Saturday Morning Cartoons - Captain N: The Game Master

“Captain N: The Game Master” was a cartoon played on NBC in the late 80’s to early 90’s about a kid that gets sucked into the video game world known as ‘Videoland’…..really it was just Nintendo games, since it was basically a 30 minute commercial for Nintendo..but still).

It was full of enemies and allies for the kid, Kevin, that were all based on whatever Nintendo games were just released or about to be released… Zelda and Link, Donkey Kong, etc. etc. Most of the locations were also pulled from games such as Metroid, the Mario games, etc.

It was an adventure show at it’s core, but had a fair bit of humour injected in due to Kevin’s use of a classic NES controller to affect the reality of ‘Videoland’, via pausing things and an assortment of other strange abilities, and his use of a Nintendo Zapper (think Duck Hunt) as his main weapon against whatever bad guys he faced.

At the time it was playing, I was really big into the NES (I was 7 when it started airing…), so all the game references and familiar characters were fun to watch, and it of course convinced me on more than one occasion to plead with my parents to get me a certain game or toy that I had seen on the show or the commercials (mostly about video games, action figures, and other such things.

The nostalgia factor is high with this one, but the stories were actually pretty damn bad. Watching an episode now is fun, but it’s fun in that “Oh man, I can’t believe I used to be entertained by this,” sorta way. This is the first cartoon in my Saturday morning series that doesn’t seem to have held up against the test of time for me. But there’s always other ways to fill that desire for nostalgia, like a classic NES belt buckle just like Captain N had…… if you don’t mind the strange look you’ll get.

It’s Saturday Morning. Time For a Cartoon or Ten

Saturday mornings have always been associated with cartoons to me, so I thought I’d spread a little cartoon love around on TV Gawker by way of posting something related to Saturday morning cartoons Saturday morning (have I said “Saturday Morning” enough yet?).

I thought I’d start out this regular feature by giving a look back at one of my all time favourite cartoons I used to wake up to on Saturdays. I’d pull myself out of bed reluctantly, drag myself to the kitchen, make myself a big bowl of whatever sugar-infused cereal that was there at the time, and sit down to watch Darkwing Duck.

Long story short, it was a Disney cartoon about a superhero, which satirized the superhero genre.

It made fun of many aspects of other superheroes, such as how Batman always just happens to have some obscure gizmo on him that happens to be JUST the thing he needs to save the day, but would never have any other use, or Spiderman’s OCD-like need to make an entrance with a pun or witty quip.

It was full of subtle humour and so, as was typical of disney at the time, it was almost more entertaining for adults as it was for the kids it was supposedly aimed at. Even today when I watch an episode I occasionally get a reference or joke that I would not have gotten as a kid. The humour is often either slapstick cartoon style stuff, or dry sarcasm and satire, which is a combo I enjoy greatly.

The best part though was probably the villains. From “Quackerjack”, a psychotic toy-making jester, to “Steelbeak”, complete with plenty of James Bond references, to the extremely strange “Bushroot”, half duck half plant, and so many more. All of which Darkwing would refer to as his “Arch Nemesis”, to the point that he would be tongue tied when confronted with more than one and attempts to say “Arch Nemesises”.

There were also an assortment of other superheroes that stopped by from time to time, usually to the dismay of Darkwing, as they would constantly complain about how ineffective, sloppy, or just plain dangerous his crime fighting style was.

Darkwing, being a superhero without any powers (think Batman, Ironman, etc), he had a few staple gizmos that he used constantly: a jet in the shape of a duck’s head, a motorcycle with a sidecar (for Launchpad or his daughter, depending what was going on), a grenade launcher for shooting different sorts of gas grenades… which also doubled as a grappling hook, and his cape, which at times was made of strange materials such as teflon, depending on the villain he was hunting.

The show was sarcastic, witty, bizarre, and full of a certain…as the french say…I don’t know what. I loved it then, and when I watch it now it brings me back to that time when I was a kid, and it’s actually still pretty damn entertaining.

It’s even been translated into a few different video games, most notably for the original Nintendo, but as with most shows turned in games, they were all pretty lame, sadly.

If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend looking for it. And if (like me) you have fond memories of watching it all those years ago, rest assured, watching it again will bring back a flood of those feelings, and it won’t ruin the memory for you by way of noticing that it really wasn’t that good (as is the case with so many shows from the late 80’s and early 90’s). It really is just as good as you remember… maybe even better, since you’ll probably get some of the jokes you missed the first time around.