Saturday Supercade memories

[vintagegamer]

I remember the Pac Man cartoon, but this one I didn't recall:

[SirPeale]

I remember that!  Didn't until you brought it up. 

[vintagegamer]

Here's the Pac Man one I remember watching..



VG

[DaveMMR]

I used to watch that as a kid.  Wasn't exactly the most memorable set of cartoons in the Saturday Morning lineup - but still cool to look back on. 

[vidmouse]

Only a matter of time before it shows up on DVD 

[TOK]

Man, that sucks even by incredibly low 80's standards. 

[Crowquill]

I LOVED this show when it was originally on (I was 9 at the time). As a kid obsessed with games this was the coolest show on TV.

It's actually impressive that Ruby-Spears managed to license so many games from so many companies:

Frogger-Sega/Konami
Q*Bert-Gottleib
Pitfall-Activision
DK and DK Junior-Nintendo
Kangaroo-Sun/Atari
Space Ace-Bluth studios

It's also why it'll probably never get re-released on DVD.

Looking back at it now it's pretty much standard boring early-80's cartoons, but it could have been worse. Even at the time I wondered why they thought the best approach to a Q*Bert cartoon was a Happy Days knock-off. It's good to see Mario running around chasing Donkey Kong instead of eating mushrooms and running through pipes.

[FrizzleFried]

I think Pitfall was actually Jungle Hunt....

[DarkBubble]

Man, I remember that.  Wasn't any worse than the other stuff based on TV shows and movies, like Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Gary Coleman Show, Punky Brewster, etc., but that's not saying much.

[Crowquill]

Man, I remember that.  Wasn't any worse than the other stuff based on TV shows and movies, like Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, The Gary Coleman Show, Punky Brewster, etc., but that's not saying much.

Lots of animation fans ---smurfette--- about how GI Joe, Transformers, and other toy licenses ruined saturday morning by turning it into a lot of toy commercials. Were things really that much better when saturday morning was ruled by mystery-solving teens with loveable sidekicks and cartoons based on hit prime-time shows? Was My Little Pony really that much worse-off than a time-traveling Fonz?

I think Pitfall was actually Jungle Hunt....

Nope. It was definitely Pitfall. Maybe they couldn't get the license to Jungle hunt or maybe they just thought "Pitfall Harry" was a better character to work with. I'm wondering if it's the first one. I was watching the opening to the show again and in the opening credits Harry's running down a hill from a boulder and avoiding "natives". He's also wearing a tan safari outfit instead of a green outfit. Could just be playing up stereotypes of the genre, though. Hard to tell.