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

May 22nd is the launch date of the remarkably anticipated Bubsy 4D, the most looked-forward-to Bubsy game since, well, since Bubsy 1. The franchise has been on a steady downward slope since the SNES/Genesis original, so it’s nice to see the character do good for a change, unlike literally every other original take the character had.

The original Bubsy had instant deaths, leaps of faith and gameplay so frustrating that the nine lives Bubsy started with seemed insufficient. Its designers gave Bubsy Sonic-style speed but without his spin attack. Bubsy’s only means of attack was to jump on enemies but which were often off the screen when descending from jumps. I tried playing a bit of the original Bubsy a couple of weeks ago and it turns out the game was worse than I remembered.

Bubsy wasn’t entirely a failure in the marketplace so he got four sequels, not counting the one happening later this month. One was so terrible that it became a meme.

It was on the strength of that questionable success that Bubsy got a pilot for his own cartoon show. So let’s take a moment, or 28 minutes, to look back on it: the Bubsy that once was and could have been.

It was a time when lots of properties were getting one-episode days in the sun in the hopes of landing a series on Saturday mornings. They tried it with Battletoads and it failed a deserved failure. They tried it with Earthworm Jim and succeeded to the degree that it went to series, with an effort that many agree was pretty okay! Now it was Bubsy’s turn. What could possibly go wrong?

This, this is what could go wrong. With original commercials too.

I don’t want to heap too much scorn on the back of a 30-year-old pilot for a failed cartoon show. Its flaws now should be more than evident. Jokes are fired off much too quickly and have no room to breathe, and the sound design is confusing and hyperactive. Compare the Bubsy But lots of shows had problems like those. Earthworm Jim among them, but strong writing saved it. Compare either show to some classic Looney Tunes to get a sense of how far cartoons had fallen. No one expected SatMorn cartoons to measure up to the lushness of the Termite Terrace animators, but they could have slowed themselves down and had more faith in their gags.

By that point the writing was already on the wall for Saturday morning. A decades-long television tradition was on the way out, hurried on its way by cable channels that devoted themselves to showing cartoons all the time instead of just once a week. But at least it was allowed to linger a bit; a Saturday morning Bubsy show could have just killed it outright.

rodneylives