Spoilers ahead for the latest episode of Disney's DuckTales.

Francisco Angones and Matt Youngberg got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reboot Disney's DuckTales for modern audiences, and they are absolutely running with it. The duo recently talked about how the first season, back in 2017, was about reintroducing audiences to Scrooge McDuck and the Duck Family, while Season 2 was about exploring the vast world of crazy characters they encounter on their excursions; Season 3 will get even more adventurous than the show has been so far. Beyond all that, DuckTales has the opportunity to fold in classic characters from the 80s/90s Disney Afternoon lineup. They've already done so with Darkwing Duck, TaleSpin, and even a nod to the GummiBears. But this past weekend, another fan-favorite got its chance to join the reboot as the Rescue Rangers took to the screen.

This was a pleasant a surprise for yours truly, a moment that actually made me cheer out loud; I'm still basically a kid at heart even 30+ years later. Perhaps more exciting than the Rescue Rangers appearing in DuckTales (and the manner in which their origin story unfolds) is the fact that new audiences will get a chance to meet Chip, Dale, Gadget, Monterey Jack, and Zipper. We've got a breakdown on how the crime-solving sleuths appeared on the show and their new origin story, as well as a behind-the-scenes explanation on how Angones, Youngberg, and the creative team worked their butts off to integrate the characters despite some difficult licensing deals they had to navigate.

First off, here's how Rescue Rangers factored into the latest episode of DuckTales: In "Double-O-Duck in You Only Crash Twice!", Dewey and Launchpad are dead-set on beating a VR spy game at the local Fun Zone. The problem is that the arcade is a front for the shadowy villainous organization F.O.W.L. So Steelbeak (Jason Mantzoukas), Black Heron (April Winchell) and the Eggheads attempt to neutralize Launchpad so they can enact their plan to destroy Duckburg. Essential to that plan is mad scientist Black Heron's "anti-intelligence ray", which can either triple the target's intelligence or reduce it by the same amount. Pretty solid supervillain tech, but she has to test it out first, and she does so on an ordinary lab rat ... who just so happens to smarten up and turn into Gadget, the brains of the Rescue Rangers operation.

That blink-and-you'll-miss-it origin story was fantastic for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that the villains behind the scenes just created one of the best crime-fighting teams in cartoon history, but the Rescue Rangers continue to factor into the rest of the episode (and hopefully more to come). Gadget leads the gang in the Ranger Plane to rescue Launchpad and Dewey from captivity, all while a modified version of their classic theme song plays out. This action mostly takes place in the background--we never see the team strategizing or even how Gadget got the gang together, none of them talk (even though the DuckTales gang wouldn't be able to understand their squeaks even if they did), and we don't get to see Gadget putting together her tech--but it's one of the best background bits ever. I can't wait to see where this goes from here, and hopefully the Disney brass is now on board.

Here's a long thread from Angones on how Rescue Rangers came to be featured in not just this episode but in the new DuckTales universe:

And here's a shoutout to Tad Stones, a Disney icon: