Battletoads (animation)

In 1992, Battletoads was a hot game and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1987 cartoon was still going strong. Given the similarity between the two properties, it stood to reason that a good Animated Adaptation could give the games better Popcultural Osmosis.

Someone must have thought so, because a Battletoads cartoon series, produced by DiC Entertainment, was launched.

The pilot was shown on Thanksgiving 1992. It is a prequel to the game, but does not provide the same backstory as the one published in Nintendo Power. It appeared to be based on a very, very obscure comic adaptation printed in some other gaming magazines at the time, rather than the game itself. In this origin story, Morgan Ziegler, Dave Shar, and George Pie are, rather than computer technicians, three teenage losers from Oxnard, California who are squirted with Super Serum by Professor T. Bird and turned into the Battletoads. Tasked with defending the Princess from the Dark Queen, they receive the "ancient names of honor": Zitz, Rash and Pimple.

It was directed by Kent Butterworth and written by David Wise, who were both major figures in the development of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1987 animated series (Butterworth was a senior animator on almost every episode; Wise was the head writer for the majority of its run, and not to be confused in this context with the David Wise who wrote the music for the Battletoads games). A natural expectation would be these guys would make a decent TMNT-alike show.

The pilot bombed spectacularly: the aborted series is a textbook example of a Stillborn Franchise: a niche work being rammed into another medium, adaption changes alienating the existing fans, critical panning and a failure to capture a new mainstream audience. No further episodes were broadast and it likely destroyed any chance of a good Battletoads series ever being made.

For many years it was nearly forgotten (though it was released on VHS in 1994), buried in the wasteland alongside hundreds of other failed TV pilots, until rediscovered by the Internet. See it in its 30 minutes of glory here (or the somewhat MSTed version here).

Tropes appearing in the Battletoads cartoon:

 * Alien Among Us: Subverted, T. Bird walks around openly and doesn't seem to be at all afraid of being seen. Played somewhat straight with Angelica, who tries to work like a normal human.
 * Analogy Backfire: "Life is one big basketball game!" Um...what?
 * Ascended Extra: Princess Angelica gets lines and some personality, which is more than she ever got in the games.
 * By the Power of Grayskull: "Let's get warty!"
 * Also "Let's get normal!" to return to human form.
 * Catch Phrase: "'Toads rule!"
 * George/Pimple saying "Cosmic" in various Crunchtastic ways ("Cosmerific," for example) and Dave/Rash's "Psychotronic!"
 * Creator Provincialism: Oxnard, California "sounds so mysterious"?
 * Dean Bitterman: The Principal, who for some reason has it in for the main three and threatens to suspend them if they keep hanging out together.
 * Diner Brawl: The first Fight Scene.
 * Epic Fail: Morgan/Zits making a computer monitor explode just by pressing a few keys and Princess Angelica making a jelly doughnut explode by gently pinching it. Though the latter might have been an animation error.
 * Everything's Better with Princesses: Princess Angelica
 * Fictional Video Game: Any resemblance between "Galaxy Wars" and any Real Life arcade game is coincidental.
 * Flying Car: Introduced with a Back to The Future Shout-Out: "Where we're going, we don't need tires!"
 * How Do I Shot Web?: The Battletoads have to find out how to use Smash Hits.
 * Insignificant Little Blue Planet: According to T-Bird, Earth is "so backward and insignificant that the Dark Queen never dared to conquer it."
 * Limited Animation: To the point where characters walk by moving their cels.
 * MacGuffin: Princess Angelica's amulet.
 * Show the Forehead: The Dark Queen.
 * Stillborn Franchise: Never got past the pilot, no plans for additional animated adaptions despite the cult status of the original game. A good example of how attempts to leverage popularity in one genre to another can go awry.
 * Super Serum: The genetic essence of the ancient Battletoads.
 * Suspiciously Similar Song: One part of the episode has a surf-style version of "Havah Negilah" playing over a fight sequence.
 * This Loser Is You: The three Battletoads start out as "the biggest losers in the history of Waldo P. Oxnard Junior High."
 * Title Theme Tune
 * Took a Level In Dumbass: The Battletoads are decidedly dumber here than in the games.
 * Totally Radical: The characters non-ironically use catchphrases like "psychotronic".
 * Unusually Uninteresting Sight: The cashier at the Stop N' Scarf doesn't look up from his newspaper/magazine once during the Diner Brawl.
 * Villain Teleportation
 * Yeah! Shot: At the end.