What Went Wrong?

About This Column::

Good ideas, good qualities...BAD flaws; that's the trouble with many promising entertainment products. Every once in a while there's that one product (movie, television, video, or game) which had it all --concept, sound, visuals-- yet fell like a rock because of a few grating mistakes. Techtite's "What Went Wrong?" commentary examines such titles.

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Earlier What Went Wrong Columns :

---Trespasser (PC)

---Quantum Leap (TV)

---Quest for Glory 3: Wages of War

---Living Dolls (TV)

---3Dfx (!!!)

---Phantasmagoria

---Roswell (TV)

---Mork & Mindy (TV)

---Electra-Woman & Dyna-Girl (2001, TV)

---Dreamcast (Video Game System, Sega)

---3DO (game system, 1993-1996)

---Atari's Biggest Flops: ET, Pac-Man (Atari 2600)

---Father of the Pride

---Spellcasting 301

---"Enterprise" (TV)

---Big Brother 6 (TV)

---The Amazing Race: Family Edition!

---Leisure Suit Larry Magna Cum Laude

---He-Man's "Masters of the Universe (the movie)

For the current WWWrong page, click here.

The entertainment product discussed this month is:

While there have been many video game characters made into children's cartoons, it's intriguing how few shows have tried the obvious: a series about video game characters themselves, living everyday lives, yet in a video game world. The arguably best attempt at such a series, is the ironically titled Game Over. By "ironically titled," I mean that it lasted five episodes. What makes this series' failure so surprising, however, is how it seemed to have it all: a great premise, great potential, and a strong target audience. What Went Wrong?

First, as always, let's cover the positives:

What Went Right?  Love or hate video games, it's fascinating how much of a part of pop culture they have become, in relatively little time. Game Over would salute&parody the effect these video games have had on everyday life. What made this idea so interesting, however, is how this was a family in a video game. It's one thing to get kids to play outside when they're busy playing games, but what if the outside world was a video game? How hard would it be to get kids to the dinner table, when they are busy playing with Pac-Man, Mario, and Sonic, who are all real people? That sitcom premise sounds very interesting.

Okay; so this series wasn't exactly like that; we'll get to that soon enough. However, if there was one thing this series did have, it was potential. Imagine a world filled with not one, not two, but "all" popular video game icons. Even if they could not get the license to show an exact character as-is, they could still salute them, and when and where they did would've been cool. All plumbers could sound like Super Mario. Back yards could be ransacked by speedy hedgehogs that love collecting anything that looks like a "ring." The local pub could have Parappa the Rapper as the musical guest. A wanted poster could have Sly Cooper on it. A TV news report would be of Alexis Sinclaire. The list of potential game cameos goes on and on. Note I said "potential" again. We'll get to that later. Honest.

Yet there's no dodging the issue: "potential" means very little if that potential wasn't reached. So; what did the series offer? Well, in five episode...not much, though I will praise one thing: the humor was very daring. In the premiere, a "Conker"-style video game character drills a hole into the shower of a Lara Croft style of character, to get a peek at her butt. It sounds crude but it's actually pretty funny, like the humor in most modern cartoon shows. This series often had the humor of South Park, albeit with computer animated graphics. Count me in.

I must also praise this show's inspiration in publicity stunts. It may sound rather obvious that a game about video games had its own "video game." Yet here's where this promotional idea shines: it was a real game, and...it was free. Game Over in Machinimation may be only one level, but it stars none other than Raquel Smashenburn herself, in a Tomb Raider style quest that was graphically stunning in 2004, thanks to the Quake 3 game engine. Did we mention it was free? If you ever catch out this series on DVD, I suggest you go to File Planet or the equivalent, and download this free game, which may be short, but no joke intended, is more than worth the price, and your time. Check it out.

It deserves saying, as the perfect conclusion to What Went Right (and the perfect pick-me-up, prior to What Went Wrong!), that the complete series DVD is more than worth checking out, even at six episodes. Although at least one episode is just plain awful (Into the Woods), half of them are cool (Basic Win-Stincts, Alice and the C.A.T.S., Monkey Dearest), and the sixth episode was never aired on TV. Series creator Dave Goetsch gives a few anecdotes in the included DVD booklet, and his prose is interesting to read, even if surprisingly optimistic. By "optimistic," we mean: UPN bought only six episodes, and aired five. As for why the show failed, Goetsch jests: "Maybe too many people were playing video games instead of watching television." Funny, though sincerely I doubt that's What Went Wrong...so what did?

What Went Wrong? Goetsch does offer one detail behind the scenes, that if you think about it, was a big hurdle. Everyone busy making the series felt they were "too busy" to play video games. While this would make sense anywhere else, the theme of this series was video gaming. You'd think a video game sitcom would be written and directed by diehard gamers, one and all. In this case, they felt one "video game intern" was all they needed. As Goetsch explains:

"Fisch [their video game intern] arrived promptly at 10 AM every morning and dutifully played all the video games we asked him to play, putting on exhibitions for the producers at our request...Soon we were all playing HALO with the storyboard artists late into the night. Everyone...tried once a day to break the ever-escalating office high score of TETRIS on our old school Nintendo 64..."

What's wrong with this picture? For one: neither game mentioned would have led to good sitcom plots. Tetris is a classic, but it's just a bunch of stacked blocks. As for Halo; it's a game about a soldier fighting parasitic alien life forms. The idea was to find story ideas for a sitcom, and these two games are, without a doubt, the most humorless games you could play. Seeing how humor is what a sitcom needs most, this wasn't good.

Not that we're saying Fisch was a bad intern, because we never met the guy. It's not like he was hired to write the scripts. In fact; the writers for Game Over could've easily met Fisch halfway. Go to any newsstand, pick up a game magazine, and start reading. Sonic. Mario. Zelda. The games this sitcom should've parodied are obvious. All they had to do is tell Fisch which games to play, out of hundreds of available games.

I know what you're thinking; each game's characters are licensed. They couldn't license every game icon, so why even look at such games? Wrong. Even if they couldn't get the rights to use exact likenesses of all characters, what parody needs "exactness"? If a person crosses a street, have it look like Frogger. If they hire a plumber, give him an Italian accent, like Mario. If he "happens" to be dressed in red and blue, with his coworker dressed in green; well, that's just coincidence, isn't it? Then there's always the arcade classic, Paperboy. Man; the jokes this series missed out on with Paperboy. When and where the paperboy would strike each week could've been the series' running gag.

Yet the real challenge of any series, cartoon or otherwise, is a well chosen recurring cast. The lead characters of Game Over didn't just need to be interesting: the Smashenburns should've been the almighty amalgam of all popular video game genres. Instead we had:

• Mom: Raquel Smashenburn. This was admittedly a good character idea: a Lara Croft wannabe as the mom. Yet the idea was so obvious we can't praise it much. Imagine telling someone you're going to parody Star Wars, and wondering who the female lead should look like. A Lara Croft parody was a slam-dunk idea. If only the other characters were as "obvious"...
• Dad: Rip Smashenburn. Oh, I get it; they wanted to rip off Homer Simpson for the "father" of the family. Um...excuse me, but what does Homer Simpson have to do with games? To have made the most important character of the series into an utterly worthless dimtwit is nothing short of a travesty. "Duh I'm so stupid I'm lucky I married a brilliant wife" got old fast.
• Daughter: Alice Smashenburn. This is one of those ironies that must've sounded much better on paper than in execution. Alice hates games. Oh how ironic. Oh how droll. Oh how useless!
• Son: Billy Smashenburn. In the words of Homer Simpson: "the boy!" Ah yes; the boy. I still have no idea, what they ever intended to do with the boy. Let's see: games are mostly played by young boys. So who should the boy of this family represent. Hello...? Yet Billy wants to be...a white rap star. Show me a single sitcom idea, besides The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where this character wouldn't be utterly worthless.

As for the family pet...how do I put this delicately? Allow me to be blunt; if you think Jar-Jar Binks is the most annoying critter ever conceived in computer animation, may I present to you...Turbo. How bad was Turbo? Imagine if Jar-Jar Binks drank, smoke, farted, belched, and whined, to the point where Jar-Jar actually looks better in comparison. That was Turbo. Their running gag for this humorless hound was his ongoing love life. His...Love...Life! How annoying was the sight of a female Turbo in episode five? Let's put it this way: they never aired episode six. The only amusement Turbo ever offered was when his own family tries to feed him to monsters in the premiere. If only they had succeeded.

The final nail in Game Over's coffin is actually a common TV series epitaph: "You'll see better stuff later." I've heard of saving the best for last, but isn't it wiser to show your best work, before it's too late? It would've been a blast to see Lara Croft chatting with Raquel about "Tomb Raiding" in the series premiere. The idea was saved for "later." Spyro was licensed as a guest character...for later. Supposedly, Crash Bandicoot and Turbo go way back. How do we know this? Because it was mentioned in interviews for...later. What did we see "now"? Well, we saw lots of Turbo. Then we saw the show's cancellation.

Agnostic TV viewers may wonder if gamers are just hard to please. Admittedly; at its core this wasn't a bad sitcom formula, if just because its been done so many times before. Dimwit husband acts stupid next to know-it-all, do-it-all wife. Son is a mental case. Daughter is a whiney brat. If you still watch the Simpsons, hoping for it to be as funny as it was ten years ago, then by all means, enjoy this sitcom...cliché that it was, and "original concept" it could have been, so very easily.

As a game sitcom, however, this could've been big. It could've been to video games what Disney/Pixar's The Incredibles was to comic book heroes. Yet that would've required more game-centric characters all around, Turbo's grinning evil death in the series premiere, and a much stronger grasp of the gaming world, than a split second shot of "Oddworld Abe" in the series premiere. Who is Abe, you ask? Exactly. A split-second homage to a forgettable B-grade game was the strongest grasp this series had with the game world ...and in the end, that is how strongly gamers grabbed this series themselves.

---Techtite