A Little bit Spooky

The Little's is one of those old Saturday morning cartoons you either love... or know nothing about. It's a perfect example of the saying 'you had to be there'. For those not in the know, the Little's are a race of tiny rodent like people who live among us in hiding. The Little's the show revolves around often interacts with Henry, a good natured kid whose house they reside in the walls of. Well, it's Halloween and Henry (with a few friends) go on an adventure at the local neighborhood haunted house. Of course his little friends get involved and we get a pretty great cartoon. Sometimes I joke about the things I post about and sometimes I'm just telling you to check out something cool. This is the later.

Monstro vs. The Wolf Hound

I love watching old Heathcliff cartoons, but it brings to mind a question. Why did they split it up with another group of cats? I wanted to watch Heathcliff. Regardless, the Catillac Cats are a fun group of felines who get into various adventures and are generally likable. What's this got to do with Halloween? They watched a scary movie and have nightmares! Classic Halloween episode plot! Watch the gang act out classic monster tropes in obviously outsourced animation!

Koopa's got kids

I've always loved the Nintendo cartoons produced by DiC in the late 80's and early 90's. To be fair, I've always been a fan of cartoons made by DiC. They really made great shows that I still watch regularly to this day. Their Super Mario Bros cartoons have always been a bright spot for me as... I freaking love Super Mario. Some of my favorite games of all time and I still have yet to get tired of playing any of them. At the time, media about video games was hit or miss. There was gaming magazines, but I wanted fiction. Prior, there was the Saturday Supercade and Pac-Man cartoons  that gave some extra life to those characters I liked on my Atari. That was much needed as in those days the plot was mostly a basic scenario. I was fully in love with the richer gaming worlds my NES gave me and just gobbled up the characters however I could.

Needles to say, thanks to the time they were made, the shows weren't very true to the source material. Like Saturday Supercade and others before it, some additional world building was needed to make a show out of the games. A boss in a game's personality back then was often a few sentences in a game manual. Not to mention, animation companies like DiC was provided material by the companies localizing the game from Japan. So whatever material they had to give them was likely pretty limited at the time as the game was probably being localized at the same time. We know him as Bowser here in the western world, but in Japan his name is Koopa. So he's King Koopa in those old cartoons. After hearing a Milli Vanilli song on the radio recently, I was reminded of that episode of The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 featuring them. Somehow that thought resulted in me wanting to write about the Koopa Kids from said cartoon and their name differences from game to cartoon. You can blame this post on the rain

Game/Cartoon
Larry Koopa/Cheatsy, he tends to be a cheater.
Morton Koopa Jr/Big Mouth, talks a lot.
Wendy O. Koopa/Kootie Pie, spoiled brat.
Lemmy Koopa-/Hip (twin of Hop), not very smart, but also genuinely innocent.
Iggy Koopa/Hop (twin of Hip), immature and childish, but a brilliant inventor.
Roy Koopa/Bully, calm and collective.
Ludwig Von Koopa/Kooky, mad scientist and elder Koopa kid.

What if Season 6?

This little clip has been making the rounds this week. It's a intro to a season 6 of The Transformers that never happened. The clip's creator used animation from toy commercials that were from the time the season would have happened. Powermasters, Pretenders and Micromasters, to be exact. This would have been a counterpart to Masterforce theoretically. Maybe even Victory and Zone. I've wondered before "what if" DiC took over the Transformers cartoons like they did with GI JOE? It would have been different than what we were used to, but different doesn't scare me. I'm basically using this currently popular on social media clip to once again say how much I would have loved it if DiC would have took over. Everyone take a shot.

Friday Night Frights- Return To Castlevania

Another Friday is upon us and y'all know what that means, another spooky edition of Friday Frights here on the Base! This week, Captain N and the gang in an episode themed after the then newly released Castlevania 3: Dracula's Curse! For those not fully familiar with Captain N, it was a Saturday morning cartoon with a teenager from Earth living in the world of Nintendo video games in adventures in a different game each week.

This was way before Castlevania got the anime look we're all used to and was more homage to classic monsters. Captain N was a DiC production and took a few liberties with the characters as you can probably tell. Not to mention... Sypha is a man here as characters were often mislabeled in marketing materials due to localization errors at the time. Regardless, it's a fun silly adventure in Dracula's Castle and that's the kind of Halloween all year spooky shit we can all love.

Captain N-Return to Castlevania

Long before the Castlevania series on Netflix, we had to do with an episode of Captain N to bring the events of Castlevania 3 to animated form. Yea, they pretty much reinvented everything and got the characters wrong. But I do think Alucard is pretty great here and not only am a fan of Captain N, but DiC cartoons. Not to mention, it's Halloween crunch time. We've got to get our spooky shit all the way in before the next few months of singing that Snowman song.

Starcom was pretty rad

Starcom was a pretty neat short lived line of toys with a matching short lived cartoon. If you read off the list of companies involved it sounds more like an itinerary of presenters at a merchandising expo. Toys by Coleco, cartoon by DiC and distributed by Coca-Cola Telecommunications (sometimes big companies own other big companies), and developed with the help of the Young Astronauts Council to get kids interested in NASA. Under all that was actually a really neat bunch of space toys.

Starcom would fight the ill intended Shadow Force in another epic struggle of good vs evil. Toys were smaller space themed (like the name would suggest) vehicles with small scale figures. The figures has cool little guns that your mom would tell you would get sucked up by the vacuum cleaner. The figures were pretty dang cool with the NASA inspired good guys vs the evil sci fi fantasy inspired bad guys. Because things you find entertaining are bad in the eyes of things you find boring.

The most dominant play gimmick was the 'Magna Lock'. If this was a fan wiki, I'd make a bad joke about that. This is a fan blog, so I'll make a bad reference. The Magna Lock was a series of magnet plates on the vehicles and play sets as well as on the feet of the action figures. This was meant to simulate the gravity boots of the space explores as they fight in zero gravity. What happened more often was the figures got stuck on the refrigerator.

Starcom had a pretty short life, according to Wikipedia the cartoon only had 13 episodes. Also according to Wikipedia the line only lasted around two years, though it did get a second life when Mattel released the toys in Europe and Southeast Asia and was apparently pretty popular there. From my own memory, I remember liking the cartoon quite a bit. I'm sure I could find a few episodes on DVD thanks to budget releases as seems to be the home for old cartoons. Which isn't a bad thing,  video racks at discount stores have long been a staple of my entertainment.

I had a few of the toys, bought on clearance at Kay-Bee toys. Like a lot of oddball sci fi toys of mine, they'd find their way in a weird homogenized city made of such toys. They were the perfect scale to interact with my Transformers and often found themselves operating under the command of Hi-Q. Hi-Q was a fair leader who made sure everybody got their 15 minute break every 3 hours.

Battle Armor Cobra Commander

Cobra Commander is a unique character. By all appearances he's a coward who's nothing without his underlings. Though, once he donned his Battle Armor all bets were off and his badassness started showing through. Prior seasons he was evil and ruthless, sure, but once anything got serious he was sniveling. Once Serpentor came around, he was reduced to lackey and kinda in a non-sensible way. The underlings felt like he was no longer worthy to lead Cobra, so they made Serpentor to be the ultimate leader. Ok, I'm down (even though you had Destro right there), but they kept him around and still called him Cobra Commander. Shouldn't his title have changed? Though after the events of the movie and his return to glory, Cobra Commander got hardcore. I'd like to think his new costume at that point was part of his 'New Year, New Me' regime. I know I've always liked it better than his other outfits. Just looks awesome, you know?

Hey now this is crazy, but Transformers Series 2 maybe?

I've mentioned before how I sometimes wonder how things would have been if Takara had been more successful with Diakron. Well, that's not the only 'what if' that crosses my mind occasionally. DiC took over making GI JOE cartoons post GI JOE the movie with what's commonly referred to as GI JOE Series 2.  Sometimes I wonder, what if DiC made Transformers cartoons post 'The Rebirth'?

The Rebirth's art isn't too far off from a DiC production.

Think of the possibilities. Instead of Season 5 with repackaged reruns, we could have had new adventures. Pretenders, Micromasters, Actionmasters... yeah. What if instead of the repackaged reruns we got as Transformers Generation 2... we got a whole new show? All those awesome Generation 2 original molds and characters... yeah, and one could wager better toy sales. As good as Beast Wars was, this could have led to a different DiC produced beast era. Which, being a cheaper production could have featured more characters. Not to mention, I wonder if would have been received better by those who hated Beast Wars? Obviously not those who didn't like the change, but I did witness several G1 purists like BW II and BW NEO more since it was more like a traditional TF show.

M.A.S.K was a DiC production that was compared to Transformers.

Part of thinking about this possibility would include possible cast changes. I'm sure not all voice actors would have worked on the DiC produced shows. Budget reasons, voice directors, or maybe just conflicting schedules. What if we got a different sounding Optimus in 1989? Imagine the debates over who was better. Or Vince DiCola and Stan Bush are regular Transformers convention guests, what about all that funky DiC music? What if those musicians performed live? Sometimes fans complain about regular convention guests, well I'd assume this would have created a deep pool of talent to invite out. Not to mention, just about I mentioned imagining the debates. People already debate which show is better, what if there was 2 G1 shows by way of a series 2?

What if these guys were on local TV?

Sure, I can 'what if' all day and probably would if given the freedom. It's one of those things that just make me wonder why it didn't happen. Why didn't Transformers get a DiC cartoon and got repackaged reruns instead? What was the business behind those decisions? Would it have been a success or a massive failure? I don't know. Nobody does, it never happened. Sadly so, because I would have loved it.