X-Men ended up being a surprise inspiration for Disney XD’s DuckTales. The executive producer and showrunner for the series, Francisco Angones and Matt Youngberg, told Vulture about how Chris Claremont’s run with Marvel’s mutants influenced their approach. Now, the 90s versions of the superheroes have enjoyed a lot of time in the sun lately with Disney+ launching in 2019. But, a lot of DuckTales fans probably wouldn’t expect Claremont’s name to be one that Angones and Youngberg to drop when asked about their creative process. The outlet alluded to Carl Barks’s work with the ducks in establishing the franchise. But, to take it a step further, the duo invested in that dual-layered approach that Marvel’s mutants used to such great success.
“We obviously were inspired by Barks’s comics, but we knew that we wanted to do something that was serialized but that also the episodes itself could also be self-contained — we called it self-contained serialization,” Angones revealed. “We knew that we wanted every story to be a complete beginning, middle, and end like those Chris Claremont X-Men comics. 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.”
The creative team also spoke to Comicbook.com after the series wrapped. Angones and Youngberg were absolutely touched by the support from the fanbase.
“It’s been really nice. I mean, I think the thing that we hoped … These characters have been around for forever. Some of them are new for our series. Some characterizations are new, some ideas are new,” Angones explained. “We were hoping that we opened a bunch of storytelling possibilities for these characters and that hopefully some of these characters would stick around in various forms, either in other projects or continuations of this project, 30 years from now or at the very least, in the hearts and minds of the fans that love the show and the kids that love the show.”
He added, “To see people loving characters like Della so much and, and Webby, and our versions of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and side characters, like our versions of Darkwing and Gosalyn and Penumbra and seeing how much our iteration of Donald and just seeing how much those characters really have made people’s lives, especially in this last year, just a little bit more connected and bearable has been really nice.”
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