Gamers Daze: When gaming invaded Saturday morning

You may not know it, or chose to forget it but the 80s were a crazy time for video games.

As much as we like to think that gaming has really hit the mainstream media today, it pales in comparison to the 80s and early 90s marketing blitz over just about anything that dealt with digital games. Cereal, toys, t-shirts, underwear and heaven help me even Chef Boyardee; video games were big business and a huge draw for the younger crowd like nothing before it. Naturally with kids glued to their TV sets playing hours on end of Super Mario, marketing firms tried to infuse everything with a jolt of “totally awesome” video games — and its strangest victims were Saturday morning cartoons.

Nostalgia is a hell of a thing; it warps reality and spit shines memories to a diamond gleam but in reality, more often than not the true memory is no where near as spectacular as you may have thought. Take Super Mario Bros. Super Show, a half hour show hosted by wrestling icon Captain Lou Albano and… some other guy. It was a great cartoon, which amazingly holds up today — if only for sheer campiness sake but it’s also cringe worthy watching a grown man make pretend he’s the lovable plumber who’s cute energetic voice we now have burned into our brain. Captain Lou was all Brooklyn and Mario sounded more like a Wise Guy than a plumber.

“Eh, itsa me, a Mario. Ima here to a whack-a-yo face!”

Captain N the Game Master is another classic which has forever changed my idea of Simon Belmont from Konami’s Castlevania. What was in my mind a brave and powerful warrior became a giant dork constantly hitting on the princess. He was very much the stereotypical dumb jock character that was in every 80s movie; only cranked to an 11 on the weenie scale. I do appreciate the fact that Nintendo went all-in with Captain N, even allowing characters like Kid Icarus’s Pit and Metroid’s Mother Brain - which always reminded me of Krang from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

It wasn’t all “top notch quality stuff”, and I use top notch quality as loosely as possible here. We also had to deal with Pole Position, Rubick The Amazing Cube (which made no damn sense to me, a damn cube, really?) and Qbert. 

It’s not all tears and face palming though. I have some rather fond memories of Pacman and his lovely Pac-family. It was really the only video game show that really worked! The reason due to it being a blatent rip off of The Flinstones. Poor Pacman was a hard working guy just trying to make ends meet and also randomly ate ghosts that tried to invade his town. It again, didn’t make much sense but not much in the 80s did. I often wonder if all the marketing folks and TV writers were high when they came up with this stuff. It would certainly explain a lot, a whole hell of a lot. 

Regardless, the 80s and 90s were filled with some terrible and not so terrible cartoons, but it was fun to see some of gamings best and brightest in some interesting and unexpected ways. Thankfully, gaming animation has come a long way since then. Sure it’s not the Saturday morning variety but than gamings biggest franchises aren’t what one would consider kid friendly any more. With big franchises like Dragon Age, Dead Space and Assassin’s Creed;animation and the games we love have grown by leaps and bounds. 

This isn’t Pacman. 

I just hope that publishers continue to try and bring some of these franchises to life via animation. It’s a great way to expand these deep universes and a way to keep fans waiting for the next big sequel satiated. 

staff