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I thought it would be fun to imagine what Splash Woman may have looked like if her game was old enough to appear on Captain N, because I always thought that show deserves more respect than it gets. Yeah it shows its age, but so does every other cartoon from the 80s. Ninja Turtles had cheap animation, cringe-inducing catchphrases, and was more concerned with selling a product than anything else too. I love the old Ninja Turtles as much as everyone else does, I spent the entire Summer between eighth and ninth grade bingewatching it, but why is it that most people are willing to cut Ninja Turtles or He-Man or Thundercats slack for being old but never the DiC Nintendo cartoons? What do they do differently? The Mario cartoon has since thankfully gotten vindicated, the availability from being on Netflix a few years ago and Tubi currently have given people, including a new generation of kids, an excuse to look at it again without some bitch in their ear telling them it sucks, combined with the fact that the movie was written pretty much as a long episode of it, just with references to newer games, means I don't see nearly as much negativity thrown at it anymore. Not the same with Zelda or Captain N unfortunately. (And yeah, I know Captain N's 3rd season is packaged with Super Mario World on Tubi, but that's the weakest season, not a good introduction)

Zelda especially since a lot of the criticisms I've seen that show get over the years stem from getting lore wrong about games that didn't exist yet when it came out. Like that there were only two Triforces instead of three, when the show is based on the first NES game and it's the second game that introduces the third Triforce, and considering concept art for a scrapped sequel series called The Adventures of Link has been unearthed within the past few years it seems like the plan was to eventually address it. It just didn't get another season. Instead they had to acknowledge the third Triforce in a Captain N episode. Way more egregious is one that's stuck with me for years where I've literally witnessed someone complain about a scene where Link refers to his horse by name because he calls her Catherine instead of Epona. "They couldn't even get the name of the horse right." Epona being a character that wouldn't be introduced until 1998. Those are just a couple examples off the top of my head. On behalf of the writing staff for a cartoon that came out before I was born, I apologize that they weren't able to see the fucking future. At least Catherine is a female horse with brown fur, if anything that scene should be praised for getting that right! Hell, that scene should get praised just for getting the fact that he has a horse right! There was no horse in the NES games! Go check, boot them up right now, show me where the horse is, I dare you! And I mean an actual horse, not Horsehead from Zelda II you smartass! In fact, the YMMV tab for the show's TV Tropes page actually has a list, a pretty lengthy one no less, of other things the show accidentally got right, from Ganon using a disguise that looks pretty similar to Agahnim to Link straight-up performing a speedrun strat from Breath of the Wild, so actually the show's writers seemingly could see the fucking future, just not as well as the Internet decades later would decide they were supposed to. Give an inch, take a mile.

So needless to say I'd love little more than for Captain N to get a revival of some kind. It's a perfectly fine show for its time, more so than most are willing to admit, and in a time where there exist great reboots of Ninja Turtles, He-Man, Thundercats, Transformers, G.i. Joe, etc., that do a great job making them as good in their own times as the originals were in their time, a cartoon about a gamer getting pulled through his TV and forming a superhero team out of actual licensed game characters has potential to be way cooler now that video games have evolved to a point where they have so much more to work with. If they use Mega Man, they could actually have him look like Mega Man, instead of giving someone who's never heard of Mega Man the in-game sprite, colorless line drawing from the manual, and that infamous box art, telling them they're the same character, giving them no further instruction, and then acting surprised when they just make up an original design that amalgamates them. Yeah, it's easy for us to say the box art should have been disregarded, but we know what Mega Man looks like, they didn't! Back when I was in college I brainstormed what a revival would be like and considered doing it as a comic, similar to what TheInkTank would eventually do with their Ben 10 comic Five Years Later, if not for anything else then at least to show the Internet that there is at least one fan of the DiC Nintendo cartoons that isn't Andrew Dobson or Moviebob, the two people I least want to agree with on anything. I've been thinking a lot about it lately, and would love to pull it out of mothballs eventually

Description

I thought it would be fun to imagine what Splash Woman may have looked like if her game was old enough to appear on Captain N, because I always thought that show deserves more respect than it gets. Yeah it shows its age, but so does every other cartoon from the 80s. Ninja Turtles had cheap animation, cringe-inducing catchphrases, and was more concerned with selling a product than anything else too. I love the old Ninja Turtles as much as everyone else does, I spent the entire Summer between eighth and ninth grade bingewatching it, but why is it that most people are willing to cut Ninja Turtles or He-Man or Thundercats slack for being old but never the DiC Nintendo cartoons? What do they do differently? The Mario cartoon has since thankfully gotten vindicated, the availability from being on Netflix a few years ago and Tubi currently have given people, including a new generation of kids, an excuse to look at it again without some bitch in their ear telling them it sucks, combined with the fact that the movie was written pretty much as a long episode of it, just with references to newer games, means I don't see nearly as much negativity thrown at it anymore. Not the same with Zelda or Captain N unfortunately. (And yeah, I know Captain N's 3rd season is packaged with Super Mario World on Tubi, but that's the weakest season, not a good introduction)

Zelda especially since a lot of the criticisms I've seen that show get over the years stem from getting lore wrong about games that didn't exist yet when it came out. Like that there were only two Triforces instead of three, when the show is based on the first NES game and it's the second game that introduces the third Triforce, and considering concept art for a scrapped sequel series called The Adventures of Link has been unearthed within the past few years it seems like the plan was to eventually address it. It just didn't get another season. Instead they had to acknowledge the third Triforce in a Captain N episode. Way more egregious is one that's stuck with me for years where I've literally witnessed someone complain about a scene where Link refers to his horse by name because he calls her Catherine instead of Epona. "They couldn't even get the name of the horse right." Epona being a character that wouldn't be introduced until 1998. Those are just a couple examples off the top of my head. On behalf of the writing staff for a cartoon that came out before I was born, I apologize that they weren't able to see the fucking future. At least Catherine is a female horse with brown fur, if anything that scene should be praised for getting that right! Hell, that scene should get praised just for getting the fact that he has a horse right! There was no horse in the NES games! Go check, boot them up right now, show me where the horse is, I dare you! And I mean an actual horse, not Horsehead from Zelda II you smartass! In fact, the YMMV tab for the show's TV Tropes page actually has a list, a pretty lengthy one no less, of other things the show accidentally got right, from Ganon using a disguise that looks pretty similar to Agahnim to Link straight-up performing a speedrun strat from Breath of the Wild, so actually the show's writers seemingly could see the fucking future, just not as well as the Internet decades later would decide they were supposed to. Give an inch, take a mile.

So needless to say I'd love little more than for Captain N to get a revival of some kind. It's a perfectly fine show for its time, more so than most are willing to admit, and in a time where there exist great reboots of Ninja Turtles, He-Man, Thundercats, Transformers, G.i. Joe, etc., that do a great job making them as good in their own times as the originals were in their time, a cartoon about a gamer getting pulled through his TV and forming a superhero team out of actual licensed game characters has potential to be way cooler now that video games have evolved to a point where they have so much more to work with. If they use Mega Man, they could actually have him look like Mega Man, instead of giving someone who's never heard of Mega Man the in-game sprite, colorless line drawing from the manual, and that infamous box art, telling them they're the same character, giving them no further instruction, and then acting surprised when they just make up an original design that amalgamates them. Yeah, it's easy for us to say the box art should have been disregarded, but we know what Mega Man looks like, they didn't! Back when I was in college I brainstormed what a revival would be like and considered doing it as a comic, similar to what TheInkTank would eventually do with their Ben 10 comic Five Years Later, if not for anything else then at least to show the Internet that there is at least one fan of the DiC Nintendo cartoons that isn't Andrew Dobson or Moviebob, the two people I least want to agree with on anything. I've been thinking a lot about it lately, and would love to pull it out of mothballs eventually