04-19-2016, 01:55 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-19-2016, 09:29 PM by JadePharaoh.)
You don't need me to tell you here how much I love the original Megaman series. Back when I was a kid, I was hyped every time a new one came out, and I also remember looking over the Nintendo Power coverage on them a lot too. So you can imagine how ecstatic I was when I heard there was an animated series coming out based on the Blue Bomber. Megaman had previously been featured in Captain N: The Game Master, but the portrayal of Megaman himself and other characters from his series had some... creative liberties taken (same for most other franchises that showed up in Captain N). So I was excited to see what a series focused exclusively on the Megaman series would turn out. I kept close tabs on the date and time of the show's premiere and was sure to watch it on Saturday morning. Well, let's watch now!!
When I saw this back in 1994, I absolutely loved it. While I see it get mocked to hell and back nowadays, I still feel that it is way better and is more faithful to its source material than most other cartoons based on video games at the time, like Double Dragon and the Super Mario Bros. Super Show. It may not be the best either, but I consider it a guilty pleasure at the absolute worst.
First thing most people notice about the series is the character designs. While he looks a lot better than he did in Captain N, the Megaman in this series looks noticeably taller and older than he is in the games, and is hella ripped for a robot. The same can be said for most of the other robot masters that appear. There actually is a reason for this. See, when the show was first pitched, the characters looked almost exactly like they do in the games' original artwork. But the producers felt the anime art style wouldn't be popular in America (this was the early 90s, when anime was still a very niche market; it would be a few more years before DragonBall Z, Sailor Moon, and Pokemon would bring anime into the mainstream). So, they changed the character designs to look like something they felt would appeal more to American audiences; hence the bigger, more muscular characters ala Masters of the Universe. The original pitch is still floating about on the internet; check it out and shed a tear for how the series COULD have looked:
Anyway, back to the series at hand. Now that I think about it, one thing I find a little disappointing is the complete lack of music from the games. Other animated series like Super Mario Bros, Zelda, and Captain N did it, and it's not like the Megaman series had any shortage of excellent music to choose from. Aside from the main theme song which is a total ear worm, the rest of the music, while not terrible, it wasn't all that memorable either.
One of the most noteworthy things from the games was Megaman's ability to copy the robot masters' powers and use them himself. I was quite excited how they had incorporated them in this series as well. Though there were a couple of key differences. First, Megaman doesn't have to actually defeat the robot master first to copy the weapon; he just needs to touch them. You'd think the robot masters would learn eventually to keep as far away from him as possible, then, but no. Second, Megaman doesn't change color when using them, although that's understandable as that was likely a way for the player to quickly tell what weapon Megaman has equipped in the games. Also, the show seems to go back and forth on this, but the robot masters sometimes act as though Megaman has physically stolen their weapon by doing this, rather than just copy it.
Roll is quite an interesting character in this series. She not only looks completely different from her video game counterpart, but so is her character as a whole. In the games, she was mostly a background character and never contributed much, and the times she is more essential to the plot it's as a damsel-in-distress (MM10, MM2: The Power Fighters, Super Adventure Rockman; she only gets more kickass in side games like MM Powered Up, Marvel vs. Capcom, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom). Here, she gets perhaps the most character development out of anyone in the series. At the start, she is quite eager to prove herself as being every bit as capable as her brother, with him constantly telling her to go back to the kitchen. When she does get into the action, she ends up becoming The Load and has to be rescued by Megaman. As the series goes on, however, she evolves into a much more capable action girl that seems to hold her own just as well as Rock.
Some viewers may have been confused with Protoman being a villain in this series, serving as Dr. Wily's second-in-command. Some accused the writers of not being faithful to the series, only watching the intro to MM5 to give them the notion that Protoman is a bad guy. But, this can be more easily explained due to the simple fact that they wanted someone as similar to Megaman as possible as a villainous foil, and Protoman most closely fit that. Remember, this series was developed well before MM7 would introduce Bass. Also, Protoman is in a bit more antagonistic role in MM3 as well (although understandably, his overall role in the game is hard to understand as it's never talked about in the game or even in the manual). Interestingly, the first episode shows that Protoman is capable of copying robot master weapons as well, but he never does it again after this. It would have been kinda cool to see Protoman fight Megaman a couple of more times with a small arsenal of robot master weapons.
Rush functions primarily as the comic relief of the series. Unfortunately, it falls squarely down to the Jar-Jar Binks level of comic relief. He comes complete with a "dopey saxophone" leitmotif, and a large number of episodes are the kind that end with him doing something dumb and everyone laughing. To make him even worse, he speaks in a Scooby-Doo voice. Zoinks, indeed.
The first episode above incorporated all six robot masters from the first game, but all episodes after this would follow a "robot master(s) of the week" format (the episodes are purely episodic, with no real continuity or story arc between them). Due to the time frame these episodes were developed in, robot masters from Megaman 1-5 would see usage in the series before its cancellation. The only robot masters from those games that never showed up were Bubbleman and Flashman from MM2, Skullman from MM4, and Chargeman from MM5 (Napalmman appears in the intro, but only for a very brief instant). The exceptions would be Cutman and Gutsman, who serve as Wily's main enforcers; Cutman with his bad puns and Peter Lorre accent, and Gutsman with his dumb muscle schtick.
Overall I felt the voice work was good, for the main cast anyway.
Megaman - Ian James Corlett
Roll - Robyn Ross
Dr. Light - Jim Byrnes
Dr. Wily - Scott McNeil
Protoman - Scott McNeil
Cutman - Terry Klassan
Gutsman - Garry Chalk
I find the casting hilarious in hindsight as Ian Corlett and Scott McNeil would go on to voice Goku and Piccolo respectively in the Ocean dub of DragonBall Z. Also, Corlett voiced Dr. Wily in the Captain N series. The voices for some of the less-recurring robot masters can run anywhere from really awesome (Pharaohman, Crystalman) to extremely grating (Needleman, Diveman). This is mostly due to the above voice actors also playing these parts as well, with varying results.
So, back to the first episode shown above, a few of my own observations about it in particular:
- Dr. Light has a friendly Met (ironically, the only Met in this series) working for him, named Dot or Doc or DOS (I never fully understood which it's supposed to be). It disappears after this episode and is never seen again. Odd, considering Mets are pretty much the Mascot Mook of this series.
- A guy says at one point, "It's all Dr. Light's fault; if he never invented robots, none of this would have ever happened!" I wondered at the time if this was setting up a story arc where Dr. Light would indeed be blamed for Dr. Wily's insurrection, but given how all future episodes would be episodic with no coherent story arc, nothing ever came from that.
- Protoman's origins are a little sketchy. During the flashback, Dr. Light and Dr. Wily are working on a robot that looks like a smaller Protoman, but he's clearly not Protoman since Wily doesn't leave the lab with him and he's shown working on the actual Protoman later. If Wily built Protoman himself, are he and Megaman actually brothers? Protoman says "We were built from the same plans", but it seemed pretty explicit that the original plans (the ones presumably used to build Protoman) were flawed and Dr. Light modified them when he built Rock. In addition, there's a line in a later episode that muddles this issue up even more...
- Dr. Wily gives an impressive motive rant as he's working on Protoman. Unfortunately, nothing in it is brought up again after this episode as Wily moves on to pretty stock take-over-the-world-for-the-evulz plots.
- I don't recall "Robot's cannot lie" being one of Asimov's rules of robotics...