JS: When you talk about DW getting a wrong-headed idea, the episode I remember is where he lets Gosalyn and Honker market research him into this nice, sweet kind of hero. He finally gets the public acceptance he's always craved, but in the process the criminals lose their fear of him.

TS: That's the whole turnaround: “I dress like a bat because it's scary.” Okay, once you take that away...

JS: One of things that frustrated DW was that he couldn't get taken seriously by the public —

TS: Oh, good lord, Darkwing's ego was always getting in the way.

JS: That was another great episode where Darkwing is exploring his own brain and he opens this door to reveal a giant monster: “Oh, no — it's my ego!”

TS: I thought the execution didn't quite make it. We wanted the brain to look really cluttered and it never quite got there. Sometimes we lost things in translation because we were doing so many episodes.

JS: You were doing things in that episode like freezing the action on a close-up, and then DW and Launchpad walk in front of the freeze frame of themselves to narrate what's going on - conceptually brilliant stuff on a weekday afternoon cartoon show.

TS: Timing-wise we were very lucky. There's always a thing where you're doing a show, and then the competition comes out with a big hit. The boss turns around and says, “Why isn't your show like that one?” even though the concepts are completely different. The lucky thing that happened to me is that we took longer in our development than Warner Bros. did. While Darkwing was in the works, Tiny Toons came out. Remember how I told you at the beginning people were skittish about him talking to the camera or falling off a building? Well, the competition comes out with this very wild throwback show, which worked to our advantage. Suddenly everyone is not nervous about it.

When I was developing Darkwing and Magon was in the middle of doing TaleSpin, well TaleSpin was never meant to be anything like Tiny Toons, so it didn't help him at all. I was very lucky when it came time to jump on the bandwagon; we already had our own wagon.

Back then Krisel ran a tight ship. He'd be all over you in development and in the first three scripts — then he'd go away and you got to do your show. Then when the first footage would come back and it would start up again, and then “Okay, now we know what the show is, and it would level off. Then when the show was about to go on the air, panic struck again. Basically for the most part you watch out for your crew, let everybody do their creative best, and you get the best product.

One More Darkwing Duck Question:

JS: The statue of Basil; tell me about that. [Bopping the small statue that sat in Darkwing's living room on its head opened the secret passageway to his headquarters.]

TS: Remember, I shared an office with Ron Clements. Ron loved Sherlock Holmes and went on with John Musker and Burny Mattinson to do The Great Mouse Detective. I wanted to put a nod towards my friends in features in there; why not Basil? We never talked about it, I just did it.

JS: The fan boy side of me wondered if Basil had inspired Drake Mallard to become a crime fighter himself.

TS: It was more of “Hey, here's a detective, and Ron's a friend of mine, why not?” That's why Darkwing is so frustrating to people: they insist on doing continuity, and I was actively anti-continuity. Saying, “yeah, we have continuity because Batman met the Joker before, he's meeting him again, and he'll think `this time I'm going to watch out for the giant penny.'” That was about as far as our continuity went.

JS: So if Negaduck was split off from Darkwing in one episode, and in another he comes from an alternate dimension - who cares?

TS: Pretty much. After we did the Negaduck episode, I really liked this character and I wanted to bring him back. They said “how?” and I said, “What do you mean how? He's back.” We just did it, and in the episode Life, the Negaverse and Everything we just created this whole alternate reality he supposedly came from.

Check back next month for the final installment of Joe Strike's conversation with Tad Stones in which Tad discusses life after Darkwing Duck, Aladdin and direct-to-video releases.

Joe Strike is a NYC-based writer/producer with a background in TV promotion and a lifelong interest in animation. He is writing a children's novel.