TV / Movies DiC Video Game Cartoons That Never Were

DiC Entertainment was an old animation company founded in the seventies, famous for shows such as Inspector Gadget and The Real Ghost Busters. In the late 80s through the 90s they produces several shows based off of video game licenses, including: The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, The Legend of Zelda, Captain N: Game Master, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, Super Mario World, Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic the Hedgehog (often known as Sonic SatAM), Double Dragon and Sonic Underground. The quality of these series varied and was often quite debatable now but those who watched them as kids tend to have fond memories of these shows. However, there were also several other video game cartoons that DiC apparently planned to make at some point put ultimately scrapped during development. Specifically, promotional posters for four of these shows were sold at the estate auction of a former DiC employee. To my knowledge, nothing is known about these potential cartoons other than what is shown in the posters, but some information can be gathered from them. Notably, they all have a banner in the top-right corner advertising them as part of the "Super Mario Bros. Power Hour", which presumably was planned as a follow up to The Super Mario Bros. Super Show before TAoSMB3 became a thing, which would have included episodes of these series as part of an hour-long block, similar to how Super Show included episodes of The Legend of Zelda. (Source: Kotaku)

Spoiler: Double Dragon

You may have noticed that I already mentioned Double Dragon in the list of video game cartoons that DiC did make. You may have even seen the 26 episode series which ran from 1993-1994. If you have seen that series, then you can probably tell just from a glance that this poster is not for the Double Dragon cartoon they ended up making. This shows a series that would have been much more faithful to the source material than the final product turned into, which apparently involved the main characters dressing up in dragon-themed armor and wielding scimitars for some reason. Presumably DiC decided that a more street-level brawler probably wouldn't have caught on with kids, or at least that's what my guess would be for why they would veer so far off of the source material compared to what this poster shows.

Spoiler: California Games

I had never even heard of California Games before, but apparently it was a sports game released for the Apple II and Commodore 64 that included surfing, roller-skating, motocross, frisbee, half-pipe skateboarding and hackysack. The poster makes it look like the series would have been a beach-themed comedy series, but that's just about all I could tell you from this.

Spoiler: Castlevania

These monsters were definitely all in the original Castlevania game. Those kids with the flashlight definitely aren't Belmonts, though. It looks like this series probably would have featured a couple of normal kids stuck in the hunted castle known as Castlevania. How this would have related to Captain N, which featured Simon Belmont as a major character and saw several appearances from Castlevania itself and characters such as Dracula and Alucard, I couldn't tell you. I'm guessing this was pitched before Captain N was made and some ideas for this series likely made their way into Captain N.

Spoiler: Metroid

I've heard that one of the people in charge of Captain N had no idea who Samus was, which is why she never appeared in the show despite Mother Brain being the main antagonist. That excuse was already shaky, but the fact that this poster shows some random dude in Samus' armor somehow both supports and counters that claim. I'm also not really sure if that bug-eyed pink monster is supposed to be a Space Pirate or Ridley. While I'm really curious so see what they would have done with this show, I'm really, really glad we didn't end up a Metroid cartoon staring male Samus. That would have been awful.