The original series ran for four years and 100 episodes, though through re-runs and videos it’s never really gone completely away, giving the theme song a longevity and appeal that now crosses generations. “I was thinking what can I give them to animate to, and when I saw it three months later they hit everyone of those things.” “‘Race cars, lasers, aeroplanes, it’s a duck-blur!'” he sings one of the lyrics that he wrote. But if they tell you, ‘OK, we’re going to have action, we’re going to go back in history,’ whatever, that’s different. “A pop song is more to a theme: ‘I love you, I used to love you, I love your brother,’ those kinds of things. “This is where it’s different than a pop song,” he says. “They said, ‘We don’t want you to write down to kids, we want it to sound like a song on the radio.’ And they said, ‘What we really want is stuff we can animate to, so lots of visuals.’ “I went in and sat down with (Disney),” Mueller recalls. When he got the original gig to write the “DuckTales” theme he was a younger songwriter who’d just gotten his first Top 10 hit thanks to the rock band Heart which recorded and released his composition “Nothing At All.” “And my reaction was, ‘Phew!’ because it sounded great!” Mueller says. “And then they played it and they were all looking at me for my reaction. “We sat in a big conference room and small-talked for about 45 minutes, which felt like five hours – ‘I want to hear the song!'” he says. The new version of his song is sung by Felicia Barton, who appeared on the eighth season of “American Idol” and has written songs for Demi Lovato and Lea Michele, and Mueller was invited to Disney earlier this year for the new theme’s unveiling. 11 on Disney XD with a one-hour special titled “Woo-oo!” - the title a nod to the catchy chorus Mueller wrote – and picks up with its first season of 21 episodes on Saturday, Sept. The new “DuckTales,” which again features Huey, Dewey and Louie and their great-uncle Scrooge McDuck, made a big splash at Disney’s D23 convention in Anaheim in July. Which, even though Mueller had produced the original, and considered it “my little baby,” he says he understood. “Finally I couldn’t take it anymore so six months ago I wrote to the head of Disney XD and said, ‘So … are you using my song or not?’ And he was very nice and said, ‘Of course we are, but we want to do a new take on it to make it more contemporary.'”
“I just figured they were doing their thing and I’d hear when I heard,” Mueller says.
For songwriter Mark Mueller, the ‘Ducktales’ theme song he wrote 30 years ago now is twice as nice – Orange County Register