Long before the Anaheim Ducks cast off their Disney tie-in origins to become a hockey team people could take seriously—and back in the days when Kenan Thompson was, somehow, not yet an eternal Saturday Night Live fixture—The Mighty Ducks was just a ’90s movie series that inspired kids of a certain generation to bug the shit out of their coaches with quacking noises.
All these years later, the movies have calcified into the sort of genre classics that only corporate-powered nostalgia can create. Images and clips from the films send an entire demographic of fresh olds back to a simpler time, when plucky kids could become hockey superstars with just a bit of grit, determination, and Emilio Estevez.
Bask, then, in the glory of the D2: The Mighty Ducks cast in the year 2019, taking to the ice in jerseys marked with their character names and numbers. As you’ll see below, the formerly miniature ducklings have now molted their down for the coarser feathers of adult life. The group of D2 stars—Kenan Thompson, Vincent Larusso, Garette Ratliff Henson, Colombe Jacobsen-Derstine, and Danny Tamberelli—may have grown older, but they still managed to band together as the Ducks squared off against the New York Islanders in their periphery.
What, exactly, the former Ducks were doing at the reunion during the real team’s 25th anniversary season still isn’t clear—there’s talk of a potential Super Bowl commercial, as their time on the ice was filmed—but, as the Anaheim Ducks Twitter account warns, we’re likely to find out soon enough.
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