…one great big pile of crap.

A commanding pig?

We got it all together now, gang! The Fonz, his dog he named Mr. Cool, and the good group. One flaky time machine, and… a future chick name o’ Cupcake.

Oh, now the gang got zapped into that time machine, and they’re like travellin’ through time! My my, ooh they do not dig where that machine is going, but they sure do hope to get back to 1957 Milwaukee!

Can you dig it.

Last week, I showed you what happened when Ruby-Spears made a cartoon based on Rubik’s Cube. When that show was aired, it actually shared a timeslot with another cartoon based on a huge fad-craze phenomenon of the time – a video game called Pac-Man.

The year is 1982. The world is going crazy over the arcade game phenomenon that is Pac-Man. Arcades are swarming with people who can’t get enough of the dot-eating, pill-popping, ghost-chasing, maze-traversing action. A phrase was coined to describe this rampant popularity: Pac-Man Fever. For something this popular, an animated series was inevitable, but Pac-Man is kind of an abstract game. The main character is a yellow sphere, and all we know about him is that he goes around a neon maze and eats dots, power pills and ghosts. Man, that’s not much to base a cartoon on. This is going to have to be a pretty creative interpretation.

Ok, so.. Pac-Man now lives in a fairyland world that looks like a slightly more spherically-themed version of Bedrock. And he has a wife, despite the fact that she was originally an unlicensed ROM hack. And also let’s throw a baby in there. Not Jr. Pac-Man, or even Baby Pac-Man, but the never-before-heard-of Pac-Baby. Great job, guys!

Also, let’s bring in Sue, Clyde’s renamed double from Ms. Pac Man. And let’s make up some humanoid villain who looks like Darth Vader with his helmet off, who is trying to get… not Pac-Man, but the power pills. Which actually seem to be pretty common in Pac-Land, so I don’t see what the problem is, or why the ghosts usually end up going after Pac-Man. Ok, that’s a lot of new stuff to expect kids to swallow, but at least now we’ve got this world set up and we don’t need to make up any more bullcrap.

Oh did I forget to mention that Pac-Man shaves, and he has a spherical dog, and also the ghosts have shape-shifting abilities, Pac-Man has teeth, and so on… The plots of each episode pile even more onto this growing compost heap, including episodes about travelling back in time and fighting pac-dragons, meeting Pacula, and Ms. Pac-Man being kidnapped (using a magic movie camera) and replaced by a bionic pac-woman.

But you know, since this is a blog about the random nonsense that happens in cartoons, all of this shouldn’t be any surprise, and it’s not. I’m more surprised that there doesn’t seem to be one shrinking or mind-swapping episode in the whole series (though I could be wrong). No, what I’m surprised about it that almost everything that was made up for this cartoon was then adopted by Namco into the official, canon Pac-Man mythos. They even made a video game based on the cartoon in 1984, called Pac-Land. It could be found in most arcades, standing there with nobody playing it.

Sure yeah, I know, they also made Street Fighter: The Game: The Movie: The Game and that’s not canon anything. But then in 1994, they made Pac-in-Time and Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures, both based (mostly) on the cartoon. And then there’s the whole series of “Pac-Man World” games, the latest being a kart racer in 2006. In fact, most Pac-Man games since 1984 seem to have incorporated aspects of this cartoon.

So although it seemed like a dismissive, careless and terribly loose adaptation, this cartoon is Pac-Man now. Did the writers at Hanna-Barbera realise the implications of what they were doing back in 1982? Or should Namco have just thought harder about what they were doing when they decided to adopt it?

Well you know, who cares. The real Pac-Man died in 1983 with the rest of the games of his generation. I don’t mind saying that this cartoon didn’t help.

One of the contributions that Joe Ruby and Ken Spears made to the world of cartoons was to redefine what could be done in the animated version of a live-action TV series. They showed that the boundaries could be pushed so far back that they even included all the usual improbable things that happen in cartoons all the time.

This bold, defiant move freed animation studios from the shackles of their live-action basis, such as consistent plots and characters, relevant situations, and the confining limitations of reality and common sense. In cartoons, anything can happen – no matter how improbable or irrelevant!

Many of you will remember a popular TV show from the mid-80s called Punky Brewster. This was a family sitcom drenched in morals and life lessons, about a young orphan adopted by a kindly old man. Like Diff’rent Strokes, except super-white and not actually funny.

What you might not remember is the short-lived animated series produced by Ruby-Spears. As you can see, they kept the plot almost entirely unchanged:

Having broken away from the restrictions that would normally apply to an animated spin-off, the writers of the show were finally free to settle back and play the standards. Including, of course, the obligatory shrinking episode.

Thanks, Ruby-Spears. We’ll never forget everything you’ve done.