SATURDAY
SUPERCADE
MAIN
CAST:
By the time the 1980s rolled around,
the American video game market was booming. Arcades were experiencing a Golden
Age with rapid advancement in technology and growing cultural impact
beginning with the release of Space Invaders in
1978. Likewise, home consoles were entering their second
generation thanks to the affordability of new microprocessor technology,
with the Atari 2600
leading the charge. Both resulted in a combined revenue of $11.8 billion for
the video game industry by 1982.
 |
| Hanging out at the arcade. |
Television and studio executives
were not ones to let a popular trend go by without finding a way to capitalize
on it. ABC and Hanna-Barbera struck
first, adapting the highly successful arcade game Pac-Man into
a hit animated series. TBS was next with a
game show that utilized arcade games, Starcade. CBS, looking to compete, decided to hedge their
bets by not just licensing one hit game, but several from both the
arcades and home consoles.
 |
| The stars of Supercade: Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Q*bert, Pitfall Harry and Frogger. |
Among the chosen properties was the
game that saved Nintendo of
America from bankruptcy, Donkey
Kong, and its sequel, Donkey
Kong Jr.; Gottlieb’s
most successful game, Q*bert; Konami’s
hit Frogger;
and Activision’s home console smash Pitfall!
These five entries were combined under the banner Saturday Supercade, where
they would air four segments over the course of an hour every Saturday (Q*bert
and Pitfall! would alternate weeks). Naturally, as video games at
the time were a bit limited in their story and presentation, some liberties
were taken in adapting them for the small screen; such as making Frogger (Bob
Sarlatte) an investigative reporter or setting Q*bert in a pastiche of
the 1950s in a town dominated by cube shapes.
 |
| Character models for Donkey Kong's Pauline and Mario. |
Saturday Supercade debuted on
CBS on September 17, 1983. The series was produced by former Hanna-Barbera
employees Joe Ruby and Ken Spears
through their company, Ruby-Spears
Productions. Despite sharing screen time in the intro and during commercial
bumpers, and that both Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. were set
in the same universe, none of the shows or characters crossed over or
interacted with each other. Jack
Enyart, Gary Greenfield,
Gordon Kent and Michael Maurer served as story
editors, while Haim Saban and Shuky Levi composed the series’
theme. Dean Elliott handled
the rest of the series’ music.
 |
| Article published during Atari's decline. |
The
other factor was that during the show’s production, the video game industry was
hit by the crash
of 1983: too many consoles, too much product of questionable quality
through the establishment of third-party publishers, plus the rise of the home
computer meant that there was a lot more product than consumers. Arcades fared
no better as there really hadn’t been any major innovation in game design and
they were blamed instances of delinquency in their vicinity. Video games had
lost their luster for Americans and wouldn’t begin to rebound until Nintendo imported their revamped Famicom as
the Nintendo
Entertainment System in 1985. The console wars began anew when Sega entered the fray, challenging the 8-bit
Nintendo console with its high-speed 16-bit Genesis. With this new
era in gaming came new attempts to adapt them for the screen, but those are
stories told in their own entries.
 |
| A revived console war meant a new lease on life for video games--and new shows based on them. |
Because Sony owned Q*bert through Columbia Pictures’ previous ownership of Gottlieb, it remains the only entry in Supercade to have seen a home video release. They released The Best of Q*bert in 2015 to coincide with the release of their film Pixels, which featured the character. Warner Archive announced via their Facebook page in 2010 that plans were underway to release Supercade to DVD, but because of rights issues with the various game properties the project needed extensive research before it could happen. Segments from Space Ace have appeared as filler between programs on Boomerang and Toonami, but otherwise the various segments have only become viewable through recorded uploads on sites like YouTube.
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