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YMMV / Duck Dodgers

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  • Awesome Music:
  • Broken Base: While most people agree Season 3 is the weakest season, there's the debate on if it went through Seasonal Rot or is just not as good as the first two. Detractors point out that it's the first Looney Tunes project to have actual character development, and Season 3 undoing that is a disservice. Defenders point out that, like the classic shorts, the Looney Tunes are not the best with long term character development, being more suited to simple plots, character archetypes, and lampooning pop culture, and Season 3 captures that feeling pretty well.
  • Crosses the Line Twice: When Daffy tells Roboto he's done something terrible, Roboto replies, without a hint of irony, that he'll help Daffy "bury the body".
  • Cult Classic: Especially by Looney Tunes purists. The introductory page should explain why.
  • Fandom-Specific Plot: A popular fanfic plot is to have Daffy look back on his past life before he became Duck Dodgers. Said fanfics usually focus on his vitriolic friendship with Bugs Bunny, and tend to be massive Tear Jerkers.
  • Fanon Discontinuity: To some fans, Season 3 never existed.
  • Foe Yay Shipping:
    • Dodgers and the Martian Commander. The episode "Enemy Yours" goes out of its way to make them act like disgruntled lovers, what with Dodgers panicking when he finds out that Marvin has other archenemies and Marvin making excuses to his current archenemy as if Dodgers is some Psycho Ex-Girlfriend who is trying to sabotage their current relationship.
    • Canon example: Dodgers and the Martian Queen. Seriously, the woman veers between wanting to destroy him and wanting to marry him. However, it seems a bit one-sided, as when confronted with the Queen's feelings, Dodgers usually either exploits them to his own advantage, or outright rebuffs them. If he manages to remember that they were ever engaged in the first place. When they really did get married, he had no problem with it, until Marvin tricked him into leaving her. When Dodgers found out he was duped, he seemed pretty mad. Even after I.Q. High reveals to her that Dodgers is an idiot she still finds herself strangely attracted to him.
  • Genius Bonus: When there's a throwaway joke about early 20th century botanist Luther Burbank, you know you're in for a lot of these.
    Space Cadet: Don't worry, kids. I have no idea who that is either.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: At one point in "The Menace of Maninsuit", Dodgers is thrown onto a nuclear plant in the bay damaging it, prompting him to comment "Oh, for all the stupid... I mean, WHO would put a nuclear power plant right there by the ocean!?" which can be rather sour after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: There are plenty of jokes that became a lot funnier a few years later.
    • One episode, "Menace of Maninsuit", which parodied Godzilla and few popular '70s Anime has Dodgers and Cadet piloting giant robots, clearly modeled after Mazinger Z and Great Mazinger, that could turn into a giant gun and a giant fist. And then we got Shin Mazinger, in which Mazinger actually turns into a giant fist.
    • And now we have another bit of "The Green Loontern" to make us chuckle retroactively, as Dodgers tells Sinestro to "forget the pony" he'd been requesting. Then you remember who was voicing Sinestro and what role he would later get many accolades for (not Q). To say nothing of Sinestro going up against a purple-skinned character voiced by Tara Strong.
    • In "The Green Loontern," Dodgers' "Oath" (which he makes up on the spot) starts out with "In blackest day and brightest night," which seems to be just a humorous reversal of the normal script. A few years later, this is how the Sinestro Corps' oath starts.
    • Another example from "The Green Loontern": one of the captured Green Lantern Corps members strongly resembles Raiden from the Mortal Kombat series. Not only would Warner Bros. later buy the franchise, but Raiden himself would appear as a guest character in Injustice 2, a DC fighting game.
    • In one episode, Dodgers comments on EYSC's upcoming engagement that wives start out "sweet and innocent", and then "You wake up in an empty house handcuffed to a radiator." A few years later, this is exactly what happens to the Eleventh Doctor on his first outing.
    • That Martian spring in "Duck Codgers" doesn't seem so farfetched now that liquid water was discovered on Mars in 2015.
    • In "Samurai Quack" (a parody of Samurai Jack), Duck Dodgers starts attacking random robots with his sword, slicing and dicing them with his sword. Then he sees a human who yells out that he isn't a robot. Dodgers abruptly stops and says this line. Even funnier that the particular human was voiced by Genndy Tartakovsky.
      Duck Dodgers: You're lucky I didn't cut you to ribbons.
      Human: Not with a Y-7 rating you won't.
      • Could qualify as Harsher in Hindsight as of the 2017 revival, where Jack does slay a human for the first time thinking she was another one of Aku's robots, earning it a TV-14-V rating.
      • And it doesn't end there. During the fight between Dodgers and Achoo, Achoo says the line: "Become my apprentice, samurai!...It is your destiny! Join me and we will rule the galaxy as father and son!". It may have been a hilarious reference to the iconic Luke, I Am Your Father scene of The Empire Strikes Back, but come Season 5, it ends up almost accurately describing the crucial plot twist of the penultimate episode: hint: to make it accurate, the subject is not the titular samurai, and change "son" to its opposite gender.
      • When Duck Dodgers finally confronts Achoo, the former demands Achoo to use his powers to send him back home. In the 2017 revival, after Ashi regains control of herself from Aku, she uses Aku's own time traveling powers to send herself and Jack back to the past.
      • And then there's Dodgers charging straight at Achoo, who pleads him to stop because they need to do customary battle preparations for "dramatic tension". In the finale, Jack just charges at Aku, who tries to beg him for a second. Unlike Duck Dodgers, Jack doesn't stop to let Aku catch his breath. No staredowns or anything. Jack goes straight for the kill.
  • Idiosyncratic Ship Naming: Space Angels for Dodgers/X-2 in reference to the song used to hypnotize X-2.
  • My Real Daddy: Although Spike Brandt and Tony Cervone are the creators, many people think Paul Dini and Tom Minton are the true creative force, and their absence in Season 3 made the decline in quality noticeable.
  • Seasonal Rot: The third season was made even though the show was originally intended to end after season two. As a result, the status quo was abruptly restored in the season three premiere by having the Martian Queen call off her marriage to Commander X2 due to still having feelings for Dodgers and revoking Mars' peace treaty with Earth when Dodgers continues to reject her advances. To make things more aggravating, Daffy's character development was undone, and the last episode was basically a faux-documentary with various characters being interviewed about their feelings about Duck Dodgers rather than a proper Grand Finale. Oh, and the show didn't even keep its own promise (as stated via Dodgers himself) that "the Martian gets one solo cartoon a season".
  • Squick: Long John Silver and Dodgers eating space parasites as part of a contest. The parasites are spiky, slimy, acidic and are swallowed alive.
  • Woolseyism: The Mexican Spanish dub, big time, as that dub includes craploads of Mexican slang, memes, and cultural references that doesn't exist in the original English version, much for the chagrin of non-Mexican viewers from other Latin American countries.

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