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This was the first Nintendo TV show, and was aired every weekday. Before and after commercial breaks and the show, there was a section were actors portrayed Mario and Luigi. Occasionally, a guest cameo appearance would occur during these non-cartoon scenes. Also, every Friday a cartoon version of Zelda would be shown (very good).
This was an interesting cartoon shown on Saturday mornings back in it's day. Here's how Mark Moore, who has a whole page devoted to the show here, describes the show in a nutshell:
"This TV series consisted of, I believe, 34 episodes. It premiered on NBC on September 9, 1989. The episode length for the first season, excluding commercials and the theme songs, was about 20 minutes.
"The show is about a fifteen(?)-year-old boy named Kevin Keene who lives in Northridge, California. One night, when Kevin (played by Dorian Barag in the real-life main action sequence) is playing Punch-Out when he was supposed to be doing his homework and cleaning his room, he gets pulled through his television set (a Sony) by a huge blast of energy. His dog, Duke (played by Louie from "Critters of the Cinema"), jumps in after him.
"They become cartoon characters, and end up in a universe called Videoland. It appears that in this universe, all of the characters from Kevin's video games are real.
"Kevin is greeted by Princess Lana, the Ruler of Videoland. For the past seven years, Mother Brain (the villain from "Metroid"), has been trying to conquer Videoland. The Princess was losing the war. But then, an ancient prophecy was fulfilled, and Kevin was brought to them to save Videoland.
"Kevin and Duke join the N Team, which consists of Lana, Mega Man, Kid Icarus, and Simon Belmont.
"The second season of Captain N had the same episode length as the first, but there was a Super Mario Bros. 3 episode before and after it. The one-hour (commercials included) show was collectively called "Captain N & the Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3". During the second season, the N Team got an additional member, a supercomputer named Gameboy that looks like, well, a Gameboy! Kevin also meets Link, his favorite video game hero, and Princess Zelda.
"The third season really took a turn for the worse! The animation quality was downgraded severely, and the episode length was reduced to about 10 minutes, 30 seconds - half the length of Seasons 1 and 2! The show came after a Mario episode. The half hour (commercials included) show was called "Captain N and the New Super Mario World". The third season had only seven new episodes, that I know of. In addition to the seven episodes, they also showed edited fifteen-minute versions of half-hour episodes. "NIGHTMARE ON MOTHER BRAIN'S STREET" and "THREE MEN AND A DRAGON" are two of them. I don't know about any others. Also, "QUEST FOR THE POTION OF POWER" was shown as a two-part episode. The third season ran in 1991-1992.
"Captain N ended its three-year run with the episode "BATTLE OF THE BASEBALL KNOW-IT-ALLS". Mother Brain, and her two servants King Hippo (Punch-Out) and the Eggplant Wizard (Kid Icarus), are trapped in the Cellar of Baseball World. Kevin does not go home, however. The episode ends with Kevin and Bo Jackson doing a high-five, rather than ending the show in a logical fashion. This is where the "CHANGES" miniseries begins.
"While the show was still in production, reruns were shown weekdays and on Sunday as part of The Family Channel's "Fun Town" lineup.
"After the series ended, there was a show called "Captain N & The Video Game Masters". All it was was it showed the old Captain N episodes, The Legend of Zelda, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, and The New Super Mario World. That's it. No new episodes. One curious thing is that they changed all of the music and replaced it with just one tune with no words."
Doesn't it strike you as being funny that years later, Sony and Nintendo would be at each other's throats?
I can't recall the exact name of this series, but it was all characters from games made by Acclaim. The characters I can remember are Kwirk, Bigfoot (don't ask me :^) ), someone from Arch Rivals, the Drug Lord form NARC, and the warrior from Wizzards and Warriors. I only watched this show for the two weeks I had the chicken pox, because it was on weekdays before I got home from school.
This was the an excellent animated series. Based on the best-selling video game ever (that's SMB 3 in case you didn't catch on), this show really was fun. It had a huge cast of characters, including Mario, Luigi, Princess Toadstool, Toad, Bowser, all 7 of the Koopa Kids, and (my favorite) the Hammer Bros! This one was another Saturday morning must-see event.
Yet another Mario-based cartoon! When will it end! Anyways, I never did watch this, though I do remember the opening music being the same as the regular music from the game. This was also shown on Saturday morning.
Over the past month, I've gotten two emails about this series. Although I've never seen or heard of it, I figure I can trust this. Here's Andrew Bayless' description of the show:
"Believe it or not there was once a television show based on Dragon Warrior . Although it was an Anime (even cooler ) which was dubbed over . I never saw the show myself but I know it existed because I read about it and saw screen shot in an japanese animation guide . It did air in america."
And here's Tiffany Knox's description:
"There was yet ANOTHER Nintendo-game-based cartoon you forgot to mention--sometime in '91 or '92, I believe, there was a cartoon based off of Dragon Warrior! Really! It was on Saturday mornings, and had rather exotic-looking characters and costumes...at first I thought it had NO resemblance to Dragon Warrior at all...then I played Dragon Warrior 3. It's taken more from the JAPANESE Famicom versions. Once I played Dragon Warrior 3 (BUTT-KICKING game, by the way!) it started seeming more and more familiar. After my party found something, I was like, "Oh, that's the magical sword that they found in episode so-and-so." They used a great number of actual artifact, place, and character names from the game. Such as the Blizzard Sword and Baramos. It was a Japanimation-type thing, VERY much so, and everybody had huge eyes, you know, that kind of thing. One of the party members was a kick-boxing maiden who wore the blue armour the guy wears in the instruction booklet--complete with the little horned helmet. I can't remember much more than that and sadly, I never taped any episodes. Oh, wait--I just remembered some more. First of all, the episodes progressed through the storyline the same way you go through the game, and each episode was called "LEVEL" whatever. So in "Level 1", you see the characters meet each other and buy their stuff, for example, and fight relatively weak monsters, whereas by "Level 20" they're exploring a lava-cave full of dragons, hearing clues about how to get to Baramos, and finding important magic swords. It was an interesting concept, but the whole fun of role-playing game is that YOU are playing the role! So it wouldn't be as much fun to just WATCH rather than PLAY, so I can see why it didn't last very long. The other thing I remembered is that one of the characters was always eating, and wore funny clothes. I think he was a "Goof-Off", which in Dragon Warrior 3 is an actual character class that you can play."
Special thanks to both Tiffany and Andrew for these summaries!
I knew about this one before, but thanks to Andrew once again for pointing this out to me. I never saw this show, but it was a real-life (i.e. NOT cartoon) show shown on the Family Channel. Have any more info? Then tell me!
Have any info not here? Mail me!
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