Who signed off on that one?

If a new animated series based on a game is being made right now, it's treated like a major multimedia event. Just look at recent cases like Sonic Boom and Pac-Man: The Ghostly Adventures. These shows are announced years in advance, get tie-in games released alongside 🎃their premieres, and have dozens of corporate folks planning every aspect of it, right down to the laces on Sonic's shoes. That's a far cry from the slapdash ex🌌ecution in some ancient Saturday morning cartoons.

Back in the '80s and '90s, it seemed like any halfway decent animation house could score the cartoon rights to series as big as Mario and Sonic, with little effort or care for the characters' histories. And kids at the time overlooked so many of these screwups, mostly because they didn't know any better in the years before decent gaming toons like Pokemon showed up. Now, though, with the old style cartoons properly , it's painfully clear just how much these shows missed the mark. Read🎶 on to see some of the most damning inaccuracies ever televised...

Super Mario Bros. Super Show

Original concept: Two brotherly plumbers travel the Mushroom Kingdom to free Princess Pe😼ach andꦯ the Toadstool people from the evil King Koopa.

can't make up for that.

Pac-Man

Original concept: A circular man eats pellets and finds love w💫hile avoiding (and later consuming🧜) deadly ghosts.

The execution: Pac-Man's plot is so thin that it's impossible to really do much with it, so animation studio Hanna-Barbera decided to mash together The Flintstones and The Smurfs, sprinkling some Popeye on top for good measure. This Pac-𝐆Man is a family man, married to Pepper Pac-Man and raising Pac-Baby ( that's maybe not all that relatable to kindergarteners). The ghosts continually pester the workaday slob in their attempts to steal Power Pellets (hardly their MO in the game), all under the orders of Darth Vader wannabe Mezmaron. It's all a weird mix of overly high stakes and mundane family life. The confusing show reaches its apex of oddity when Pac-Man saves X-ma𝔍s by feeding Rudolph and the other reindeer Power Pellets. Also, British viewers should know that Pepper's nickname for her husband (which rhymes with "lackey") has unfortunate and wholly unintended similarities to a horrible racist slur.

The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog

Original concept: A coꩲol, incredibly fast hedgehog and his fox friend✤ battle a mad scientist, destroying thousands of robots along the way.

The execution: This goofball showꦰ is definitely aimed at Sonic's younger fans, but it start🐻s out close enough to the source by making the core cast Sonic, Tails, and Dr. Robotnik. But Robotnik is reimagined as a hapless buffoon, Tails as a naive toddler, and Sonic as a chili-dog-obsessed wiseguy that sounds suspiciously similar to Steve Urkel (because, well, it IS Steve Urkel). Things get even worse when evil sidekicks Scratch, Grounder, and Coconuts show up as "funny" robots that have some of the most annoying voices in animation history. It adds up to a mix of bad writing and animation that's less "Gotta Go Fast," and more "Snorks but with worse production values." By the time you reach Sonic's hacky, at every episode's climax, the formerly cutting-edge mascot feels about as hip as a trip to the dentist.

Q*Bert

Original concept: A spherical, orange creature hops from one cube to 🍰another while avoiding snakes and trolls🦩.

The execution: Q*Bert feels like a game made by drug-addled college students, but even the most chemically impaired wouldn't reimagine it as a . Q*Bert and his nasal-voiced friends Q*Tee, Q*Bit, and Q*Ball all attend Q*Berg High, in a light teen comedy that tests the viewer's ability to stomach Q-related puns. Episodes cover everything from surfing contests and school plays, to celebrating Thanksgi꧋ving and attending sock hops; you know, all the 🦩things you expect Q*Bert to do when not hopping on cubes. Q*Bert will occasionally speak in his trademark nonsensical symbols, but those brief shoutouts to the arcade title are very limited. The producers are more interested in having the cast drive around town in their souped-up hot rod.

Donkey Kong Junior

Original concept: A young ape battl𓆏es against a mustachioed man to f🥂ree his imprisoned father.

The execution: This cartoon is accurate for about 11 seconds... then it's all downhill from there. It starts with Junior saddened by his father's absence and ready to begin his search for Donkey Kong, which is exactly when Bones, a leather jacketed greaser, offers to help. The two then hop on Bones' motorcycle (apparently a baby gorilla can drive), and start a cross-country road trip where they do a terrible job looking for DK. Additionally, Junior is like a more annoyi𒁏ng version of Scrappy Doo, usually investigating and arguing with ventriloquists instead of climbing vines and dodging crocodiles. And because the show only lasted 13 episodes, Junior and Bones never get close to finding Donkey Kong. Junior would've been better off ditching that Fonzie ripoff the ꧃moment he met him.

Frogger

Original concept: A frog must cross the road to reach a lily pad.

The execution: The car troubles of one amphibian can barely fill two minutes of gameplay, so Frogger is recast as an intrepid reporter out to expose the ills of society. He's assisted by a turtle named Shelly and Fann🐠y Frog, another bit of writing that proves American animators aren't all that inform♕ed about British slang. It's noble of Frogger to become a muckraking journalist, though he's often assigned to investigate things like a "," which I don't think has earned anyone a Pulitzer Prize (yet). The cartoon did occasionally have Frogger get crushed by an alligator, but if that's all you needed to be accurate, then this classic is the most accurate TV recreation the game ever received.

The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3

Original concept: Mario and Luigi fend off King Koopa and his seven Koopalings from conquering The Mushroom Kingdom, ultimately freeing Princes🍌s Peach fromꦬ Koopa's captivity.

The execution: Based on , the show gets off to a pretty good start, staying true to the third Mario game--it even has Kuribo's Shoe! It's full of the game's sound effects, settings, enemies, and 🐟all seven of the Koopalings are present, though they all have different names for some reason. Adventures is definitely closer to its roots than Super Show, but the whole thing breaks down once celebrities get involved. The oppressively '90s singers , playing a concert the whole gang attends. Not only is it inconceivable that Princess Peach would actually pay money to see Milli Vanilli, but the episode had t𝔉he poor timing of airing days before the two men were revealed to be lip-syncing frauds. It's a destructive dose of reality that basically ruins the entire series in retrospect.

Captain N and the Gamemasters

Original concept: The stars of Mega Man, Kid Icarus, Castlevania, and more team up with a▨ Nintendo superfan to ꦯsave the video game world.

The execution: If you're looking for the series that will provide the most inaccuracies per minute, consider Captain N the undisputed leader in liberty-taking media. This type of mascot team-up would be a huge deal today, but back then it was merely a platform to misunderstand almost every popular NES game of the era. Simon Belmont is a vapid pretty boy, Pit is an unintelligible wuss, Mega Man is green, and every new world they visit is another chance to screw up some other series. The bad guys take the misinterpretations to Dada-esque levels by re-envisioning Metroid's Mother Brain, the silent alien cerebellum, as Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors. Seriously, the animators , R&B s💮inger Levi Stubbs, then painted lipstick and eyeshadow on Samus' most dangerous enemy to make her the evil schemer of the show with her incredibly obscure cohorts Eggplant Wizard and King Hippo. And don't even get me started on the .

The bad old days

So, after seeing all those crimes of cartoons past, it makes thღe Sonic Boom redesigns seem pretty reasonable, huh? If I missed any other exceptionally bizarre gaming recreations, tell me all about them in the comments. I will sacrifice a surprising amount of time to watch more terrible cartoons.

Want more melding of games and animation? Check out the 1🥃5 esoteric game-to-anime adaptations worth discovering and 8 weird things you forgot about t♏he Pokemon animated series.