Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Mighty Ducks: Game Changers’ Season 2 on Disney+, Where The Fired Emilio Estevez Is Replaced By Josh Duhamel

In 1992, down-on-his-luck coach Gordon Bombay led a ragtag bunch of inexperienced misfits to hockey success. Then, in 2021, he did it again. Mighty Ducks: Game Changers returns to Disney+ up for a second season after a much shorter absence, as the now-revived Ducks hockey team faces a new set of challenges.

MIGHTY DUCKS: GAME CHANGERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: After a quick and helpful montage highlighting the plot points of Season 1, we pick up with members of the newly-revived Mighty Ducks proudly skating through the hallways of their school in their hockey jerseys. Team member and in-universe podcaster Nick provides narration to fill in the gaps between the end of Season 1 and now.

The Gist: The first season of Mighty Ducks: Game Changers re-ran the underdog playbook of the movies, as the “Mighty Ducks” team had evolved into the same kind of win-at-all-costs powerhouse that it originally formed to go up against. A misfit crew of players not good enough for the Ducks formed the Don’t Bothers–under the guidance of Emilio Estevez’s ice-rink operator Gordon Bombay–only to coalesce into a solid team and eventually win back the Ducks name in a bet.

Season 2 picks up with the (new, new) Ducks unified and successful, but their home, the Ice Palace, condemned. The prospect of a long and boring summer ahead is interrupted by an invite to a highly-competitive summer hockey camp run by former NHL player Colin Cole (Josh Duhamel), setting the stage for a new season of underdog dramas.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Reboots are all the rage these days, from Fuller House to Bel-Air, but the closest spiritual cousin here is Cobra Kai, Netflix’s now-long-running revisiting of the underdog-athlete Karate Kid story.

Our Take: No familiar property stays dormant for long these days.

From repeated new Ghostbusters movies to five seasons and running of the Karate Kid followup Cobra Kai, there’s a good chance that if you loved something in the ‘80s or ‘90s, you can find a new version of it on a streaming service today.

That’s certainly the case with Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, the Disney+ pre-teen sports drama series that picked up the underdog-hockey storyline several decades after the original run of movies. The first season set the stage for a straight-up re-running of the original’s plot, with the Mighty Ducks having grown from scrappy underdog success story to the kind of swaggering powerhouse team it was originally formed to rival. When a player is cut from the team and told he’s not good enough, he ends up playing on an upstart rival, the Don’t Bothers, which–this sounds familiar, doesn’t it?–slowly coalesces into a winning team under the leadership of crusty ice rink operator and hockey coach Gordon Bombay (Emilio Estevez).

At the end of Season 1, the Don’t Bothers faced off with the Mighty Ducks with the name on the line, and won–so now we’re back to rooting for the Ducks, not against them. Got it?

That name change sets up a fresh drama in Season 2: the team is accepted into an invitation-only hockey camp that hosts the best of the best from around the country, only to arrive and find out that the invite was an accident, intended for their former rivals, “the real Ducks”. Coach/team mom Alex (Lauren Graham) pleads for the “unintended Ducks” to stay, and camp leader and former NHL player Colin Cole (Josh Duhamel) reluctantly agrees.

(Bombay has been conveniently written out for Season 2, as Estevez is not expected to appear after an anti-vaxx dust-up last year.)

So, much as sequels to the original film had to conjure up new underdog scenarios for the successful Ducks, season 2 of Game Changers puts our local heroes on a bigger stage.

It’s easy to be cynical about reboots like this, given their prevalence these days, and there’s some obvious plays toward the nostalgic parent here, such as when the “Bash Brothers” from the original movies show up as construction workers repairing the condemned Ice Palace. Those are fun, but the success of a show like this should really be graded on one metric: is it as fun for kids as the original was?

In that sense, Mighty Ducks: Game Changers is a winner. You don’t have to have grown up watching the originals on VHS to appreciate what’s happening here; it’s a fun-if-by-the-book underdog-kids-sports-story that captures the endearing spirit of the originals quite ably. The cast is charming and diverse, the villains are Disney-appropriate levels of menacing, and the emotional stakes feel real.

What more can you ask of a reboot?

Sex and Skin: This is a family show on Disney+. You’re in the clear. There is some mild teen profanity, however.

Parting Shot: The hockey camp opens with an “icebreaker” game, one where all of the players compete to score a goal, dwindling down to just a few players on the ice. This exercise serves to introduce many of the personalities that’ll feature heavily this year, but also introduces a new character with a surprising background. The Ducks briefly consider leaving the camp afterwards, but decide to “stay, and show them how we play hockey”. It’s a capable set-up for a fresh season of Mighty Ducks drama.

Sleeper Star: Swayam Bhatia excels as star player Bhatia, and Lauren Graham shines in the single-mom-trying-her-best role she’s perfected in such varied venues as Gilmore Girls and Bad Santa.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I know you’re solid hockey players, but the competition level here is really high, and I just don’t think you’re going to be a good fit,” Duhamel’s Cole offers, realizing he’s invited the wrong Mighty Ducks to his hockey camp and setting up a fresh season of underdog drama. “We don’t do scrappy here, we do excellent.”, he later offers, as Graham’s Alex begs for the team to stay.

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s not breaking any new ice, but if you enjoyed the originals, your kids are gonna love this.

Scott Hines is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky who publishes the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter.