Ahh. The Velvet Hammer, Connie Moreau. You might think she was the Ducks’ token girl, but I’d argue she was so much more. Connie brought both elegance and elbow-checks to the Ducks. She was a voice of diplomacy to cut through District 5′s bitterness, reaching out to Gordon Bombay (“Coach,” she calls him in the image above, smiling). Connie brought love into sullen Guy Germaine’s life– and the lives of nine-year-old boys across the world. She was much more than just a compulsory female presence.

And Connie Moreau was transformative for a adolescents. She was like a family friendly Phoebe Cates, all smile-flash and quiet toughness. And not for nothing, but Marguerite Moreau’s performance as Connie was one of the best in that young cast. What follows is my love letter to Connie Moreau. No apologies.

(Okay, let’s get this out of the way first: Connie Moreau is played by Marguerite Moreau. Yes, I also worry this is like how Tony Danza always played characters named Tony because he was too dumb to pretend to be someone else. Let’s put that aside.)

Was Connie’s inclusion just another marketing strategy– like so much else in The Mighty Ducks? I don’t know. Maybe. If she was put in there just to appeal to girls and make boys swoon, does that ruin The Mighty Ducks? Did the existence of Malcolm McLaren ruin the Sex Pistols? Hell no.

And Connie was more than just the requisite young woman in the boys’ sports flick. She was a diplomat, the Jean Luc Picard of Pee Wee. Connie was the first to reach out to Gordon Bombay, the first to defend Charlie when he was picked on, and the first to knock down smart-talking Averman– who frankly needed a friendly throttling lest he become even more unbearable. And thanks to Bombay’s support and guidance, Connie had the confidence to find love with Guy and his stupid, stupid hat.

Connie: A Photo Essay Using Fuzzy Screencaps

Connie was the bang-less glue that adhered the Ducks to one another even when Bombay was somewhere else, presumably eating cake.

Twenty years ago, this was the only kissing we boys would tolerate in our movies.

Connie wisely overruled Averman’s “Spazway!” chant with the supportive-but-blander “Charlie!”

Young love is complicated like early 90s fashion was complicated. It’s like a Gadzooks exploded.

Connie has come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And she’s all outta bubble gum.

I gave her short shrift in my Then and Now post, but actor Marguerite Moreau has done very well for herself since the Ducks trilogy. I’m just gonna drop some names real quick: The Secret World of Alex Mack, Boy Meets World, Blossom, and Free Willy 2: Electric Belugaloo. And back when The O.C. was a going concern, Moreau played the comic-book executive who drove a wedge between Seth and Summer and man that show was pretty good, right?

But Maggie (Can I call her Maggie? No? Alright.) But Ms. Moreau’s finest role was in Wet Hot American Summer, in which she and Paul Rudd shared special time.

Yeah. That happened.

Ms. Moreau also starred in Queen of the Damned with the late, great Aaliyah and skeevy shirtless Stuart Townsend, who played vampirey KoRn songs while killing other vampires. (Spoiler alert: Moreau becomes a vampire at the end and looks hawt.)

She also did guest spots on Lost and Parenthood, where she mingled with the cosmically undeserving Mr. Kristen Bell, Dax Shepard. And check out this getup she wore on Mad Men:

In her spare time, Marguerite does lots of charity work, including the LifeRide project to raise money for AIDS. Well, it’s not for AIDS, but rather for the effort to cure AIDS. She can also surf!

Marguerite has had a maddeningly successful career, and except for the embarrassing lack of going on a date with me, she has built a legacy to be proud of.

But she’ll always be Connie to us!

Gangsta rap, this is all your fault. Criminy, it’s like headwear bingo up there.

It’s been twenty years since we learned to quack. In that span of time, our Ducks have flown far and wide. Now we have this opportunity to check in on Gordon, Charlie, Hans, Jack, Averman, Goldberg, Jesse, the other one, the short one, the guy from that other movie, and all those other unforgettable characters.

The career trajectories varied as much as their crazy hats in that picture above (Guy Germaine, what the hell is on your head?). Some actors rose to fame making out with Tom Cruise’s ex-wife, and others had to settle for making out with Paula Abdul. Follow me past the jump for a trip in the wayback machine.

Emilio Estevez as Gordon Bombay

Estevez was 30 when he made Ducks and already a veteran of the big screen. An alumnus of star factory The Outsiders and the son of The West Wing‘s Martin Sheen, Estevez hit it big in the mid-80s with The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire. Like other Brat Packers, Estevez’s career dried up for a bit before he found second life in the Ducks series.

Today Estevez is a presence behind the camera, directing 2006′s soggy historical drama Bobby and a bunch of those hourlong shows on CBS that people apparently watch in large numbers but I can’t ever remember seeing one.

Fun fact: Emilio Estevez dated Paula Abdul. Who won that breakup?

Joshua Jackson as Charlie Conway

The Mighty Ducks was Joshua Jackson’s first big role. Charlie Conway was the team’s moral center and he had one stunning head of hair.

Jackson suffered the ravages of puberty in the public eye and emerged relatively unscathed. He was a participant in that awful run of ingenue movies in the late 90s like Urban Legend, Cruel Intentions, and The Skulls, but Jackson made his biggest mark as Pacey Whitter with Dawson’s Creek, a coming-of-age drama on The WB (it came on after Buffy, natch). After the Creek dried up, Jackson starred on FOX’s Fringe, which sounds like the kind of show I should be watching. Anyone?

Fun fact: Joey + Pacey  = Jocey. Chad Michael Murray sucks.

Lane Smith as Jack Reilly

1992 was a big year for character actor Lane Smith. On paper Jack Reilly was a dull character, but Smith imbued him charm and dignity. That same year, Smith portrayed Mr. Trotter in My Cousin Vinny, which is probably on TV right now if you look for it. Smith also played Perry White on Lois and Clark.

Sadly, Smith died of ALS, which is a sonofabitch of a disease, in 2005. Johns Hopkins has a great research facility for ALS if you’d like to learn more or get involved.

Fun fact: YouTube is awesome.

Joss Ackland as Hans

Hans is somehow both Gordon Bombay’s latent conscience and the pre-eminent hockey profiteer of Minneapolis.

Joss Ackland is a Shakespearean actor with over two zillion credits to his name. Him acting with Emilio Estevez was like Fred Astaire dancing with me at Grand Central in Adams Morgan. I have no earthly idea how he ended up in The Mighty Ducks, but my gut says gambling debt. Ackland did not appear in the sequel, but he did show up in D3, which I still have not seen.

Fun fact: Ackland was the bad guy in the Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Heidi Kling as Casey Conway

Charlie Conway’s mom was, I think, supposed to be Gordon Bombay’s love interest, although what attracted her to that morally bankrupt jackass baffles me. No matter, as the romance plot abruptly fell off in the sequel, in which Kling played Sir Not Appearing in This Film. IMDB tells me that she was in D3, but again: have not seen it. I’d like to imagine she and Bombay settled down and started raising little Bombardiers together. Kling has not acted since 1999. I hope she still has those curls. Hot.

Fun fact: There is literally nothing fun about Charlie’s mom.

Shaun Weiss as Greg Goldberg

Fart jokes, people. We’ve got fart jokes. Shaun Weiss played Goldberg, District 5′s flatulent goalie who keeps telling us he was about to move back to Philly but never did. Weiss appeared in the Ducks sequels, even though he got pulled at the end of D2 so Cat could get the big save. Weiss went on to star in Heavy Weights, and then he lost a whole bunch of weight himself. TMZ tells me he’s a New Jersey Devils fan, and if I can get Kim Kardashian in this sentence it’ll officially be the trashiest thing ever posted on this blog.

Fun fact: Shaun did this American Psycho send-up and it’s quite troubling.

M.C. Gainey as Lewis

Gordon Bombay’s limousine-cum-conversion-van driver (it’s like Horatio Alger in reverse!), M.C. Gainey didn’t have all that much to do in The Mighty Ducks. That’s okay, because since Ducks he’s had the market cornered on bad ass characters with a Deep South drawl. He played Tom Friendly (spoiler: not so friendly) on Lost, and he’s a bike gang leader on Justified, which is totes on my DVR waiting to be watched.

Fun fact: He had this coming after talking Walt off the raft at the end of the first season.

Matt Doherty as Lester Averman

Averman had no apparent athletic talent and didn’t have Guy Germaine’s quiet intensity, so he compensated with crass jokes he cribbed off Saturday Night Live. Matt Doherty kinda fell off my radar after Ducks, but the dude is in Argo now, so he’s going to be buried in Oscar statues soon.

Fun fact: Rob Schneider shoulda sued.

Brandon Quintin Adams as Jesse Hall

I’ve no idea what “cake-eater” means, but I think it’s a dig on rich people– because they, ya know, eat cake. Jesse competed for the much-contested Team Bad Ass role, but I don’t think he won (see below). Unlike his seemingly mute brother Terry, Jesse actually made it to the sequel. Since then, Adams has done some stints on sitcoms like Moesha; Sister, Sister; and Boy Meets World (which is totally overrated– there, I said it).

Fun fact: Marie Antoinette never said “let them eat cake.” When she learned of France’s bread famine, she actually said:

It is quite certain that in seeing the people who treat us so well despite their own misfortune, we are more obliged than ever to work hard for their happiness. The king seems to understand this truth; as for myself, I know that in my whole life (even if I live for a hundred years) I shall never forget the day of the coronation.

And the rest!

• Garette Ratliff Henson as Guy Germaine. Some people over look Guy Germaine, but I think he’s the one of the best characters in the Ducks legendarium. He was the first to score under the Bombay regime, he had a sort of Alex Semin vibe to him, and he was totally macking on Connie. It looks like Henson took a step away from acting after Ducks, but he did do an episode of NCIS, which stars the guy from Summer School!
• J.D. Daniels as Peter Mark. “Pete” was the team’s real bad ass. Somewhere south of five feet tall, leather jacket, all attitude. Daniels took over the tube in the 90s. He was on Full House, The Nanny, and Gargoyles. And then puberty. And then silence.
• Elden Henson as Fulton Reed. I feel bad stuffing the team’s hard-hitting enforcer this low on the list. He’s actually a local (Rockville, baby!) and an accomplished actor since the movie came out. Henson has done tons of guest spots, he was awesome in the mean-spirited The Butterfly Effect, and has over sixty billion roles to his name.
• John Beasley as Mr. Hall. Beasley played Jesse and Terry’s dad, who gave up overtime to watch his boys cheat. Beasley is on Treme now, but you might know him as Token Black Guy on the Treat Everwood beard documentary that the WB promoted as Everwood.
• Danny Tamberelli as Tommy Duncan. It’s Pete! From Pete & Pete! Hey Sandy! No one knows what Danny’s been doing since he left All That!

Did I miss anyone? Yes.

Yes, I did.

Your turn: Who was your favorite Duck and what do you think Charlie and Jesse and Guy are doing today?

UPDATE 5PM: It has come to my attention that Vincent Larusso, who played Adam Banks in the Ducks trilogy, was in the first episode of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse on Fox. Obviously, I deeply regret missing this and I apologize to everyone I let down. This is a grievous mistake and I’ll do whatever I can to make sure it NEVER happens again.

A few months ago I was on Up the Pucks, a podcast that mixes up punk rock and hockey. They asked me what got me into hockey and I blurted out The Mighty Ducks! After some thought, that answer rang true for me and I imagine for lots of other fans my age as well.

This week, that seminal movie celebrates its 20th anniversary. And as much as I am petrified by time’s march, the thought that The Mighty Ducks is twenty fills me more with nougaty nostalgia than existential dread. Yeah, it’s a craven exploitation flick starring an aged brat packer and liking it instantly brands you Too Old To Hit On College Girls, but it’s still an important part of our shared culture. So let’s take a moment, nay, an entire week, to revel in this Hockey Cinema Classic.

On the outside chance you haven’t seen The Mighty Ducks (or, obviously, read its novelization by Jordan Horowitz), here’s the pitch via IMDB:

A self-centered lawyer is sentenced to community service coaching a rag tag youth hockey team.

(Completely, unrelated, here’s a link to watch Bad News Bears on Netflix right now.)

Star Emilio Estevez, fresh off of Young Guns II, needed a kickstart to his career, which had stalled after the one-two punch of 1985′s The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire. That kickstart came in the form of The Mighty Ducks, a film dreamed up by Avnet-Kerner Productions, a team that has been responsible for some of the worst movies of the last 25 years.

Today it is a tired formula, but back in the salad days of 1992 Ducks was just a shameless retread of Bad News Bears: a troubled youth sports team gets a reluctant new coach, hijinx ensue, and Lessons are learned. Since the D trilogy, we’ve suffered through countless variations on that theme: Little Giants, Ladybugs, The Sandlot, thirty or forty Air Bud movies, Angels in the Outfield, Kicking and Screaming, The Big Green, Rookie of the Year, and a not-all-that-bad-but-completely-redundant remake of Bad News Bears. The kiddie-sports movie genre boomed after The Mighty Ducks.

But back in ’92, hockey held a peculiar place in popular culture. The NHL’s biggest stars were still active, it was still a few years out from the dead puck era, and it was buoyed by a curious new phenomenon: rollerblading. Inline skating allowed hockey to expand from a regional curiosity to a continental pastime. Like biker movies in the 50s and surf movies in the 60s and, The Mighty Ducks was a savvy way to capitalize on hockey’s upward trend.

It’s an exploitation film by definition. Its lean budget, trendy subject, and targeted demographics make Ducks the worst kind of cynical Hollywood offering, and yet I (and we– can I use we here?) are drawn to it anyway. Why?

I would like to think it’s because people like the underdog. People like fair play. The Mighty Ducks, in some ways, is a morality play in which the wicked are punished and the virtuous are rewarded. Estevez’s Gordon Bombay learns that cheating is bad and cooperation is good, and we the audience are heartwarmed.

But I doubt that’s it.

It’s more likely that The Mighty Ducks has lasted because it’s a syrupy swamp of crass gags and Queen songs surrounding core of exploitation. Take another look Averman’s painfully dated impression of Rob Schneider’s Richmeister routine or the Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch song and tell me I’m wrong about that.

I really do love The Mighty Ducks. It’s a part of my childhood, but I’d feel like a fraud if we didn’t air out these uncomfortable truths before we start piling on the praise. The things we love were designed to be loved. Even now, the NHL season we want so badly is imperiled because it might not make enough money for its owners. The NHL isn’t a labor of love, it’s a business. Same thing with The Mighty Ducks: we can’t delude ourselves into thinking that it was the work of some impassioned genius, slaving over a typewriter in some dusky cabin with a view of a frozen pond, writing with the sole purpose of delighting young viewers. No; it’s a scheme for profitability, a career vehicle, a cash-in.

Nostalgia is a funny like that; it doesn’t really stand up to adult scrutiny. The vocabulary of a grown-up can’t describe why we loved the things we loved when we were little– not without dousing it in irony or tearing into it like the cynical bastards we all inevitably become. And that’s the real sad part of getting older. The magic isn’t really gone, you just can’t see it anymore.

So I endeavor to spend this week talking about The Mighty Ducks with the same affection and wonder I had when I was nine years old. You go first: Did The Mighty Ducks get you into hockey? Why do you like it?

Photo credit: Karl B DeBlaker

Over one thousand posts and we’ve never seen the Caps this bad. After watching them get wiped out by the singular wretchedness that is the Carolina Hurricanes, we realized that any unit of hockey players anywhere in the world could have beaten our boys in this one. The entire intramural team at Colgate could get brainerd diarrhea and still mollywhop Alex and company. The 1974 Caps coulda shut ‘em down. Probably the ’73 team, too. So we had to wonder…

What fictional hockey teams could have beaten the Caps tonight?

District 5, pre-Gordon Bombay, from The Mighty Ducks

Despite the raw talent of Charlie Conway, the preternatural hotness of Connie “The Velvet Hammer” Moreau, Guy Germaine‘s poise, and Greg Goldberg’s presence in the cage, the District 5 team lacked both an identity and a single win on their season. But with the space Schultz and Green would most likely afford him, even Spazway would swing enough to give the Caps more than a cold.  District 5 beats Caps 1-0.

The team from Most Valuable Primate

A three-year old chimpanzee named Jack joined his foster family’s junior league hockey team and hijinx ensued. They were a ragtag bunch, but Jack’s inhuman talent (no seriously, he’s not human) with the twig gave them the boost they needed to beat their people-y opponents. But how did they fare against the ’10-’11 Capitals? Well, Jack has twice the upper-body strength of Jason Chimera (and 3x Mathieu Perreault), so battles along the boards were no contest, and the feces-throwing thing was a huge advantage while a man-down. Jack beats Caps 4-2.

The pick-up team on the roof in Clerks

Warning: strong language. Double warning: Penguins jersey

Lifelong friends Dante Hicks and Randal Graves are eternal losers and omega-level slackers, but they’ve got some decent game when it comes to shinny. Hosting the Capitals on the roof of the Quick Stop, the New Jersey pick-up team were underdogs according to most sports books. But a gametime decision gave a sweater to expected scratch Dante Hicks, who would repeatedly reminded Pierre McGuire that he wasn’t even supposed to be there today. The Clerks would go on to score “somewhere around 36″ goals on a beleaguered Braden Holtby, although some inventive stat-keeping would ameliorate the final score: Clerks beat Caps 3-2.

Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar from Wayne’s World

Wayne and Garth had Aurora, Illinois’ best home record so long as intermittent traffic didn’t halt play. Although their roster was drastically depleted due to an outbreak of hurling following a bad pre-game meal at Stan Mikita’s, Wayne and Garth still mounted an impressive attack on the Capitals– keeping Alex Ovechkin pointless and baffling Alex Semin with some clever asphinctersayswhat? chirps. Nonetheless, the Caps actually came out on top in this one after Garth left the game, later telling Al Koken he was “feeling a little funny, like when I used to climb the rope in gym class.” Caps beat Wayne’s World 6-5. Party time. Excellent

Thanks to my buddy Andrew Ahrens, from whom– let’s be honest– I stole most of these jokes.