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Gábor Csupó’s Proposed ‘Duckman’ Revival Opening Feels Like An Elaborate Provocation Or A Nightmare
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Gábor Csupó is unquestionably an animation legend. As co-founder of Klasky Csupo, he helped bring The Simpsons, Rugrats, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters (I’m wearing a T-shirt from the show as I write this), and The Wild Thornberrys to television. His studio also produced Everett Peck’s Duckman, one of the strangest and most memorable adult animated series of the 1990s.
All of which makes Csupó’s newly uploaded pitch for a Duckman revival very hard to process.
The video, described as a “new proposed opening title” with updated visuals, has an AI feel to it and features a truly painful new theme song. The show’s once-gritty, noir-inspired characters have been digitally Botoxed into vibrant, glossy approximations of themselves, drifting through a familiar setup but with an aesthetic that replaces the original series’ deliberately ugly aesthetic with a just plain ugly one. There are also a couple of inexplicable Simpsons cameos.
According to the video description, Klasky Csupo and Grand Allure Entertainment control future television, streaming, and film rights to Duckman in conjunction with CBS. Csupó says the companies hope CBS will order new episodes, adding that a major streaming platform could also be interested.
Whether the video is a serious pitch or an elaborate provocation is unclear. Perhaps it was intended as a subversive critique of modern animation, the industry’s obsession with endless reboots and IP exploitation, and the damage soulless AI slop can inflict on beloved relics of our past.
If it is serious, the world would be better off leaving Duckman in that past, where it can remain unspoiled. Duckman holds a very special place in my heart. It was the first “grown-up” show I remember watching with my dad, and seeing it presented like this is a little bit heartbreaking.
Maybe Duckman deserves another shot. But if it does, it deserves a much better one than this.
For the sake of your eyes and ears, here’s the show’s original opening.