Captain N: The Game Master

Captain N: The Game Master is an animated children's television show produced by DIC Entertainment about a teenage boy who gets sucked into his television and enters the world of Nintendo Entertainment System video games. The show ran from 1989-09-09 to 1991-10-26 and lasted for three seasons totaling 34 episodes. It was also turned into a comic book.

I watched this show when it was on television and, as a kid obsessed with Nintendo, I really loved it despite its flaws. Because I was too young to really pay attention to TV listings, I never really knew when it was on, so I only saw a handful of episodes. In my late 20s, I watched the first season and found that it did not age well at all.

Review

Good

• The idea of living in a universe where various video game worlds are real, and you can warp between them, is a really interesting concept.
• Levi Stubbs does a great job voice-acting Mother Brain.
• The game incorporates various sound effects and music from actual video games, which was pretty awesome.

Bad

• Over all, the show is pretty cheaply made. Many of the characters are poorly drawn, the animation is jagged, and the plots are terribly contrived.
• Several of the characters are drawn incorrectly (Mother Brain doesn't have a face, King Hippo doesn't have cyan skin, Mega Man is the wrong color, etc.).
• Despite having dozens of games to draw inspiration from, the show's designers often created new monsters and environments for each episode which had nothing to do with any video game.

Ugly

• The show was targeted toward young children, but it's so painfully childish, it becomes nearly unwatchable as an adult.

Links

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_N:_The_Game_Master - Wikipedia.