We’ve all seen spin-offs of video games, we own the lunch boxes, the merchandise, hell we’ve even gone to see the movies and we’re very well aware that things often work the other way too, a successful movie gets a video game makeover. A phenomenon that seems to be dying out though is the video game inspired cartoon series and so we decide to investigate the history of the video game toons!
The first evidence of a Video Game being translated into a cartoon seems to be Pac-Man: The Animated Series from 1982. It’s fitting in some ways, since Pac-Man is one of the fathers of video games proper. It was extremely successful, so much so a lot of the subsequent games (Pac-Land and Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures) were even based on the cartoon. The show lasted two season and forty two episodes. Its success “inspired” the competition to get on board with these video game things.
This led to the Saturday Supercade in 1984 which was a smattering of shorts based on various game characters. Frogger, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Q*Bert, Pitfall!, Space Ace and Kangaroo. It’s a licensing nightmare so don’t expect this on DVD Ever! It’s exactly what you’d expect it would be for collection of five minute shorts from the 80’s. But one cool historical thing is that the Donkey Kong segments featured Mario chasing after him. This was arguably the west’s first experience of Mario as Mario (not Jumpman), about a year of more before Super Mario Bros. Was released. But wait for it here is something cooler still, he was voiced but none other than Peter Cullen, Optimus Prime himself!
We’ll just wait here while you get back from your cold shower before moving on.
Mario in Saturday Supercade and a few years later in his own Super Mario Bros. series
It was pretty quiet for the next decade or so, there were a few here and there Dragon Lair had a short series in 84/85. Then in 1989 the Super Mario Bros. Super Show! happened. It consisted of some live action Mario (Pre-Bob Hoskins) a Mario cartoon based on the Mario Bros. 2 game and once a week they aired the Legend of Zelda Cartoon . . . we still have to file that away in the “Things we have to pretend that don’t exist just to get through the day” section along with the Zelda Phillips CD-I Game and Highlander 2. That being said the music is great if you’re a Zelda fan.
Airing alongside the Super Show! Was Captain N: The Game Master. The premise was Kevin and his dog was sucked into video game land for some reason and has adventures with various video game characters licensed by Nintendo. It’s still fun to watch, and old school Nintendo fans will probably enjoy it, well unless you are a Megaman fan. Most other characters while not accurate are at least fun to watch but Megaman hurts.
It was around this time in the early nineties that video game popularity exploded and by extension so did video game cartoons. This led to many classics, not so classics, hidden gems and things that even brain bleach can’t erase.
A fine example of one video game property that spawned all the above is that lovable blue hedgehog. It started off with the not so classic, then classic, then that one where they had the guitars and Sonic X a few years ago that wasn’t very good. This is a great example of the creative range you can take with these properties. It is both a blessing and a curse. While these early games are so light on story it gives the creators free range to make it whatever they want. Which is good when you have a good writer and you end up with Sonic: The Animated series with one of the greatest intro songs ever “Fastest Thing Alive” or not so good writers when you end up with Sonic plus Guitars, that’s cool right?
They milked every type of game they could just to see what would happen, let’s look at one in particular. It’s a strange beast, one aimed at kids but based on a game rated 18+ or at least not suitable for a seven year old to play, The Fighting Game. We always thought it was weird adapting adult aimed products into kids shows (Robocop or James Bond Jr. anyone?) but that’s a different conversation. We got a lot of shows based on fighting games some better than others, Street Fighter (good), Darkstalkers (not good), Double Dragon (mileage may vary).
One of our personal favourite of these is Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm. The fanbase is split on this, you obviously can’t have scorpion ripping out someone’s spine in a kids show, the toned down violence tended to annoy the die-hard fans. But it’s a fun thirteen episodes to watch if you ever get the chance to.
Towards the end of the decade someone realised the Japanese were making cartoons of these things too and decided to bring them over to the west and on April 1st 1997 Pokemon premiered, there was no looking back. It’s amazing success due to the popularity of the TCG and video games cemented the premise of animating your video game. You could say the video game cartoon grew up at this point. The quality of shows improved and they realised the stupid amounts of money that could be made from shows that complimented the source material instead of badly drawn and cheaply written nonsense.
We could go for hours just talking about Mario cartoon let alone the whole pantheon, so I will leave you with this, why do all video game cartoon series’ have such kickass opening theme songs?
