Captain N: The Game Master

Some time around 5 AM one cursed morning before work, I made the impulsive decision to finally sit down and watch a cartoon that had been on my radar for over a decade, even longer if you count the one comic book I had as a kid that I made my non-gamer mom read to me over and over. Call it what you will - the proto Smash Bros, the ultimate crossover, the original isekai anime, the best worst best video game to cartoon adaptation I still can't believe was ever made - any way you slice it, Captain N: The Game Master sure is a wild little piece of both video game AND animation history.

A very "Harrison Ford just shoots the guy instead of using his whip because he needed to stop filming and take a shit" moment.

If you've never heard the name, let me set the stage for you. Some time in the late 80s, during the height of the NES's popularity in home video game consoles, Nintendo Power magazine ran an original comic series about one guy - Captain Nintendo - and his misadventures against Mother Brain from Metroid with help from other characters from new and upcoming NES games. An animated series was pitched and hastily put into production.

Kevin about to lose his partnership with Nintendo for using an actual gun instead of promoting the NES Zapper.

Mind you, this was LONG before these familiar characters of the NES era had personalities or series history to draw from, and the production team definitely was NOT given access to much by way of key artwork or design docs. They had to make do with what they could infer from the games themselves, and somehow craft a Saturday Morning Cartoon out of them that satisfied the basic needs of any Saturday Morning Cartoon: a relatable teenage protagonist (white kid in a varsity jacket, of course), and toy* promotion. The end result is absolutely bonkers, especially in retrospect.

*There was a huge push in the 80s and 90s to get video games classified as "toys" to make them eligible or legal to sell in certain stores. Read up on it sometime, it's fascinating stuff!

Captain N (Kevin) is joined by a veritable Who's Who of recognizable faces - Mega Man, Simon Belmont, "Kid Icarus" (these days we know him as Pit), occasionally Link and Princess Zelda (yes, from the memetic "well excuse me, princess" cartoon of the same era), Kevin's canine companion Duke, and because they needed to have one single girl in the cast to prevent the whole thing from being an absolute sausage fest - and because the NES library famously has barely a handful of playable female characters AT ALL - they created an OC named Princess Lana, the princess of all Video Game Land. Zelda and Toadstool (Peach) were busy co-starring in their own shows, and most people still didn't know Samus was a girl at the time, so they really didn't leave themselves a lot of options to choose from!

When your designated role on the show is The Girl, every single shot of you becomes one of questionable framing.

There is some semblance of a story thread planted into the early episodes of the show about Kevin being isekai'd from The Real World into Video Game Land and trying to get home, and also about Princess Lana searching for her kidnapped kingly father, but these eventually get phased out and brushed aside as Kevin decides he just likes it here in Video Game Land. He spends most of this time in this world as Lana's knight protector, facing down Mother Brain and her various schemes to take over all of Video Games. But alas, as she is but a brain trapped in a jar, she relies on her two dimwitted henchmen (bizarrely, the Eggplant Wizard from Kid Icarus and King Hippo from Punch Out) to do her dirty work, while occasionally calling on Dr Wily (Mega Man) or Dracula (Castlevania) for assistance.

Somewhere, Raffi is smiling knowingly.

What really sells this show is its commendable persistence in trying to bridge video games and cartoons of the era. You can tell that a lot of care went into transforming little pixel sprites into recognizable Saturday Morning Cartoon archetypes, bizarre characterizations be damned. It's a fun game trying to identify which game the enemies and guest stars are coming from without looking it up, or catching the cool remixes of what are now considered iconic chiptune classics playing in the background, and wondering why the hell the NES had so damn many sports games in its library.

Here is a gif of Bo Jackson (not voiced by Bo Jackson) attacking a sentient flying baseball bat with a regular wooden baseball bat in a cartoon about video games' interpretation of the underworld of a video game about baseball starring Bo Jackson.

Deconstructing what wacky creative choices the writers, artists and animators had to do in order to make some of the weird shit that happens in this show ACTUALLY HAPPEN is the show's true strength, especially as more and more of these older game titles become lost to time. Watching them take random stabs in the dark on which games would end up being successful enough to be recognized in an episode, or how to actually go about adapting a game's world from one medium to the other is a weird little delight any way you slice it.

I can't believe there's an episode for Bayou Billy, a game I know exists, but have literally never heard ANYONE talk about, EVER.

The best way I can put it is this. Captain N is a piece of history for people who love cartoons and video games. It represents such an old and somewhat forgotten era of video games, long before any of the characters were the iconic mascots they are today. Back then, nobody knew if any of these characters would even last, and writers were pressed to learn as much about the paltry few games each character had to their name to get as many small details right as possible while still fitting the mold of what was expected of cartoons in that day and age. It’s impressive in that sense, and yet completely baffling to revisit it in the here and now.

Hi, will you accept a Collect Call from MY FIST?!

Also, watching it (when I did) in the 2022 era of entertainment really made me realize why I'm so lukewarm on things like HD remakes, new Netflix series, and big name movies like Super Mario Bros [2023]. They're all built from the ground up on nostalgia, on getting the references right, and following the exact script that dedicated fans want to see. There's no room for experimentation when all you're doing is revisiting the past in a modern light.

Any modern nostalgia grab would never just let the characters do dumb random things together with no semblance of story or deeper meaning.

And as I touched on in my Mega Man review, all of my favorite adaptations, reboots, and spin-offs are the ones that take risks by subverting expectations, and doing something completely different with the formula of the original. Captain N works so well because it's a series of nothing BUT risks. It's not going to win any awards for Best Story or Art Direction, because it never intended to be any of those things. But it will always stick out in memory because it dared to be weird and different. Modern adaptations could really learn a thing or two from that. They won't, I know they never will, but they COULD.

Making Simon Belmont into a Johnny Bravo-esque himbo was perhaps the weirdest re-characterization, but canon Simon Belmont will NEVER be as interesting as this one is!

If you're looking for similar shows to check out, your best bets are other video game adaptations of the same era, like the aforementioned Mega Man and the 1989 Legend of Zelda cartoon. For other shows that follow kids and teens on wacky colorful fantasy adventures, there are tons of them, but I'd personally recommend something like Mighty Max or Bucky O'Hare. For more shows about living in a video game world, ReBoot and Code: Lyoko are great places to start, or you can turn to the endless slate of titles in the extremely-popular-right-now isekai genre of anime (my personal favorite is So I'm A Spider, So What).

Anyway, in my eyes, Captain N stands up there with the 1993 live action Super Mario Bros movie as one of the strangest, most earnest, and weirdly memorable attempts at ever adapting video games into a series, and that makes both every bit as iconic as the original games they were built on, whether anyone agrees with me or not!

In closing, I'd just like to add that if King Hippo is allowed to walk around with his juicy blue raspberry tits out and no one will bat an eye, then so why is it so goddamn taboo whenever any remotely feminine character does it? And don't tell me it's cause he's fat and therefore ugly or whatever. Being fat never stopped anyone from lusting over luscious nip nops like the ones he's got on display at all times. It's absolute double standardist bullshit, I tell ya!