Disney XD’s highly acclaimed DuckTales reboot has become known for occasionally paying memorable homage to iconic movies via episode-long tributes, like season one’s “Jaw$!,” which recreated Steven Spielberg’s classic shark thriller in Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. This week’s installment, entitled “Louie’s Eleven!,” returns to that well by incorporating tropes from famous heist films like the obvious “Ocean’s Eleven,” among others.
The episode also introduces Daisy Duck (voiced, as usual, by Tress MacNeille of The Simpsons, Animaniacs, and Futurama fame) to this version of Duckburg, and it’s kind of crazy to think there was ever a time before Donald (Tony Anselmo) had met his better half.
Daisy is in charge of organizing a fancy party thrown by tastemaker Emma Glamour (guest star Bebe Neuwirth, AKA Lilith from Cheers) and Donald’s nephew Louie Duck (Bobby Moynihan) has come up with an incredibly convoluted scheme to get The Three Caballeros into the party, where they will ostensibly perform and make the pages of Glamour’s fame-generating blog. Of course none of this goes the way Louie has planned it, despite the involvement of supposed ringers Huey (Danny Pudi), Gyro Gearloose (Jim Rash), Fun Zone waitress Jane (Toks Olagundoye), a Harpy, Webby (Kate Micucci), Manny the Headless Man Horse, and lest we forget, Dewey (Ben Schwartz) who serves as the party-crashing team’s “specialist,” though that doesn’t end up meaning what he wants it to mean.
As you may have guessed, this all makes for an extremely busy episode, and I haven’t even mentioned the fact that the power-hunger tech guru Mark Beaks (Josh Brener) has put together his own heist gang to invade the gathering and get his own name on Glamour’s list. But amid all the chaos and hit-or-miss comedy, the best and most touching scenes in this outing are the quieter ones, like Donald and Daisy getting stuck in an elevator together and having the meet-cute to end all meet-cutes– it’s pretty funny and actually sort of moving that Ms. Duck turns out to be the only person in town who can understand Donald perfectly, to the point where she even finds his voice to be somewhat enchanting. And he, naturally, is similarly smitten with her ambition and strangely familiar anger-management issues.
The Caballeros, Glamour’s party, and Louie’s scheme all function as backdrop and comic relief to further the goal of getting Donald and Daisy to notice each other, but it mostly works and ends with a pretty good punchline– despite the fact that the original song featured in this episode “Hear My Voice” is a little overly reminiscent of “Remember Me” from Pixar’s Coco. The lesson learned here is that in Duckburg, adventures don’t always result in their intended outcome, but happy accidents can still send the Duck family down fortuitous paths. Plus there’s a pretty fantastic Die Hard reference, so how can you go wrong there?
New episodes of DuckTales air Saturday mornings on Disney XD.