This episode is an inversion of the famous episode from Batman: The Animated Series (1992) titled "Beware the Gray Ghost (1992)", guest starring the late Adam West as an actor famous for playing a pulp hero now stuck in a Jim Starling-like situation, but ends up having an arc the complete opposite of Jim's.
During the initial reveal of the Ducktales episodes to air in May 2019, this episode's title was deliberately kept secret during the official reveal on Disney's Ducktales social media accounts. On 14 May 2019, the episode title and plot were revealed with an official clip posted on Disney's TV animation news YouTube account, which also confirmed that Jim Cummings would reprise his role.
Both Jim Starling and Drake Mallard say that "they/Darkwing Duck" is better than Gizmoduck. This is another throwback to the DW series, in which Darkwing and Gizmoduck teamed up several times (The Justice Ducks and other episodes), however Darkwing never liked Gizmoduck due to him finding Gizmoduck to be annoying despite the two being capable of working together (which is similar to Donald Duck's relationship with Storkules in this series), as well as the fact Gizmoduck was more popular with the public than he was. Another connection is that Launchpad and Fenton Crackshell(-Cabrera) were friends in both of the original series, and are in the Ducktales reboot.
Launchpad's line about a big budget reboot is likely a meta reference to the DuckTales (2017) reboot, as well as the live action reboots of Disney Animated Feature Films that Disney had been doing since the mid 2010s.