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Reviews Say Readers Say Teacher's Notes Captain Duck

CREATING CAPTAIN DUCK

Captain Duck Thumbnail

I found this thumbnail sketch from a sheet of drawings where I was working out the story of Captain Duck. Here you can see the germ of the idea forming: Duck ‘borrows’ Goat’s boat. Around this central theme, characters each have their own roles to play. It’s classic situation comedy really, you come up with a situation and see how your characters react to it. You need to have strongly defined characters, so that in any given situation you will know how they would react. If an audience knows the characters too they can enjoy, and even anticipate, how they will respond to the situation too.

Here we can see that Frog and Sheep have been caught up in something they never signed up for thanks to Duck’s boundless enthusiasm (and recklessness). Of course, rather than taking responsibility for his actions, Duck is trying to wriggle out of the blame (‘we only borrowed it’). Poor Goat the authoritarian once again has to be magnanimous in the face of such disrespect (although he looks a lot more cross here than he did in the finished artwork!)