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.