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We are getting a new Mighty Ducks TV show. Not a cartoon about ducks this time, either. It’s a show about hockey centered in the world of the Ducks and Minnesota hockey and Gordon Bombay. The show is called The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers and it is arriving on Disney+. Weirdly, the Ducks are now the Hawks, basically. They are the juggernauts that need to be taken down by the underdogs. I am sure there is a trailer out there, but I have not seen it. I will not be watching the show either. That being said, Mighty Ducks will always be a notable franchise to me, because it came around at an age that probably helped push me into my fandom of hockey.
To be honest, I haven’t even seen the third Mighty Ducks film in its entirety. That being said, I have seen the first two films multiple times. In fact, D2: The Mighty Ducks was one of my most-watched films of my childhood. I may have mentioned this before, but I had the novelization of D2 and I read it multiple times, though partially as a joke. I know the plot like the back of my hand. I used to try and shoot knucklepucks, which wasn’t great because I was also starting to play hockey and that’s not exactly a practical shot to take.
All these years later, it’s a little blurry in terms of if I dug The Mighty Ducks because I was already into hockey, or if The Mighty Ducks helped get me into hockey. All I know is that as a kid I loved hockey and it became my favorite sport at a young age. I started playing hockey and I played it competitively through high school (I still play inline hockey on occasion). The Mighty Ducks was definitely part of my childhood, and my hockey fandom, though.
I feel like I was not alone in that. Hockey was on a bit of a rise in the early ‘90s. There was a quick period of time there where hockey was beginning to rise in popularity in the United States. 1994 may have been the year for it. MLB went on strike. Michael Jordan had retired. Meanwhile, the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup. That was the first Stanley Cup finals I ever watched. That’s also the year D2: The Mighty Ducks came out. It was the perfect time for a kid to have hockey delivered into their life, and it worked for me.
Then, of course, the NHL had a lockout of its own, and after that the neutral zone trap was introduced and hockey became a low-scoring and defensive game. Michael Jordan came back. Hockey slid back down the Q ratings and then when they straight-up cancelled a season the NHL was relegated to the clear fourth of the “big four” sports leagues in the United States, and college football and soccer are certainly more popular than hockey as well. I still love hockey, though. I also still remember Wolf “The Dentist” Stansson – Iceland’s head coach – yelling “The goalie!” when he realized that Gordon Bombay had snuck Russ Tyler into the net so he could unleash his knucklepuck. I won’t watch this new Disney+ show. I will always have a place in my heart for the first two Mighty Ducks movies, though.
