Everybody changes as they age but nobody did it better than the Duke.
He turned into a completely different design.
And everyone loved him even more.
His personality is as distinct as his head.
"Distinct" is the thing that to me is most missing from entertainment today and especially animation.
From some of the comments I can see that many people are actually repulsed by anything that isn't cookie-cutter stock mathematical blandness.
I guess the last couple generations have been raised to expect sameness and any time anything sticks out or breaks formula they just don't know what to make of it.
To me, I've always loved things that stand out from the norm and it's one of the reasons I veered away from even the real Disney cartoons at an early age. It was just too much re-use of the same character designs and story formulas over and over again and no amount of slickness could cover up the blandness.By the 80s blandness had added sloppiness to its brew and again for me, no amount of shadows, pores, shiny hairs or production value can hide the fact that we are in the biggest creative rut of repetitive degeneration I have ever seen.
These modern "pretty boy" clone characters in all the animated features are just pale imitations of Anime characters, but toned down so much that everything but the eyes and short foreheads is exactly like 70s and 80s Filmation cartoons or Ken dolls- and why anyone would want cartoons to not be imaginative or be less interesting than real life is beyond me.