The Mighty Ducks Creator Explains Why Game Changers Was the Right Way to Bring the Franchise Back

The Ducks are back on Disney+, but maybe not in the way fans remember. In the new series, The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, the Ducks team is actually filled with bullies, as they’ve become the powerhouse youth hockey organization in the area. They’re nothing like the Ducks of old, and neither is coach Gordon Bombay. Emilio Estevez is back as Bombay in the new series, but he has distanced himself from the world of hockey, shutting himself off from most of what he loves, and we’re not exactly sure why just yet.

An arrogant Ducks team and a disconnected Bombay may not be what folks expected to see in this reboot of The Mighty Ducks, after having waited to long to see the franchise return. Why was this the direction that franchise creator Steven Brill wanted to take for the reboot? Here’s what he told us when we spoke recently about Game Changers:

“I wanted to take Bombay and knock him backwards almost to where he was in the beginning of the first movie, so that he would have an arc, and that was the idea that he wouldn’t be too successful, he wouldn’t be a lawyer, he would be defined by what he lost and he wouldn’t have the team anymore,” Brill told us. “He wouldn’t have Casey or Charlie, and I wanted to catch up with them after having, essentially, jettisoned those things from his life, intentionally or unintentionally. And then, I thought it would be time to rebuild him, and of course, if there was a way to figure out, to get another team of kids around him, that would be a really cool way to do it. So that’s how it all sort of clicked, thinking about the story through his eyes.”

By making Bombay an integral part of the show, Game Changers delivers on some Mighty Ducks nostalgia, but the change in the beloved coach helps the story with the new team feel quite different.

“That would have been the main intention, certainly not to retread it exactly, but to see what it felt like. And if we’d tried on this franchise again, 30 years later, what it would feel like that was updated, but also what elements were timeless and what we could keep,” Brill continued. “And it turns out things change, people change, people get older, but the feeling that this elicits is consistent with the original movies, which was our intent. And that, I think, is the greatest success of it, that it has that initial emotion and humor, but it’s not completely dated. It’s updated, but it’s still sort of has a connection backwards, which I really like.”

This new take on The Mighty Ducks may not have been what everyone expected, but it certainly captures the heart and soul of the original films in a way that keeps you guessing.

New episodes of The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers are released on Disney+ every Friday morning.