Underdogs no more: Mighty Ducks return as "Game Changers" on Disney+

Los Angeles, California - Almost 30 years after Gordon Bombay got busted for a DUI, the Mighty Ducks are back. But this time, they’re the bad guys.

The Mighty Ducks, a huge success in 1992, is returning to the screen.
The Mighty Ducks, a huge success in 1992, is returning to the screen.  © IMAGO / Cinema Publishers Collection

The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, which premiered Friday on Disney+, has given the up-and-comers decades of practice since the original movies, and in that time, they’ve become a powerhouse junior hockey team.

Success, though, has changed the team. Led by Dylan Playfair (Letterkenny), they’ve become bullies, throwing away anyone who doesn’t rise to the occasion.

When Game Changers opens, Evan Morrow (Brady Noon), an undersized 12-year-old who can’t quite keep up, gets cut from the team. His mom (Lauren Graham) then starts a new team and begins to build what the Mighty Ducks once were.

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She calls them the Don’t Bothers, the exact same directions given to Evan by his former coach.

"The Don’t Bothers are going to be pushed down but they’re going to get back up," Noon, the 15-year-old New Jersey native, told the Daily News.

Slowly, the Morrows begin piecing together their own island of misfit toys: a skateboarder, a gamer, a Canadian, and the local podcaster next door.

Children of the ’90s will celebrate the reboot

"It doesn’t matter if you get knocked down over and over and over again," 14-year-old Maxwell Simkins, who plays Evan’s best friend, told The News. "You have to look for the positive and say to yourself, 'Well, if I get up and take two steps, every step I take back, I at least made a step.' You have to look for the small things that matter."

The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers fits neatly into a list of second-generation series, where characters have grown up, left, and come back.

Children of the ’90s will fall back in love with Gordon Bombay, but enough of the plot is new that their children can slide right in without missing a beat.

Graham, best known for Gilmore Girls, said the scripts she first read felt like the Disney movies she grew up with.

"Rather than it being a reboot, it’s a where-are-they-now," she told The News. "There’s a quality to it that is classic. When I sat down with the showrunners, they said we want this to feel like it could be now, it could be then."

Cover photo: IMAGO / Cinema Publishers Collection

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