Bucky O'Hare - 11

"The Warriors"
The Air Marshal's career takes a turn for the worse when his grandstanding costs the toads' armada a great many of its fighters, for which Komplex fires him and puts Frix and Frax in charge. Teaming up with the similarly disgraced samurai lizard Sly Leezard in an effort to conquer Dead-Eye's home world Canopis III and thereby curry favor with Komplex, he captures Willy DuWitt and forces him to build a network of satellites to drain the planet of its water. Bucky O'Hare and his crew—especially Dead-Eye—of course proceed to foil this villainous scheme, but the Air Marshal does ultimately get reinstated to his position—in good part because Frix and Frax prove to be even worse bumblers and incompetents.

Points of interest:
0:21 Bucky O'Hare once again demonstrates his talent for using some spiffy vocabulary.
1:07 Maybe those vocabulary lessons are for Blinky: he apparently hasn't figured out that "incredible" in this context means "difficult to believe" yet. (One suspects Bucky O'Hare can easily believe Blinky and Willy DuWitt are having trouble with the ship's engines.)
1:17 Nothing tempts the hand of fate like anticipatory boasting about historical fame.
1:30 Air Marshall can throw a back-handed punch a remarkable distance.
2:13 If you're paying attention, though Komplex removes the Air Marshal from command and relieves him of duty, it doesn't actually state that it's demoting him or discharging him altogether.
2:22 "Croakus" sounds like the name of a toad planet; and the incident referenced being an "insurrection" further implies this was some kind of civil war. Maybe not all toads bow to Komplex's influence even now? (Maybe this was another idea that was to be explored in a future episode that never got made?)
2:52 While the sheer stupidity of Komplex's decision here is truly staggering to behold, this does go a long way toward explaining why the Toad Empire's military is so incompetent: evidently, the only intellectual advantage Komplex has over its toad minions is the colossal processing power available to it; in all other aspects, it has the same arrogance, hubris, and vanity clouding its judgement as any of its subordinates.
3:36 In a way, being a ninja being a popular occupation for four-armed ducks who aren't into piracy makes sense; both occupations are a bit disreputable, and the fighting styles of each require considerable development of one's hand-eye coordination. The principal difference is that the pirates tend to do a lot more traveling, whereas the ninja seem to be content to stay home and defend their planet most of the time.
3:52 How long did Sly Leezard's explanation take? Everyone who was playing in the arcade when he started talking is gone now.
4:38 While the Air Marshal has been shown to be willing to go back on his word before, in this case, he's probably planning more on keeping the deal to the letter while blithely disregarding the spirit in which it was made. In this case, that means while Sly Leezard would indeed be the King of Kanopis III as he desires, his kingdom would be reduced to nothing more than a vassal state to the Toad Empire once the Air Marshal got back into Komplex's good graces.
5:43 That Dead-Eye takes this small cruiser (which the repair station rather conveniently happens to have available) instead of the Toad Croaker suggests that the latter is only a short-range fighter with no hyperspace drive of its own.
7:20 While Willy DuWitt is being a bit naive here, it's worth remembering that for all his prodigy-level intellect and engineering skills, he's still just a kid; and considering Sly was able to swoop in and snatch him right out from under his companion's noses at the station, his claim to have slipped past them to plant a bomb on their ship's hull is not entirely implausible either.
8:26 As the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle's sensei Splinter (and your pal Kamikaze Kamo) would tell you, Dead-Eye, "Seek victory, not fairness."
8:49 Like Mega Man, the hands on Kamo's bionic arms can transform into other devices as needed.
8:56 As a bonus, they're also strong enough to lift and throw a full-grown opponent.
9:38 While Frix and Frax have mastered the tyrannical tone of voice here as they desired, their voices are still a lot higher and squeakier now than they were at the start of this series.
10:10 Though their historical reputation is better than that of the ninja, the samurai—even those who kept their word, unlike Sly Leezard here—and their notions of "honor" weren't really all that noble or ethical: their codes of conduct involved a lot of wanton killing of their social inferiors for the slightest perceived insult or even just for sword practice, and ritual suicide for themselves (and their wives) for some rather seemingly minor social missteps. In many ways, the ninja were simply former samurai who'd decided to jettison these dubious notions of honor for a more introverted and pragmatic (if not necessarily more ethical) approach to life.
10:22 Again, Sly Leezard's threat was pretty plausible; here, we see it even fooled the Air Marshal.
11:08 That ship looks to be a combination of the lizards' and toads' designs, which suggests that it was specifically constructed for the Air Marshal and Sly Leezard's collaborative project.
11:24 As demonstrated here, those satellites are pretty fragile when they're not activated.
13:31 How do the universal translators produce a Japanese word here along with the English for those of us in the audience? Simple: like English and many other Terran languages, the languages of many species in the Aniverse occasionally appropriate words from each other; it's entirely likely that both the ninja ducks and the lizard samurai do the same with each other's languages, especially for the purpose of taunting their opponents as Sly Leezard is doing here.
13:39 While sucking up the water from the ducks' home world certainly serves the lizards' purposes well, restoring it later would likely serve the Toad Empire's interests better, since (as established two episodes ago with the Corsair Canards' favorite drink) their world has plenty of swamps on it and the toads wouldn't even need one of their climate converters to make it suitable for colonization.
15:07 While not a whole lot brighter than his brother Frix, Frax does seem to be the one with more common sense. (Remember, he's also the one who thought to warn the Air Marshal against trying those overly fancy attack formation maneuvers that ended so disastrously.)
16:00 Bruiser wouldn't exactly be my first choice to replace Dead-Eye as the ship's gunner if this were a job that required some precision targeting of the enemy, but for enthusiastically blasting a stationary target, he's more than adequate to the task.
16:38 Of course, as a treacherous dealer himself, Sly Leezard should have known Willy DuWitt would build some kind of backdoor access into those satellites; but after the kid fell for that "pretend the roll of candy is a detonator switch" trick, he probably figured his captive didn't have the guts and guile to try to sabotage the project. Besides, as established by what he did to his project's previous scientific engineer, it's clear that Sly is a bit of a dolt.
17:03 Is the Air Marshal's having a toad trooper to pilot the ship here a continuity gaffe? Not necessarily: even if he was relieved of duty, the Air Marshal had to have had access to some kind of transportation to get him to that arcade center where he met Sly Leezard, and all transportation in the Toad Empire appears to consist exclusively of military vessels. This toad pilot here might well be serving him as his personal chauffeur, as the Air Marshall wasn't dismissed from service altogether and is still a decorated military officer (albeit with only *one* medal remaining on his uniform).
17:10 As typically happens in many children's cartoons, when the technology draining the planet is destroyed, not only does the draining stop, but its effects are immediately reversed and everything goes back to exactly the same as it was before. In more realistic settings, it would take a while for those flowers to bloom again and the trees to grow new leaves.
18:11 Sly Leezard is fortunate he's not dealing with human samurai; for his infractions, they'd probably order him to commit seppuku.
19:39 Considering how they got your position, and that your boss is now giving that position back to you, you really should already know the answer to that question, Air Marshal.