Sunday, January 12, 2014

Saturday Morning's Forgotten Heroes: Captain N: The Game Master (1989)

For a period between the mid-80's and mid-90's, DIC experimented with live-action programming, just as rivals Hanna-Barbera & Filmation had done before them. The track record was spotty at best. In most cases, they mixed live-action with animation, as was the case with the most successful of the hybrids, Kidd Video, and, our next subject, Captain N: The Game Master.

Captain N is an ordinary dude named Kevin Keene, who is transported from the real world to Videoland via a warp that emerges through his television set, while his mother, unaware of what's happening, is demanding that the lad clean his room. Ah, the celebration of slackerdom among kids. Bleechh.

In Videoland, Kevin is tasked to liberate the realm from the insidious Mother Brain, whose masculine voice belongs to the late Four Tops frontman, Levi Stubbs, whose voice acting debut, for all we know, came a couple of years prior in the remake of "Little Shop of Horrors". Stubbs ain't the only musician in the cast, though. British bluesman Long John Baldry began an association with DIC with this series, and was also heard in Sonic The Hedgehog a few years later.

Captain N lasted two seasons, the last merged as part of Super Mario World, and some of the characters, the ones owned by Nintendo, that is, would appear in a Nintendo comic book published by Valiant Comics, which didn't last very long. The series enjoyed a brief resurrection when reruns aired on the Family Channel in the mid-90's.

Here's the open:



I didn't follow this series, so I can't fairly rate it.

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