Once upon a time when I was a young boy and the cold war had just ended and advertisers could still target children with animated TV series based on products like Nintendo, the world was good and full of promise wasn't it?
Recently on the Game Heroes, Handsome Tom and myself got to talking about the various video game TV shows that appeared over the years and so it was time to revisit those memories and see if they are still console fresh....
I won't be talking about the big name ones like Super Marios Brothers and Captain N:The Game Master and the Legend of Zelda but more of the lesser known ones like Video Power and Mortal Kombat:Defenders of the realm and even the infamous Street Fighter 2 cartoon.
One of the things that I am a huge fan of mid 80's to early 90's animation and one of the big popular trends was to have an animated series based on your franchise such as Kwirk, the chilled tomato....yes, I'll bet you have no clue what the hell I am talking about.
One of the first shows that featured a relative cast of nobody's was "Video Power" which would later be rebroadcast as "Acclaim Masters". The "Power team" was they were known composed of Kuros from Wizards & Warriors, Max Force from NARC, Tyrone from ArchRivals and the aforementioned Kwirk, the chilled tomato from the Gameboy and oh yeah I forgot, a talking monster truck, BIGFOOT. The cartoon I remember being kinda cool because I loved Acclaim games and especially Kuros because I was a huge player of those games. However the storylines were just kinda stupid at times but I did think the idea of using their game cartridges as a plot device was cool.
The animation wasn't bad for it's time and definitely fit into what was expected but the voice acting on the other hand would make your ears bloody bleed. Listening to Kwirk talk for any amount of time would incite sheer madness, I assure I have saved you from this pain.
Video Power also featured a live action component which was a game show and all things considered it a sign of the times, cheesy and over the top but it was a fun little outlet. Kids would appear on the show and answer some video game trivia and play some competitive stuff and run through a mall and stick video games to a velco vest. It was one of many shows kinda like this and it had it's appeal and i'm afraid we'll never see anything like this again.
Another one of the lesser known but equally as stupid is
Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the realm
Oh boy...where do I even start?
So this "show" takes places something in the space of Mortal Kombat 2-3 but takes the movie as canon to the show. Now let me preface this by saying I was an absolute Mortal Kombat fanboy back in the day and even wrote a piss poor fan fic back in the day and this show was a low point for me.
So I decided to sit down and rewatch the first episode of the show to bring back some of the memories and there are times like this that I could have my mind wiped by the Haitian from Heroes.
First off, Liu Kang flies a jet....yes a goddamn jet and the stupidity doesn't end there folks.... Sonya Blade's catchphrase
'It's kombat time!"
Yes, that pretty much sums up the thought that went into this...the entire cast of characters just isn't like the Mortal Kombat that I know and love and this pretty much crapped all over those memories. For some reason, the powers that be decided to make a mockey of the MK franchise but to give credit where credit is due, the writers did incorporate elements of the mythos in like Kabal's attempted assassination and Ermac and Rain's appearance. It's strange that the series has been released in places like Brazil and Russia but not here in North America, so sadly we shall not know of it's existence outside of bootlegs and Youtube.
The last series I will mention is the USA Networks...Street Fighter:The animated series and boy there aren't enough words to do this justice so I'll give this video and then my opinion thereof.
Alright so now that you have absolutely wasted ten minutes of your life, how do you feel?
Personally I feel violated and like something horrible crept into my soul and took up residence and did horrible unspeakable things to it.Capcom's Street Fighter series hasn't had the best luck on television considering it would later spawn Street fighter II V and that series also has a whole another set of issues to cover but I digress...
Street Fighter the animated series suffered from terrible voice acting, terrible animation and writes that I'm sure didn't understand how to portray the characters. The show did try to have some nods to other elements in the Street Fighters canon like Akuma and the cross over with the Final Fight series with Cody and Guy.
Overall, Street Fighter was a terrible show but did have some pretty animated movies done by Manga entertainment and are totally worth checking out.
It's funny when I was a kid I remember loving all these shows and thinking they were so bad ass because they were based on a video game but now I'm older and I know better.
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man i consider myself lucky being born in 1992, because some of this crap is unbearable to think of :P but i do wish i was born in the 1980's for the fact of all he awesome shows. but street fight doesn't seem like it would of been a good show in teh first place. but if it was a anime i think it would of been better since the japanese rarly make a bad anime about anything. but i just want to say that like always your articles are throughly enjoyable birdman, but EXCUSSSSSSSE me pincess i must be off to find octoroks
ReplyDeleteI find in general anything based off a video game and made into other forms of media generally suck ass, though I will admit, and I'm rather ashamed to admit it now, I liked the Mortal Kombat movie. Liked it enough to see it eight times.
ReplyDelete*ahem* But then again, there were a couple of not horrible entries to the world of video game based cartoons. Dragon's Lair was one of these, it only lasted a season but did moderately well. I mean, it was Dragon's Lair. Don Bluth, man. It couldn't be horrible.
...right?
I am suddenly very very hppy i didn't grow up with these cartoons and instead grew up with the video games by themselves as not to sully them, and to think there was a point in my childhood when I thought these cartoons would be cool to watch.
ReplyDeleteDude. This makes me long for the days of Jem and Holograms! I used to be such a huge fan of Super Mario Brothers, but I learned a lesson many summers ago: Do NOT relive your favorite childhood shows. My roommate and I decided to watch ALL of Pee-Wee's Playhouse and it was disturbing. No seriously, go watch it. There is an episode about the birds and the bees and at one point Pee-Wee writes an emo poem. It explains so much about how messed up I ended up becoming....
ReplyDeleteThese shows are why we all need to look back to our supposed favourite shows as kids and see if they really were that great or we just had poor taste. Gummy bears and the disney afternoon all the way.
ReplyDeletebeyond the 80's, the early 90's also brought us a cartoon based on sonic the hedgehog, where he was basically the defender of a utopian society of woodland creatures. him and tails would constantly thwart the evil plots spawned by dr. robotnik and scarf chili dogs. looking back i realize how lame this was and i don't remember it lasting very long, but i definitely watched it everyday before school. i think videogames are wonderful entities in the entertainment industry and should be left in their own splendor than being exploited and made into cartoons and movies.
ReplyDelete^ as i'm sitting here waiting for my pizza delivery boy to arrive, i remembered double dragon. double dragon was an awesome cartoon, which even spawned action figures which i had all of, vortex being my favorite. double dragon was a definite win.
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