Tag: cartoon

Sundry Sunday: The Amazing Digital Circus, Episodes 1-3

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

We try here to introduce people to things they may not have seen. This means having a certain mental model of our audience, a guess of what you have and haven’t seen before. And since you’re a bunch of people, a clowder of individuals, even the best guess I make could be wrong for many of you.

(Clowder is a term for a group of cats, not people, but it seemed appropriate in this case. Meow.)

I’d expect that today’s presentation is already known to some of you, it’s very popular on Youtube, with the pilot, from a year ago, having racked up a third of a billion views. But if I asked a random person on the street, “Hey, isn’t the Amazing Digital Circus great?” I’d get blank looks. But then, here in the US, I think certain political choices are beyond obvious, yet I personally know people who choose otherwise. We all have our intellectual ruts.

Let’s not veer too far from the subject. It should be enough to say that even very popular internet things may not be known to those who are not “very online.” So it is with the Amazing Digital Circus. Created by Gooseworx, who also created the animation Little Runmo (previously here, and again in playable game form), The Amazing Digital Circus is about human characters who get transported into a digital reality and are left stranded there. While it’s not explicitly a game, we do consider all forms of electronic entertainment within our sphere of discussion, and the A.D.C. is very game-like.

At first, the Amazing Digital Circus looks like it’s a crazy-fun kind of cartoon, but it doesn’t take long for the lore to set in, and reveal that there’s a lot more going on than there may seem at first. In the Circus, the humans have a whimsical representation that they didn’t choose, and none of them are much pleased to be stuck there. The circus is overseen by a ringmaster, Caine, who has godlike powers. Caine is an interesting figure, he creates adventure situations for the humans to overcome, and is antagonistic, but isn’t a evil figure. He’s not responsible for the humans being in there or stuck there. Humans in the Circus who give in to despair tend to become abstracted, becoming big and mindless glitchy eyeball monsters, so Caine tries to give the surviving humans things to do to preserve their sanity, even though he’s not really all that sane himself.

The main character though is Pomni, the Circus’ newest inhabitant, and the least content with her predicament. Will she find a way out, or will she eventually manage to make peace with being trapped in the Circus’s virtual world? My own theory is that the human characters aren’t really humans, but copies of humans, that think they’re the originals, so it doesn’t really make sense to “escape” the Circus. But that’s just a guess, and a really big guess at that. Let’s see where it goes.

So far, there are three episodes, each about 25 minutes long, so set a little time for each one.

The pilot is episode one, where Pomni enters the Circus and we meet the other characters:

Episode two is Candy Carrier Chaos, which focuses on an “NPC,” a character who isn’t a human:

Episode three, just a couple of days old as of this post, is The Mystery of Mildenhall Manor, which reveals some off the backstory of one of the human characters, Kinger:

Sunsoft Hebereke Cartoons

Hebereke is that NES game, released in European territories as Ufouria, with the cute, yet somewhat bizarre, characters. It recently got a Switch release (“Enjoy edition”), and kind of a sequel.

Sunsoft has released some animations of Hebe and his friends on their Youtube channel. Each is very short, and entirely in Japanese, but most of them don’t have words anyway, and they’re all of a style of humor that I don’t think they make a huge amount of sense even in their native language.

They’re all collected in this playlist, but a couple of selections should help you understand what you’re in for. All of these are about one minute long.

Hebe buys a toy gun:

Hebe and Sukezaemon race on what I’m going to call jet-powered “vehicles”:

And, trouble with bird poop:

Sundry Sunday: The Incredible Shrinking Hedgehog

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Mashed has a fun animation up on Youtube starring Sonic, his pals, and his enemies, where they’ve been, um, ensmallerd to itty bitty size. It’s a standard Saturday Morning kind of plot, but the voices are good, the writing is funny, and the animation, by Painter Seap, is sharp. It’s 5 1/2 minutes long, and it’s embedded below. Just so you’re properly warned, it ends on a cliffhanger, but it’s a fairly minor one.

Demoscene: La Linea

The demoscene is a rich source of awesome, and at times ridiculous, imagery and sounds. Once in a while we sift through it to find things to entertain you with.

Demos aren’t necessarily out to wow you by pushing a computer’s hardware to its absolute limits. Sometimes one will just present something that was obviously (to people who understand the platform) challenging to do, but is fun for its own sake.

La Linea is a series of short films made for television created by Italian animator Osvaldo Cavandoli. They may be familiar to 80s kids who watched a show called The Great Space Coaster, as they were in regular rotation as segments on that show. They feature an expressive and excitable character, known as “Mr. Linea,” who speaks gibberish and has a variety of adventures, despite the fact that he and his world are represented (with some cheating) as contortions of a single horizontal line. The character often speaks to the off-screen animator, asking for various items, devices and, occasionally, other characters to interact with. Every cartoon ends with the main character falling off or through the line in some way. Some of them are collected on Youtube. Here is an example (2 1/2 minutes):

In 2002, the demogroup Breeze made a tribute to Cavandoli’s work in the form of a full-length La Linea cartoon running on a Commodore 64. It doesn’t have the distinctive music or the gibberish, and there’s no photorealistic hand that reaches in to draw parts of the scene, but the style is otherwise faithful to the original. It is a remake of La Linea #10. Please, enjoy (3 1/2 minutes)!

Sunday Sunday: Shiftylook’s Mappy Cartoon

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

Shiftylook was a great site with comics and animation based on Namco characters, with official permission. It’s been gone for several years now, but it was nice while we had it.

Some of its cartoons have managed to survive, transferred to other sites, and the entire run of their Mappy cartoon, 13 episodes at nearly two hours in total, is on Youtube, uploaded by Nicky. We’re highly cognizant here of the demands of maintaining a daily blog, and I probably should be spreading these out one a week, but eh, I’m sure we won’t run out of material any time soon…. Of everything Shiftylook put out, Mappy has an unusually high number of people fondly remembering it. I haven’t seen much of it, so there’s always a chance there’s something unfortunate in there. If there is, I’m sorry, but I doubt it could be that bad.

Mappy the Complete Series (Episodes 1-13) (1 hour, 55 minutes)

Little Runmo: The Game

Last year for Sundry Sunday we linked to Gooseworx’s video game-inspired cartoon Little Runmo. In summary: a platforming character discovers that the peril-filled world he’s tasked with traversing is part of a system designed to support the life of a grotesque ruler. They turn it off, but other circumstances happen, and in the end things don’t go too well. Here’s the video, again (16 minutes).

A little green person off on a dangerous journey.

Little Runmo was made four years ago and has amassed 30 million views. Much more recently, a month ago Gooseworx made a pilot for a show to be called The Amazing Digital Circus, which in that short time has gotten an incredible 147 million views. Presumably it’ll get a series, but who really can tell these days? We have one major media company that thinks it’s worthwhile to make complete expensive productions then purposely kill them before release for a tax writeoff, but these are not the pages to discuss that.

Pointy things: the bane of all runny jumpy people

Over on itch.io JuhoSprite has made a platformer game inspired by Little Runmo, constructed in Godot and (it seems) with Gooseworx’s permission. Here is the trailer (2 1/2 minutes):

You might think it’d be a simple recreation, in game form, of the original, but it’s got its own things going on! Its platforming is pretty sharp. In addition to basic running and jumping, pressing an action button in the air gives Runmo a forward dive that gives a slight bit of extra height and some forward distance. On the ground while ducking, this move turns into a forward dash that can get through low ceiling passages.

Even with all the thematic deconstruction happening in Little Runmo, we never find out why Runmo has to traverse dangerous worlds. Presumably the evil king their deaths supports has set up some social pressure to convince his people to traverse spiky obstacle courses. Maybe the local rulers are in cahoots with him. BTW, it’s fun to say “cahoots.” Cahoots!

The game is divided into levels, but they aren’t clearly announced, and to a limited extent you can explore the areas as you wish, in a different order than as presented in the cartoon. The game world isn’t exactly as the cartoon presents it either, with the areas much larger, and containing a decent number of secrets to find! It’s usually worth it to poke around out of the way places if you can figure out how to get to them.

There’s a section with Mario-style timed alternating blocks, although here, if you’re inside a block when it appears, you just die.

The game starts out fairly chill, but gets pretty difficult. It doesn’t seem like an unfair level of difficulty, although it may take you a few plays to build up the skills to conquer it. Here is some advice to playing it:

  • If you haven’t seen the cartoon, you should know that the above ground area is only a small part of the game. The wide pit, the first one with the alternative spike wall over it, is the entrance to the rest of the game. Pikit’s message hints that that’s the way to go (press up to listen to it).
  • Unlike as seen in the original cartoon, you have to use the midair dive move to get past the pit, it’s too wide to cross with wall jumps alone.
  • Get used to hugging walls on the way down, to slow your descent. This can be used to scout out pits for secrets, to see if the scrolling continues.
  • If you press towards most walls but keep jumping, you can climb them easily. Get used to doing this all the time.
  • If a ceiling has a one block overhang, you can get around it with a jump off the wall and a dive back towards it.
  • Watch the cartoon, and think about ways to explore regions that the animated Runmo doesn’t go to.
  • There is at least one place where there are extra lives hidden off the top of the screen.
  • While running out of lives doesn’t erase your metaprogress, it just sends you back to level 1, the game does not save its state when you exit it. If you quit out and reload, you’ll be at the very beginning.
The Meatball Man is one of the funniest parts of the cartoon. It is possible to complete his room, but it’s optional in any case.

If you don’t care to see the game yourself, this 100% completion speedrun shows off the locations, although of course it doesn’t waste time talking to Pikit or exploring unnecessary places. There don’t seem to be any unnarrated longplays around yet, so, best to sharpen those skills if you want to experience it all.

Little Runmo: The Game (itch.io, $0, Windows & Linux)

Here is a secret room. What is this place? A possible reference to The Amazing Digital Circus?

Sundry Sunday: Very Short Pizza Tower Cartoon

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

This is a very short animation with a couple of Pizza Tower characters. It’s a mere triffle, and the joke’s pretty silly,but it’s spot on, of the game’s style, and in the appearance of an early 90s cartoon show, of the type that the game’s animation itself seeks to emulate. It’s gotten an absurd number of views, like nearly half a million, in six days. Now, maybe it will get a few more.

“Four feet! Get it? Get it??”

Pizza Tower Cartoon (Youtube, 25 seconds)

Sundry Sunday: The first episode of Saturday Supercade

This is a real rarity. Saturday Supercade has, to my knowledge, never been officially released on any media format. All of the tapes of this show date back to their original broadcasts in 1983-5. I’m sorry for the poor quality, but this is from a tape almost certainly recorded off of live television nearly 40 years ago.

The year 1983 was such a weird time in media history. Take for instance the movie Joysticks. A cheaply-made culture cash-in, essentially the Supervan of its decade, it was a teen sex comedy themed around arcades, and it could only have been released in 1983. In 1982 games were big, but it takes time for a movie to be made. In 1984, US arcades and consoles had crashed calamitously, and any projects in production would have been cancelled. Saturday Supercade also dates from 1983.

Saturday Supercade was a Saturday morning cartoon show that hosted a variety of different game characters and universes. By no means a classic of animation, there’s still a lot of interesting things about it. Donkey Kong gives Mario and Pauline their modern names (decided on around the time of Donkey Kong Jr’s arcade release), and Donkey Kong is voiced by legendary early TV children’s entertainer Soupy Sales.

Frogger is depicted by the show as a reporter for a swamp’s newspaper. Q*Bert is a student in a 50s-styled high school, and other characters (including a girl Q*Bert, “Q*Tee,” not seen in the game) are imagined as his friends and rivals. Donkey Kong Jr has the young ape searching for his father, while assisted by a greaser. Pitfall’s cartoon is not only the sole home-original game to be featured on the show, but also lent two of its characters, Pitfall Harry’s niece Rhonda and mountain lion pet Quickclaw, to cameo roles in the game’s sequel Pitfall II: Lost Caverns. Kangaroo and Space Ace were introduced in the show’s second season. Yes, somehow, it got a second season.

The Wikipedia page of the show notes that episodes of Space Ace were once shown late at night on Cartoon Network, and once in a while can be spotted between shows on Boomerang, while “The Best of Q*Bert” is available as a print-on-demand DVD from Amazon. Other than that, many episodes are lost outside of master reels held by whatever company owns Ruby-Spears’ output these days, which I expect is Warner Media. There’s tons of Saturday Morning shows that are lost; this one only survives to us in any form because classic video games have oddly persisted in this weird cultural cul-de-sac, the same one that made Wreck-It-Ralph an improbably hit for Disney.

So please, enjoy, or else, experience whatever substitute for enjoyment you can bring yourself to feel while watching an old old kids cartoon from the classic arcade era. Queasiness? Unease? Existential dread?

Sundry Sunday: Homestar Runner 2000 Halloween DLC!

It’s new Homestaw Runnew, and it’s vaguely game-welated, so hewe it iiis! You see, I did it in Homestar’s voice. As sorta-human embodiment of capitalization Strong Mad would say: I’M A REFERENCE!

It’s a cartoon from the early days of the site, before they had codified how their Halloween comics work-that is, it’s a Halloween-set story with every character wearing a costume that’s a delightfully unexpected pop-culture reference, and at the end they refer to the characters and Homestar humorously fails to understand what the others are dressed up as. With this special DLC upgrade, the characters have new costumes, and the gags are somewhat different! IT’S META!