Captain N's last sad season

To this day I’m still a fan of the cartoon Captain N: The Game Master. I used to watch it all the time as a kid, and when Shout Factory released the complete series on DVD I began watching it all over again. It was just always so crazy to see characters from different franchises, that weren’t even owned by Nintendo, in this cartoon together. You’ve got Mega Man, Simon Belmont, Pit (well, they just call him Kid Icarus) and then you’ve got the villainous Mother Brain, Eggplant Wizard, King Hippo and Dr. Wiley. The creators of the show certainly didn’t worry themselves with making sure that any of the characters looked, sounded or even acted like their video game counterparts, but we didn’t care, there they were all together on the TV! A lot of the fun was seeing what games they would travel to from one episode to the next, and while I’d say one of the most memorable is when they go to Hyrule for a loose interpretation of Zelda II, they also travel to Faxanadu, Tetris, Donkey Kong’s world which they named Kongo Land, Castlevania, Mega Man 2 and more. The show was made by DiC, and the animation is kind of all over the place. I used to be much more critical of some of the drawings and the choppy animation; this is until I watched the sad third and final season of Captain N.

While the box set I’d gotten said that it was the complete series of Captain N, that wasn’t entirely true. After this series ended, it was continued on in a smaller format the next season as part of a show called Captain N and the new Super Mario World. In these shows, they’d have a 15 minute Super Mario World cartoon, and a brand-new 15 minute Captain N cartoon. And man, the quality of the art in these Captain N cartoons makes the last series look like it was painted by Raphael! I could keep going on about it, but I think it would be more effective to do a before and after shot of one of the main characters, Mother Brain. Here’s her in the first two seasons:

And here she is in this new 15 minute format:

Good. Lord. All of the characters in this new series are a bit off model and weird looking, but Mother Brain absolutely takes the cake here. It’s like they’re not even trying to draw her! And I really think that’s the main feeling with these last few episodes, they really don’t seem to be trying with anything. It’s obvious their main focus was on Super Mario World, not Captain N. All of the drawings are pretty awful. Out of the seven new episodes created for this series, they don’t go to many new exciting games, in fact the only really new one is Final Fantasy. They return to Mega Man’s world in a version of Mega Man 3, they return to Castelvania for a version of Castlevania 3, and the go back to Tetris. The two weirdest have to be their going to a Baseball World and a basketball World called Hoop Land. They do seem to have game tie-ins, with Bo Jackson Baseball and Jordan Vs Bird, but I’m sure there were better games they could have selected besides two sports games!

All in all this is a pretty sad ending to the Captain N series, and after finally buying the Captain N and the new Super Mario World years after buying the other Captain N boxset, it’s a pretty unsatisfying end to the show. While I continue to watch the first two seasons to this day, I really don’t think I will ever need to watch this third butchered season ever again.

Any other Captain N fans out there? What episodes were your favorite? Did you find anything to like about the final season, if you’ve seen it at all?