Cheaptoons Has Risen From the Grave: Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures

Death comes for us all! Wakka wakka wakka!

S1E22 – “A Berry Scary Night” (2013)

Like a malefic revenant wandering the earth to tend to its unfinished business, so has Cheaptoons, my series about the inadequacies of animated video game adaptations, manifested again during this most eldritch of seasons. For one more terrifying moonlit night, we must face the wrath of spectral mediocrity!

When I first started Cheaptoons back in 2018, Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures was still relatively fresh, having run from 2013-2015; at the time, it felt too recent to jive with my mandate of looking at these cartoons from a historical distance. Well, guess what, we’re now at a point where even that series is ten years old, far enough away that it has now achieved a similar distance. This “modern” animated take on Pac-Man is officially old now…and so am I! Very possibly…you are as well!

Certainly, this show’s theme song, which mixes the traditional Pac-Man music with some Auto-Tuned pop lyrics, pulls me back to 2013—it’s so 2013 that I came close to involuntarily doing the Harlem Shake. It was terrible! In a completely different world of video game popularity—no longer a potential fad, no longer seen as just a time waster for kids but nonetheless probably edging out animated TV shows as a modern child’s go-to piece of entertainment—and a completely different world of animation—no more Saturday mornings, expectations wildly different—the question becomes just how different a video game cartoon for kids at that time would be compared to what they were like in the eighties and nineties. The surprising answer to that question, at least based on one (conveniently Halloween-themed!) episode: not as different as you might think!

Cheaptoons Returns: Pole Position

Now, if this was a Road Rash cartoon, that would’ve been something, at least

I find the act of belittling poorly-made entertainment, TV cartoons especially, so amusing that I’ve made it a feature of this site not once, but twice. Cheaptoons narrowed the potential source material to only poorly-made adaptations of popular video games, which allowed me to relive some of the most time-wasting moments of my childhood as well as discover even more abhorrent animation. I try to include as much actual insight into the machinations of the industry, historical context, and notes on adaptation whenever possible, but all my attempts to make these posts more than just a recreation of the Internet japery of old usually end up overwhelmed by the fun of unloading pent up snark.

E3, “The Chicken Who Knew Too Much” (1984)

I had considered watching the 1984 Pole Position series during the original run of Cheaptoons, but after careful thought—I always put a lot of careful thought into my decisions for this site, as its content surely attests—I decided that its connection to its source material was so tenuous that it didn’t seem like it’d fit in with everything else. That’s really saying something, considering just how much some of the cartoons I did write about deviated from the video games they were based on, but let’s be honest: if Namco’s name wasn’t prominently featured beneath the title in this show’s intro, you’d have absolutely no reason to believe this was based on their series of influential arcade racing games. It’s not like “F1 simulation” gives you much to work with, but surely if our pals at DiC had called this show anything else, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference. I guess that was the power of video games in the early eighties.

Cheaptoons #20: The Rejects

I’m sorry to see you all go, too

Before we turn the power off on the whole Cheaptoons project, let’s go a little deeper into the well to make this feel as complete as possible. You wouldn’t think so judging by the general quality of the shows, but there were some video game adaptations that didn’t even make it past the pilot episode—they got their one chance, but even in the bottom-of-the-barrel world of game-based cartoons in the nineties, they weren’t considered good enough to get even a single season. Now, there’s many reasons why a television show doesn’t get picked up, and in the case of a licensed property-based show like these, there are even more potential roadblocks before getting a full season order—even so, you have to wonder if there was something about the shows themselves, the final product, that forced all the networks to turn away after giving them one shot. We are here to determine if these certified failures among the failures somehow managed to do anything worse than what ended up being aired.

Cheaptoons #19: Sonic Underground

Someone will need to explain to me how these neckless beings put those necklaces on

E16, “Friend or Foe?” (1999)

You have to give it Sonic: even as his heyday was winding down, he was still enough of a household name to be used as the main character in a cartoon that otherwise has nothing to do with what he is about—he can join the pantheon of characters like Zorro or Sherlock Holmes who also had bad European-made cartoons where they find themselves in a the future or whatever. Someone at the production company desperately wanted to make a new Sonic the Hedgehog animated series, and if they had to awkwardly shoehorn Sonic and Robotnik into some generic Sci-Fi/fantasy nonsense, then that is what shall be done! What this means is while the “freedom fighter” aspect seen to varying degrees in the previous two cartoons is still there, now there is a prophecy! And a royal family! And magical music instruments! And Sonic has two siblings!

Cheaptoons #18: The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3

What could possibly cause this much strife between the Mario Brothers? Would you believe…something stupid?

E23, “True Colors” (1990)

For one thing, that is an extremely ungainly title, the inevitable result of mixing marketing and an utter lack of imagination. Secondly, the narrator in the intro tells us that this is “a legend no one will forget” underpinned with a decidedly mock-epic score (the intro is also book-ended by scenes of Mario and Luigi reading an actual book, which could be a vague nod to the meta-presentation of the game as a stage play, but that’s probably giving the producers of this too much credit, which is to say any credit)—this seems to be selling us the idea that this incarnation of Super Mario Bros animation is the real deal, not like that lightweight Super Mario Bros. Super Show piffle. This being the bridge between Super Show and Super Mario World, it axed the live action segments, had shorter cartoons, and changed some of the voice actors; I’ve already talked about those changes in the World post, but I thought maybe you needed to be reminded of the brave new paradigm we’ve entered.

Cheaptoons #17: Dragon’s Lair

Me, after realizing I’ve done seventeen 1000+ word posts on this subject

E2, “Sir Timothy’s Quest” (1984)

There is some grand irony in a game used as a vehicle for high-quality animation being adapted into a eighties Saturday morning cartoon show—I can only assume that Don Bluth never saw this, because he kept making things rather than dying of an aneurysm in 1984. We are once again looking at a product of the Ruby-Spears cartoon factory, who felt that Dragon’s Lair was good enough for its own half-hour show rather than joining its companion Space Ace on the previously-analyzed Saturday Supercade; I mean, there’s obviously so much more to the story and characters of Dragon’s Lair that needs double the run-time. It’s not like the game was just a sequence of random scenes played one after another with little connecting them, there’s a lot of fully-explained backstory there. Obviously.

As an aside, you can definitely tell that someone respects the quality of the show because of how poorly-cropped the Youtube version of it is.

Cheaptoons #16: Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm

TOASTY

E3, “Acid Tongue” (1996)

You already start off with a major handicap when you decide to translate Mortal Kombat into a Saturday morning cartoon—when 75% of the appeal of the game is its over-the-top violence, having to tone it down to basically nothing in order to fit television standards is guaranteed to turn away most of the series’ fans (the movie had a similar problem, albeit to a lesser extent.) So, when MK has to go completely bloodless, where does it turn to? Why, dumbed-down psychodrama, of course!

Cheaptoons #15: Double Dragon

Everyone on this show looks like they were sculpted from ham

S2E3, “Virtual Reality Bytes” (1994)

See, when I started this whole project, I kind of assumed that every show I watched would be exactly like this: minimum-effort Saturday morning filler that makes no sense and has only a nominal relationship to the game it is based on (as it turned out, that was only mostly accurate.) You can practically taste the marketing in every action-figure-hocking minute of this show, with teams of wacky characters martial-arting each other in poorly-animated ways; we certainly were not out of the era of animated advertisements disguised as TV series in 1994. And whose name do I see prominently displayed in the credits? Why, it’s Phil Harnage, auteur of “Mama Luigi”—albeit, he wasn’t the one who wrote this particular episode, but that’s not to say he shouldn’t share some of the blame for this. Everyone involved in this production has to own up.

Cheaptoons #14: Sonic the Hedgehog

Look, the original designers probably didn’t take into account every single angle Sonic may be shown from

S2E8, “The Void” (1994)

There was only one upstart video game franchise that had the hubris to get two entirely different animated adaptations that aired at the same time, one made in Canada for syndication (which we’ve already looked at) and one made in America for Saturday mornings (thus earning it the title of SATAM among The Internet.) Did we really expect less from Sonic in 1993, probably the peak of his popularity (and oversaturation)? Everyone wanted a piece of it, and who was Sega to deny a licensing agreement when they were raking in all that exposure and green? So, yeah, get Sonic everywhere—we won’t stop until every kid in modern society sees that little blue bastard in their sleep!

Cheaptoons #13: The Legend of Zelda

Spinal cord injuries: the height of comedy

S1E5, “Sing For the Unicorn” (1989)

I don’t know how it is that the Zelda cartoon is so much less incompetent than the Mario half of the Super Mario Bros. Super Show—the animation isn’t as bad, it doesn’t feel as slow and uneventful, there’s this mock-orchestral recreation of the game’s score, and the plot isn’t as insultingly lame. It’s a miracle, all things considered. This is not an endorsement of the Legend of Zelda cartoon, it should be said, but while DIC’s Super Mario shows are a terrible chore to sit through, I was able to watch this one without a constant sense that the people behind the show hated the audience almost as much as they hated themselves.