Darkwing Duck Voice Actor Reflects on '90s Cartoon for Its 25th Anniversary

The series aired for three seasons and starred Jim Cummings, a known animated series and movie star

By Corinne Heller Apr 08, 2016 7:34 PMTags

A famous Disney duck is celebrating his 25th anniversary this year...and he will likely dress light.

The Disney series aired for three seasons, starting in September 1991, on ABC and the Disney Channel and was largely inspired by its hit DuckTales. It centered around a superhero duck, whose alter ego is Drake Mallard, who battles crime with the help of his sidekick, Launchpad McQuack, lives with his daughter, Gosalyn, and likes to utter hilarious, egotistical phrases such as, "I am the terror that flaps in the night!"

And like Disney's most famous duck, Donald Duck, Darkwing is missing something obvious.

"We're not even gonna talk about the fact that Darkwing didn't have pants," Jim Cummings, who voiced the character, said in a video posted on the YouTube page of Disney fan club D23. "Pooh's got one red shirt."

Walt Disney Home Entertainment

Cummings has also voiced a slew of other, more famous animated characters in '80s and '90s cartoons, namely Winnie the Pooh and Tigger in The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and Winnie the Pooh movies, the Tasmanian Devil in Taz-Mania, Animaniacs and other Looney Toons shows, the villain Sly Sludge in Captain Planet and the Planeteers and Zummi Gummi in Adventures of the Gummi Bears. He also played Pete in A Goofy Movie, a palace guard and an apple merchant in Aladdin and Ed the hyena in The Lion King.

"Because I've been Winnie the Pooh and Tigger and Taz for many, many moons too but...I put them in their own special shelf, their own cloud, because they're sort of like the evergreens. They're never going to go anywhere," Cummings said. "But Darkwing Duck came along and he was my first sort of creation. Didn't do it alone, obviously, but he was my first guy whose voice and character came right out of me."

Walt Disney Home Entertainment

Cummings also talks about one of the show's main villains, portrayed by another famous voice actor: Dan Castellaneta, aka Homer Simpson.

"I always got a kick out of Dan Castellaneta's Megavolt," Cumming said. "Danny is, he's the bomb."