Street Fighter: The Animated Series

As much as I hated the movie that this series follows I can at least says that Zangief was amusing. The animated series is quite possibly one of the worst things ever produced. The animation is quite often inconsistent, although it does stay consistently bad. The shape of a characters face is even capable of drastically changing in the same shot. The script and voice acting also leave something to be desired since most of the cast seems about as talented as the cast of a third grade drama play. Characters like Cammy and DJ are so forced into stereotypes of their nationalities that episodes containing them are almost physically painful to watch, not that the series isn't painful on a regular basis anyway. Episode plots seem to strive to reach new levels of lame with every turn and are so full of plot holes it amazes me they had time to show commercials. Truthfully, it amazes me anyone wold pay to advertise during the show. In addition to being a bad series it is an even worse adaptation of Street Fighter. Many of the characters maintain the failed adaptations from the movie. Examples include Ken and Ryu being idiot con men (even though Ken is supposed to be rich), Blanka being Guiles friend Charlie, and Chun Li being a reporter. It takes talent to take something as bad as the movie and make it worse.

Street Fighter: The Animated Series had a very rocky start. It was based off of the Street Fighter film, one of the biggest examples of miscasting and plot contriving of the 90's, and part of a trend of increasingly bad video game to movie conversion given to hack directors. Hopes for a show like this were reasonably low. And the first season of this show gave no reason for anyone to think any differently. To be blunt, it was GI Joe with Street Fighter characters shoehorned in, and was indistinguishable from the dozens of other cartoons out at the time. Showing how derivative the American animation scene had become, it tried to take cues from both Joe and the animated X-Men series, failing on both counts. Poorly plotted, animated, the first season was not faithful to the true source material at all.

However, the second season managed to turn things around a good deal. Someone must have seen the incredibly animated Street Fighter 2 anime or watched the II V TV series, because by the time the second season came around, the producers hired a more expensive animation studio for better artwork, went away from stand-alone episodes to create something of an ongoing plot, and most importantly, distanced itself from the live-action film by adding characters from the Street Fighter Alpha and Final Fight games and developing the current roster of characters. True, hardcore Street Fighter fan-boys might have been disappointed by the absence of Sakura from Alpha 2, and certain problems with the first season, such as the tendency to serverly overuse the American characters continued (For instance, in the episode with Akuma, the American born Ken is the one to best him when nearly all other media suggests Ken can't even touch Akuma), but the show did a rather admirable job of introducing the new characters they did use.

So first season bad, second season good. That said, the anime versions of Street Fighter far exceed this effort in almost every way.

When I was a kid, I used to hate the "Street Fighter" cartoon. Being a big fan of the games, and the anime adaptations (Both the movie and the television show) I was very disappointed with the G.I. Joe treatment that this series received due the influence of the awful (but hilarious) live action movie in which this was inspired.

However, with the years, I started to appreciate this series, seeing it as one of the funniest unintentional comedies ever made.I mean, while this series is indeed pretty bad (With ridiculous plots, awful animation, an awkward character design and cheesy voice acting) it does have high amounts of entertainment value, being one of the most hilarious things that I've ever watched in my entire life.

Everything in this cartoon was so cheesy and over-the-top. And that's why it is so funny to watch.

One word sums up this 1995 TV series based on the popular Street fighter game by Capcom and the 1994 Street Fighter movie. That word is "inconsistent".

Quality of writing and animation varies greatly between seasons and even between episodes. Season 2 can be easily regarded as immensely superior to season 1(a trend that many 90s animated series seem to follow, like Fantastic four or Iron man)

Season 1 generally follows in the footsteps of the 1994 movie. Cheesy, self contained episodic stories. Some episodes, especially the more character centric episodes are quite good and help a lot with the character development. But some episodes come across as terrible toy advertisements. Sometimes characters are thrown in just to showcase their powers and the scripting at points is terrible with juvenile humor and cheesy dialogue. The animation in season 1 is mediocre. The character designs are nice, more realistic than the designs in the game or the Japanese manga. But choppy animation, simplistic art and static camera angles with little attention to detail lends to a very low budget look for majority of the episodes in season 1.

Season 2 saw a huge improvement in the show. Starting from the episode "The Hammer Strikes", one can tell the the overall tone of the second season is generally a lot more serious than the first. The episodes are still self contained but have an underlying storyline to tie everything up. Character subplots are carried on and developed nicely as the series goes along such as Blanka's conflict with the beast within, Cammy's mysterious past and Guile's wavering confidence in his leadership of the team. Animation in season is also taken up a huge notch. The animation is smoother and more dynamic utilizing a good mix of close-ups, full body pans and kinetic framing of shots to give the show a very strong, almost movie-style look. Some episodes are even on par with the quality in the Japanese Street Fighter anime movie. With the improvement in animation, the art detail takes a jump too. The blacks are heavy and body contours are sharper, all adding to the enjoyment.

A small side note here. The portrayal of the "special powers" like Guile's Sonic Boom or Ryu's hadouken in this series is possibly the most true to the game ever. In the game, a single Hadouken can be fired multiple times and just knocks an opponent down. It does not destroy require great strain on Ryu, nor does a single blast take down a building(as portrayed in other adaptations of Street fighter).

So overall, this series was a noble effort, possibly one of the better animated series based on a game. Shaky at first but finally showed improvement. The characters were easy to relate to, the animation and writing were enjoyable in the end. Personally, i recommend just watching the first episode, then skipping to episode 14 onward.

I give it 7 out of 10 for a good effort, and in keeping true to the spirit of the game it is based on. Not perfect, but not bad either.

I've gotta be honest here - even if I only watched CLIPS of the series on YouTube, I still died of laughter at how good this laughably bad series is. With the first season airing a year before Alpha 2 hit shelves for the kids of the 1990s to play on their home gaming consoles, this takes place after the live action movie released in '94. The main cast stays true to the movie, of course, but then you've got the guest characters. If you've read the 2007 manga prelude to Alpha 2, yeah - Sakura's definitely true to the lore & the games here. So accurate in fact that she can make Guile obtain an animation error just by throwing him.

Guile: "Look... I understand how you must feel, kid, but we can't bring you along on a dangerous mission like this." Sakura: *throws Guile so hard on to the ground the animators forgot how to draw his head*

It also spawned some memorable memes (Bison's well known "Yes!"), and listen... if you're calling this bad, let me just remind you that there are worse shows & movies out there.

Bison: "Well done, Balrog!"