What Ever Happened to Della Duck? is the seventh episode of Season 2 of DuckTales 2017, written by Madison Bateman & Colleen Evanson (along with DuckTales 2017's normal team of writers) and directed by Tanner Johnson. It features the 2017 Continuum versions of Della Duck and Scrooge McDuck, images and mentions of Gyro Gearloose, Donald Duck, Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck, and the debuts of General Lunaris, Lieutenant Penumbra, the Mother Moonmite and its child. Though part of Season 2, the episode actually takes place in the timeframe of Season 1.
Description[]
We wind back the clock to the fateful day Della Duck crashed the Spear of Selene on the Moon, and observe her struggle to survive and failed attempts make it back to Earth throughout the ensuing decades — including her confrontation with the monstrous Moonmite, and a reveal about the Moon that no one could have predicted!
References[]
- Della survives on the Moon using Gyro Gearloose's Oxy-Chew.
- The Spear of Selene runs on gold.
- Della meets two of the native species of the “planet Moon”: Moonmites and Moonlanders. She is introduced to the City of Tranquility.
- Having lost it in the crash, Della is led to replace her left leg with a robotic prosthetic.
Continuity[]
- The episode's cold open sees an expansion on the events of the "cosmic storms" that led to Della's crash on the Moon, previously recounted by Scrooge McDuck as a flashback from his point of view in The Last Crash of the Sunchaser (2018). Here, Della's point of view is used.
- Chronologically, and as confirmed by Francisco Angones on his blog, the "present-day" parts of the episode, past its ellipsis-filled opening, takes place some time prior to Della's cameo at the end of The Shadow War (2018).
- A year after the story's release, Sam King released a short comic adaptation of a deleted scene from the storyboard of What Ever Happened to Della Duck?, featuring Della Duck's first meal of Moon Scorpion after ten years of living off Oxy-Chew. This comic was nameless but is referred to on the Wiki as Deleted Dinner (2020).
- A mutual antagonism seems to exist between Della and Gyro, which reoccurs in Escape from the ImpossiBin.
Songs[]
Behind the scenes[]
This episode of DuckTales 2017 was released on March the 9th, 2019.
It was the first episode not to star any of the "main cast" (excepting Scrooge McDuck's brief cameo in the cold open), and Della Duck's first true appearance on the show, after her younger self had played a part in the events of the Christmas special Last Christmas and a present-day Della had made a one-line cameo at the end of The Shadow War, and another at the end of the aforementioned Last Christmas.
Highlighting its special status, the episode did not feature the usual theme song and credit sequence, with the logo merely appearing over the image and then fading at the 02:22 mark. It did, however, feature a song all the same, namely Della's Lullaby, set to the tune of the famous Moon Theme (which itself is heard several times throughout the episode).
The title of the episode is a reference to the infamous Don Rosa drawing Whatever Happened to Scrooge McDuck?
