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The Legend of Zelda
1989 · TV series · 1 season
The Legend of Zelda is based on the Nintendo game of the same name. Link, the hero of Hyrule, along with Princess Zelda protect the Triforce of Wisdom from the evil forces of Ganon.
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3 comments on Hacker News
> Sometimes tight control over IP is a good thing.
Nintendo learned this the hard way in the early 90s with the Super Mario Bros movie. I guess The Legend of Zelda wasn't cartoon wasn't enough to cause a stir.
If you're interested in a wild background story about IP, go watch Secret Galaxy's video on Captain N The Game master. It's fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-81eImgppDY
Having lived through the 80's, and being the target audience for this Mario/Zeldo show, I reject most of your comments.
Yuppies, or Boomers in their prime as working office class people, have nothing to do with this. Perhaps, other than being parents.
This show was shown during the cartoon time during each day, usually either being 6-8:30a, or 2:30p-5p. This when Mario played. On Fridays it was Zelda. That's when this abomination played (Mario was also pretty terrible in its own right). And note, unless one of your parents were stay-at-home (usually the woman in those days), your parents weren't watching it. You, the kid, was. And likely unsupervised. After all, it's a kids show during the cartoon block. "How bad could it be?"
And with the "kids not getting the references", you do not teach boys that cat-calling is good. Nor do you teach that demanding "affection" from women is good. You know you have problems when the Beavis and Butthead version is more accurate and true to what's really being said. We all know B&B is wrong, and it's funny because of that. When we're comparing official "Looking good princess, 'specially from this angle", versus Beavis' "Nice tits" , they're functionally the same thing. And it wasn't an innunendo in either case.
https://www.denofgeek.com/games/the-legend-of-zelda-animated-series-a-very-strange-history/ Puts it better than what I've said...
> Then, of course, there is the characterization of Link, which is a rather mixed bag. To their credit, the writers were successful in imbuing Link with a distinct, memorable character. Unfortunately, that character was appalling. I’m sure the writers were going for some kind of “lovable scamp” vibe with him, but he really just came off as a whiny, obnoxious, barely competent creep with a catchphrase I can only imagine was written into his character bio in the series bible, because it is used at least once per episode. At least. However, despite the fact that this irritating catchphrase that no one ever thought was charming or funny has become an indelible part of this franchise, it is not the worst thing about the cartoon’s Link. I, for one, am far more bothered by all the sexual harassment.
> And there is a lot of it. A LOT. Link is a straight up sexist creeper. He makes lewd comments at Zelda about her cleavage, harasses her for a kiss, treating her affection like some kind of commodity that he’s owed for his service (to be fair, she’s equally horrible by referring to it as a reward at the end of one episode), asks her to kiss him twice after she initially refuses, and even goes so far as to coerce her by physically preventing her from getting away from him until she gives him what he wants. And that’s just in the first episode.
"The Legend of Beavis": Beavis and Butthead audio dubbed onto an episode of The Legend of Zelda cartoon:
https://archive.org/details/the-legend-of-beavis