Thursday, July 9, 2015

Game Time: Donkey Kong (1983)

Here's another segment of Saturday Supercade.

Donkey Kong was one of the biggest arcade games on the planet in the early 80's, such that it was an easy choice to be adapted for a cartoon, and headlined Supercade. Perhaps the biggest shock was DK's gutteral speech was uttered by comedy legend Soupy Sales (ex-Jr. Almost Anything Goes). Of course, Mario (Peter Cullen, ex-The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show) is on the hunt, and often has to rescue Pauline (Judy Strangis, ex-Electra Woman & DynaGirl, Wheelie & the Chopper Bunch) from DK's clutches.

Sometimes, though, the hunted helps his hunters once he realizes he's been duped. Other times, Mario has to resort to tricks. Let's see what happens in this sample episode, "Greenhouse Gorilla":



Donkey Kong would star in a new series having nothing to do with his classic game, more than a decade later, in the cable entry, Donkey Kong Country, which lasted about as long as this series did.

No rating.

2 comments:

Silverstar said...

It's always funny to witness how different this toon's version of Mario was from his later Super Mario Brothers counterpart. It's interesting how Mario was characterized as the antagonist of this show when in the original DK game, he was the character you played as and the ape was the heavy. Probably due to the presence of the Donkey Kong Junior cartoon segments (which debuted in season 1 of 'Supercade' but were gone by season 2) DK was the hero and Mario the villain, as in that game Mario has captured and imprisoned DK and the player controlled Junior, trying to rescue his dad.

hobbyfan said...

Seems Ruby-Spears couldn't reach any sort of compromise w/Nintendo about how to program both segments for TV.