Kuomon said:
Is it the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon? Or is that considered good?
The Dungeons & Dragons cartoon isn't based on a video game, so no. Also, that cartoon had too many positive aspect to really call bad. I had watched some of it recently, so I can't call it good with a straight face. Maybe if it was not dumbed down so much, it would work.
I guess Bob find the Pac-man and Dragon's Lair cartoons to be not
that bad. Whatever. I find them wince-inducing because I wasted a good deal of my life watching that crap.
A good video game cartoon was Earthworm Jim. I guess Earthworm Jim has since fallen from grace as a property because of a few crappy games and some unfortunate comments by the creator, the nature of which I forget but don't care enough to look up. But the show had an anarchic sense of humor that elevated it into something actually entertaining while shilling the games and toy lines.
That's kind of the thing about all these shows from the 80's and later. They wouldn't exist if the law had not been changed. For you young'uns, there used to be laws on what could and could not be in children's programming, including what could and could not be advertized. I'm no lawyer, but under this law, childrens' shows based on products such as toy lines or video games would have been illegal. So in the 70's, we had all kinds of innovative cartoons with fresh, new characters. I'm not sure how Super Friends got around this. As I said, I'm not a lawyer. But in the early 80's these laws were repealed or relaxed and suddenly animators were making shows based on popular toy lines. He-Man, Transformers, G.I. Joe, etc. I'm sure it was the same for video games.
Just think how many of these old shows that you all grew up with if these laws remained in place. No G.I. Joe. No Transformers. No Thundercats (probably). The mind boggles as it became obvious that shows from the mid-to-late 80's were formulated the same as toy lines. I remember one show called Spiral Zone that probably had a toy line, but I never saw it (for the opposite, see: Voltron II) but it was obviously designed to shill toys. The good guys and bad guys had a smallish, collectable group of characters and a couple monsters thrown in. I just find it interesting how this formula is at once transparent yet somehow compelling. For me, at least.