Jeremy’s Tophunder №51: D2: The Mighty Ducks

6 min readMay 7, 2020

I’m not sure I can think of any other movie (other than maybe Space Jam) that creates such a wide gap of opinion between (a) the critics at the time who absolutely trashed the movie, and (b) the overwhelming number of people my age who love the movie absolutely and without reservation.

Mighty Ducks is not a movie that transcends generations. There are plenty of movies that I liked as a kid, my parents also liked them, and now kids of today like them. Mighty Ducks, on the other hand, is a movie that is adored almost exclusively by kids who grew up in the 90s. I know a handful of people who are just a few years older than me, but don’t get the Mighty Ducks hype. They were too old to think a kid’s sports movie was cool when it came out, the same way that I don’t really care about Gridiron Gang or We Are Marshall or Coach Carter. Then I know a few people just a few years younger than me who also couldn’t care less about Mighty Ducks, because they had their own crop of feel-good sports stories that were released during their formative years. Again, it’s the same reason that I don’t really care about The Natural, or Teen Wolf, or The Karate Kid, or any number of other sports movies geared towards kids that came out before I was born. Mighty Ducks is somehow both universal to everyone of a certain age, and irrelevant to everyone outside that window.

It’s on the short list of movies that I’ve seen the most times in my life. I owned the movie on VHS and on DVD, and whenever it pops up on a streaming service, I stop just about everything I’m doing and spend an hour and a half with Gordon Bombay and the Ducks. It inexplicably still makes me laugh, 25 years later, and I still subconsciously harbor resentment towards the nation of Iceland, even though I know objectively that it’s a lovely country. It’s a movie that I reference far, far too often in my everyday life (sometimes without even realizing it), and one that has had an undue impact on the way that I interact with the world around me.

All that being said — I have a few thoughts.

Are we sure that Gordon Bombay is a good coach? Let’s break a few things down. First of all — he sticks with Goldberg in goal even though it’s pretty apparent right away that Julie “The Cat” Gaffney is the best youth goalie in the country. He brings her in to stop Gunner Stahl’s penalty shot in the championship game against Iceland, which means one of two things: (A) He realizes that Gaffney is his best goalie, but it took him the entire length of the tournament to figure that out, or (B) he’s knowingly putting in a cold goalie because he has a gut feeling that she’ll come through. Neither one of those really paint him in the best light.
Hold on, I’m not done on Coach Bombay. He continues to give a lot of ice time to Les Averman, despite Avermen being clearly the worst player on the team. This problem is magnified when you realize that the entire team is only 13 players. The roster restrictions for this tournament are absolutely insane (NHL teams dress 18 skaters plus two goalies, it seems here the limit for skaters is 11), which isn’t Bombay’s fault, but it’s absolutely his fault that he has every youth hockey player in the country at his disposal, and only 13 roster spots, and he gives one to Lester Averman. He didn’t even hold tryouts! He was just like, “yeah, these eight kids from my PeeWee squad in Minnesota are the team, just fill out the roster with five players and we’re good.”
I can’t talk about D2 and not mention this. My sincere apologies to anyone who has heard me go on this rant before, but it’s important. Team Iceland is captained by Gunnar Stahl, the dude who looks like he’s 6–2 and 25 years old but somehow playing in the Junior Goodwill Games, ostensibly a U-16 tournament (or maybe U-14, or maybe U-18? It’s never really made clear). Let me tell you, Gunnar Stahl is a big deal. Top scorer in the tournament, captain of the team that entered as heavy favorites, a flashy player who will triple deke and then go glove side. They really build him up to be an important character, further evidenced by the exchange he has with his coach, Wolf “The Dentist” Stanton after missing the final penalty shot in the championship game, when he tells Stanton “you lost it for yourself,” and then encourages his teammates to go shake Team USA’s hands. He congratulates Charlie Conway on his brilliant tactics as a temporary assistant coach after giving up his spot on the roster so that Russ Tyler and a suddenly healthy Adam Banks could both dress for the big game. THEN, In D3 (the one at the prep school), the same dude who played Gunnar Stahl (Scott Whyte) is suddenly portraying Scott “Scooter” Holland, the goalie for the Varsity team at Eden Hall Academy, who spends most of his scenes either being a prep school doucher or macking on Julie “The Cat” Gaffney (which I’m honestly too mad about to discuss at this time). My question is: DID THEY THINK WE WEREN’T GOING TO NOTICE? Like, how attached did you get to that actor who said all of 15 words in D2? He spends most of the movie just skating around and looking too big for his age and overwhelmingly intimidating. Now you just give him a different haircut and make him a new character? Why not just bring him back — as Gunnar Stahl — and have him be a player on the Varsity team? He could have played the Adam Banks role of The Good Guy playing on The Bad Guys’ Team. Doesn’t that make for a much more interesting movie? I know that this observation is about 23 years overdue, but clearly, not enough people are talking about it. The only theory that I’ve found remotely plausible is that following the events of D2, Wolf “The Dentist” Stanton went on a vindictive streak against his former players, including Stahl, and Stahl fled to the United States and changed his name to conceal his identity. And sure, that tracks, I could totally see that happening. But it doesn’t explain why none of the Ducks recognize him. It’s just bizarre.

So, that’s D2: The Mighty Ducks for you. It’s a movie that I spend way too much time thinking about for how largely insignificant the movie is to anyone that’s not currently between the ages of, say, 25–35. But for people who are in that age bracket, it’s a very, very important movie. And, exactly halfway through this ridiculous Top 100 movies project that I decided to take on for reasons passing understanding, it shows up at №51.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One