Street Fighter: The Animated Series

In the mid 90s, USA created a Street Fighter series that followed some aspects of the 1994 film and mainly attempted to keep it close to the source material.

In the show, Guile leads a task force of Street Fighters to stop global terrorism, usually, M. Bison's Shadaloo. Some of the changes of the movie (Balrog a good guy and Dee Jay a bad guy) were corrected to the original storyline, special moves were more prominently featured and characters like Akuma and Feilong, who were left out of the movie featured in the show.

Other movie changes/additions like Chunli being a reporter, Zangief aligned with Shadaloo and the existence of movie character, Sawada were kept. This led to a pretty decent vibe to the show.

In addition, characters from other Capcom games were featured most notably the Street Fighter Alpha and Final Fight series.

When I was a teenager I enjoyed this show because of the action-packed nature of the show, which was carried over from the video game it's based on. I give Street Fighter a perfect 10/10.

Not only did the live action movie suck, but this crappy cartoon sucked even worse.

Possible the worst version of Street Fighter ever. The Anime followed the game much closer.

Definitely crap not worth watching if you're a true fan.

To start off we have crappy character designs, and even worse plot lines. It's no wonder this show went off the air so quickly. It's much worse than the Street Fighter II V series, which was a total disappointment and left us with more questions then answers. Thank god it will probably never see a DVD release.

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.

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.

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.