Do As We Say, Not As We Toon

The misguided morality within some of your favorite Saturday morning video game cartoons.

By: Nadia Oxford
April 2, 2012

If you played video games in the ’80s and early ’90s, then you probably watched the tie-in cartoons that were broadcast at around the same time, God help you. At first glance, the marriage of video game heroes and Saturday morning still sounds like an idea that should, by all rights, completely rock. Alas, the reality stank. Those early video game cartoons weren’t just bad: some of them were arguably a bad influence.

It’s almost heartbreaking to watch the likes of Super Mario World, Mega Man, or Double Dragon as an adult, because you can still smell the cartoons’ wrecked potential. With a little effort, the storyboarders could have expanded on Mario’s universe, or given Billy Lee a multi-episode quest to rescue Marian. Unfortunately, the cartoons’ production companies weren’t interested in making anything except an animated game commercial that would hold fast to kids’ attention spans for half an hour, preferably without offending their parents. And in order to yark up the cartoons as cheaply and as quickly as possible, the show’s writers typically built an episode around ten-cent morals that would make a fortune cookie manufacturer blush and turn away.