The Dragon's Den - Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series

David Wise, head writer for MD:TAS, had a significant amount of input on the show's formulation and development. In addition, he's been kind enough to participate in fan forums and answer questions over the years. Compiled below is a comprehensive sample of his answers and insights regarding certain topics. Enjoy!

On Tanya's middle name: "I picked Gertrude because it was funny. Just a sort of old-fashioned, frumpy name. It was strictly for the purposes of a joke."

On character diversity: "Again, WHY GROUP LIKE WITH LIKE??? You get nothing from this, story wise! Look at the six MDs: They are all DIFFERENT. Look at the Saurians: Each is different. The Turtles Each different. Etc. etc. etc. There is a simple reason for this... SIMILAR CHARACTERS CANCEL EACH OTHER OUT!!! Duke, teamed up with five completely different character types, is interesting. Duke teamed up with five other Dukes is five Dukes too many! Putting dissimilar, conflicting characters together is interesting. That's why I never brought back Canard. He would make Wildwing redundant."

On the use of magic on Puckworld: "No magic. That's why the Mask is so important."

On the first MD episode he wrote: "Microducks. There's really only one clue to this: It is one of the very few eps that doesn't feature direct involvement of the Saurians. The reason for this is that while I was doing all the series development (for which I was given something like three weeks), the schedule was so tight that Show One HAD to be put into production -before- the Disney execs had time to sign off on the Ducks' back-story with Canard and the Mask and the Saurians and all. The first script written couldn't feature the Saurians because they weren't approved (or even fully thought-up by yours truly!) yet. So the "pilot" wound up being a stand alone story."

On a possible revival of the series: "I hate to be the one to tell you, but the Ducks ain't NEVAH coming back. Please believe me. I am developing series at Disney TV Animation now and it's a whole different ballgame. And getting rid of Eisner wouldn't help. You probably don't know this, but MD was his baby! The only reason that show got on the air was because he wanted it to happen."

On the workload for writing MD:TAS: "YOU try writing two scripts a week - that's about 20 pages a day, seven days a week, with eight deadlines every five weekdays, FOR THIRTEEN WEEKS STRAIGHT, working literally 15 hours a day for 90 days without a single day off, and let's see if you can do better. Was Final Face Off rushed? Shyeah you bet - by then I could barely see straight. Was Jurassic Puck a clinker? Yup. You try doing 16 shows without a clinker. But if I'm such a lousy story editor, what about the other 7 eps that bore other writers' names? Traitor Among Us was pretty good. And Duck Hard is one of my favorite eps of the whole series. Well, I'll let you in on a little secret. I pretty much cooked up the stories for all of those 7 eps and handed them off to the writers - and then I had to pretty much rewrite the scripts from the ground up. Some less than others, but they are ALL at least 60% my writing. Some are closer to 100%."

On re-using plots from his previous works: "As for using plots from TMNT, actually, I was re-using a lot of those plots when I did TMNT! The basic idea of Zap Attack comes from a Transformers I did 20 years ago. I have written HUNDREDS of animation scripts, so like most writers, I recycle ideas (and sometimes jokes) all the time...
...The shrinking Ducks? I was using the shrinking bit on shows back in the 70's! And of course it's just ripped from the 50's movie 'The Incredible Shrinking Man'."