a parent can watch and genuinely enjoy with their kids. Try Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, Hilda, Sarah & Duck, Adventure Time, Miraculous, The Dragon Prince, MLP Friendship is Magic, She-Ra and the Princess of Power, Samurai Jack, Gravity Falls, Ducktales (the new one, but the old one isn't bad either), Cleopatra in Space, Amphibia, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Owl House, Craig of the Creek, Steven Universe, LEGO Elves, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Over the Garden Wall, Infinity Train, and the Disney Fairies movies.
I'd also recommend getting your hands on the cartoons you enjoyed as a kid. Odds are good your kids will like them for the same reasons you did, although you may find that they don't all hold up for you.
The Scrooge McDuck from the Ducktales remake (which I heartily recommend watching; it's a wonderfully funny cartoon for adults that pokes fun at plenty of adult things including silicon valley and mark zuckerberg) actually talks a bit about making money the smart way rather than being a penny-pincher. Which is a nice departure from the old persona.
Disney Plus has endeared the character to a new generation in America with the TV shows Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, and a reboot of DuckTales.
I doubt they put up Ducktales content on Youtube expecting hundreds of millions of view and a ton of advertising money. It's more to have the IP consumed and fresh in kids' and parents' minds for when a new Ducktales movie or toy comes out to support the reboot. The reboot is more of an ad for future monetizable products than anything else.
I wonder if assumptions about horizontal vs vertical content hold. Disney put the first episodes of their Ducktales reboot on youtube, and a week later it has... 1.6m views. On youtube? That doesn't pay one hobbyist minimum wage for the month much less a best in class animation studio.
On one hand, yeah, its targeted at kids. They probably aren't savvy at online content discovery. They almost certainly aren't subscribed to the Disney XD Youtube channel when there are Spiderman vs Pregnant Elsa videos to watch.
On the other hand, they put it out for free, to anyone in the US with an Internet connection, and they got 1.6m hits.
I don't think horizontal works as a business strategy. It relies entirely on memetic effects to propagate your content because the advertising budget required to reach an entire demographic to get ubiquity is magnitudes larger than the cost of actually making the thing. There is too much content inundating people - especially children. It makes your success completely random. Did your "meme" scenes go viral? Did your intricately designed quotable character take off? Did you have those, and just get overshadowed by some other meme at the time?
We won't see the consequences for a while. It will be 10 years before the cablecutters who dropped Disney have children at a critical enough mass to dramatically limit the number of young faces in front of non-interactive screens. But when that comes, it will have consequences none of these companies traditionally built on tv viewership are ready for. And I don't even know if they can prepare.
I feel like the only real end-game solution is to cultivate a fanbase, and use them as your revenue stream - much like how music has become today. Artists don't make anything off trying to sell their music anymore, because not being on spotify and pandora is a death sentence to your relevance. You need the audience, even if they aren't paying you anything, to attract fans that want mech you can profit from.
It would be really weird to see Ducktales as a Patreon project that is getting paid by 100k supporters several millions a month, but it seems to me that is the endgame for original creative media in the long run.
> do people really think "I'd like to see a Disney movie tonight" or do they just want to see a particular movie or genre?
I don't think it's so much "Let's go see what's on the Disney tonight", and more a question of requirements.
I have a son, who is going to turn 3. There's a decent chance that, within a few years, we're going to need on-demand access to Disney content, even if that means paying like $10/mo that we weren't paying before. If he gets hooked on e.g. Frozen and insists on watching it 10 times a day when we're stuck inside due to weather, then that ten bucks is going to pay for itself pretty quickly.
On the other hand, the other example I think of is the new Ducktales. Before this news, I was wondering: will it be on iTunes? Netflix? Streaming online through some other service? Will I have to torrent it if I want to see it in Canada without paying for a $80/mo cable package and a DVR (fuck you HBO)?
Now, if Disney is launching their own streaming service, there's a good chance that this simplifies the answers. If this streaming service launches in Canada in the first place, then there's a decent chance I can see new episodes there, and if so, there's a decent chance that I can see them day-of, or possibly real-time.
The idea of a streaming service where my kid can sit down when it's time for his favourite cartoon to be on and actually watch it, rather than having to wait for daddy to torrent it for him, is fantastic, and I'll pay $10/mo for that.