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Film and TV show content based on video games tend to find themselves at the bottom of the drug mart DVD bin. Or, more often than not, canceled and slammed by critics and audience members alike. In short, they very rarely work. One movie that was based on a video game even lost $100 million at the box office. So, it's no wonder producers are trepidacious about adapting them.
Yet, there are a few video game adaptions that are actually good. Whether 1989's The Legend Of Zelda animated series falls into that camp is totally up to the eye of the beholder. Although, its cult-like fanbase seems to think so. To be fair, The Legend of Zelda animated series only lasted for one season, so it's hard to know what its legacy truly is. One thing is certain, the contents of the series greatly differed from the far more violent video game. Here's whether or not the strict censorship rules ended up contributing to its cancelation.
The Origin Of The Legend Of Zelda Animated Series
During a fantastic oral history of The Legend Of Zelda animated series by Polygon, the creators of the show revealed that the series was really just meant as an add-on for the far more successful Super Mario Bros. Super Show. The hour-long program featured a number of mini-series based on other Nintendo games. It was also Nintendo's way of bringing more attention to their new game, Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link.
"The project originated as a concept by [writer/producer Andy Heyward as Super Mario Bros. Power Hour, a one-hour-long animation block that would have featured series based on a number of intellectual properties," the story editor and writer of the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, Reed Shelly, explained to Polygon.
The Legend of Zelda animated series was "tacked-on" to The Super Mario series and therefore was never able to really grow legs of its own.
"It really should have been a stand-alone show. It was very limiting for what the writers could do," writer Phil Harnage admitted to Polygon. "I worked on the bible and wrote a couple of episodes. When you write the bible, you hand it off to somebody else, but occasionally you get to write a script. That’s the fun part. It was a fun show to write for because of the tension between Link and the princess. We modeled it after Moonlighting. We tried to capture that, and I think we did. Maybe over the top a little bit, but that’s what we were shooting for. We could have come up with a lot more shows. That was the sad part, that we only got to do one season."
The series, which focused on Link and Zelda, as well as expanded roles for lesser video game characters, offered a certain level of freedom.
"We very much made it up as we went along," writer Bob Forward explained to Polygon. "The other nice thing was that everybody was so concentrated on the Mario brothers that they completely left us alone."
But since The Legend Of Zelda was a children's show, there were a number of notable restrictions that writers had to consider.
Was The Legend Of Zelda Animated Series Canceled Due To Censorship?
One of the biggest creative hurdles the writers of The Legend of Zelda had to clear was creating a show that abided by censorship rules. The video game features a lot of violence, including sword fighting. But an animated kid's show couldn't show the same graphic content. Characters couldn't meet their end and Link couldn't use his famous sword in traditional ways. Therefore, the writers made his sword expel magic blasts.
"Magic brings a whole different ambiance to a cartoon because it’s something you can do that’s not repeatable by kids," Writer Phil Harnage said to Polygon. "You can shoot a lightning bolt and turn someone into toast. And the toast gets up and walks away. You just have to be careful — you can’t do everything you want to do. You can’t do anything that could be copied by a child. You don’t want kids sword fighting."
"Link’s sword could fire like a ranged weapon. Actually hitting people with swords was questionable. It wasn’t something they wanted to do back then. It was easier to just shoot zaps from the sword. We also had to establish that nobody was dying, so there was the jar of evil or something, where everyone hit by zaps were sent to and got put into storage for a while. We had to downplay a lot of things." Bob Forward.
While the creative limitations were certainly problematic, it doesn't appear to be the reason why the show was canceled. According to Polygon and Slash Film, the cancelation of The Legend of Zelda animated series was due to the Mario Bros. show ending.
"It was tied to it, and they didn’t want to renew The Mario Bros., and Zelda got shuffled off," writer Phul Harnage claimed. "Everybody wishes that Link and Zelda had gone on to bigger and better things [with the TV show], but they didn’t. You have these regrets about every show you do. Sometimes you wish you could have done more, that you could do more, but there were certain things you had to do to please the network."
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