Silicon Valley has become a hotbed for television creators and film directors recently, with the Bay Area’s tech companies and the culture that supports them appearing in multiple shows and films in the past few years.
It appears that not even DuckTales, Disney’s reboot of the popular ‘90s series of the same name, will be able to escape entertainment’s latest obsession. In a series of new photos given to Polygon by Disney introducing different parts of Duckburg, the city Scrooge McDuck and his nephews live in, one of the core areas is a tech hub.
Silverbeak, seen below, is where “the local tech concern is,” according to story editor Francisco Angones. Think of it like a cool neighborhood in San Francisco, but with the hipster and creative mindset of those living in an area like Los Angeles’ Silverlake. Between the palm trees and what are supposed to be electric cars, the only thing missing is a Starbucks on the corner.
“Silverbeak is the hip and upcoming neighborhood and Silicon Valley of Duckburg,” executive producer Matt Youngberg told Polygon via email.
Although Silverbeak is the show’s most timely neighborhood, it isn’t the area where Scrooge and the rest of the Duck clan will be spending the majority of their time. Youngberg said the Ducks will spend most of their days in McDuck Manor and the Money Bin. The manor, Youngberg added, is located pretty close to their center of operations.
“The mansion and the Money Bin are two very key locations where we spent a lot of time, especially the mansion which is kind of the center base of operations,” Youngberg said. “That’s where it all happens and it being Scrooge’s house, it’s full of adventure itself.”
Angones added they put a lot of thought into the design of the manor because they wanted the feeling of visiting a grandparent or relative’s house and feeling that spooky chill run down your spine present in the show.
“One of the main things that we all talked about in trying to get everything coming from a place of character was you know, how when you go to your grandparents house, it’s just full of all this old stuff just covered wall-to-wall with like stuff that they got 30 years ago and 60 years ago,” Angones said. “We thought, ‘Scrooge McDuck’s house would be equally full of that, except most of it would be haunted or cursed.’”
Fans of the original series might notice that the Money Bin, where Scrooge stores his hard earned cash, looks a little different in the new series. Youngberg said they wanted it to feel different from the “square monolith” in the original series and, essentially, make it feel a little more safer. The idea was to take the idea of a bin and turn it into a vault.
“We wanted to find a way to take that plainness and that monolith feeling and expand it even more so we started looking at Brutalist Architecture and how everything brutalist has this real fortressy feel, and we wanted his money bin to feel like a fortress and so we put it out in the bay in the middle of the oceans where it's even more protected because that's where he keeps all of his worldly wealth,” Youngberg said.
Even though parts of DuckTales look and feel new, the producers said they’re staying true to the spirit that made the original so beloved in the first place.
DuckTales will star the voice talents of Saturday Night Live’s Bobby Moynihan, Doctor Who’s David Tennant and Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda. DuckTales will premiere this summer.