What better way to kick off the new year than with a piece of found media? The long-lost 2D pilot episode of Mega Man: Fully Charged, produced by Man of Action (Ben 10, Generator Rex) and animated by Film Roman, has surfaced at last. Until now, only brief snippets had been seen nearly a decade ago, before the project was retooled by DHX Media / WildBrain Studios into a CG-animated series.
The 21-minute pilot showcases a number of differences from the final series, spanning animation style, character designs, voice acting, music, and even a slightly heavier tone. Where Fully Charged ultimately skewed toward very young viewers, this pilot feels more squarely aimed at an elementary to middle school audience.
We know a fair amount about Fully Charged’s production history, including early plans for a second season, but the reason it moved from traditional animation to CG has never really been explained. For now, all we can do is speculate.
I didn't like either. Too bad they didn't actually produce a Mega Man show. For it be Mega Man, he has to be more than a "blue guy". They threw away the entire supporting cast besides Dr. Light. This doesn't represent any of the previous Mega Man series in any way, shape or form. It's way too different to be Mega Man.
ReplyDeleteEh, having new characters doesn't automatically make a show bad. I actually thought Bert Wily was the best part of Fully Charged; he was the only character who seemed to have any brains on top of having consistently organic struggles and victories. Plus, Mega Man has had a bunch of spinoffs already. Why is it OK for Mega Man Legends to throw out the entire supporting cast, but not Fully Charged?
DeleteThere are much more practical reasons for why Fully Charged turned out to be such a terrible spinoff.
I absolutely hated Fully Charged in its entirety... but this... this is a genuinely good pilot episode.
ReplyDeleteWe were robbed of a charming Mega Man spinoff. How did it all go so wrong? What happun, Matt McMuscles?
THIS! COME ON MATTYBOI, GIVE US THE STORY! WHAAHAPPUN?
DeleteEh, still not feeling it.
ReplyDeleteI'm not usually interested in leaving comments on this site, but I think this is a pretty good opportunity to give my two cents on adaptations like this. I never really watched the show, but I see this particular pilot as generally pretty harmless. I've never really resonated with the hate people often give to anything that's different to the original media a franchise is associated with. Like, I enjoy the Sonic games lore, but I also think alternative Sonic lores like the Archie series and SatAM can be considered good by their own merits too. Different adaptations of a series existing isn't a threat, it's just another take. DMC is another example, I vastly prefer the games lore but I actually enjoyed the Netflix adaptation too. It's not canon to the games, and I don't think it's doing anything wrong by going in its own unique direction. When you treat it as its own thing instead of constantly comparing it to the games, it's honestly pretty good.
ReplyDeleteMega Man seems to get this kind of hate directed at it a lot too, and I've never really been able to figure it out. Different doesn't have to mean bad, and I can definitely see myself as really enjoying this series if it continued being like this and released while I was a kid. It's got that same sort of appeal as like, Ben 10 and Code Lyoko. In reality I would have been grown up by the time this released anyway, but my point is that it could fill that same sort of role for the younger generations. I'm actually somewhat curious what this show could have ended up fleshing out into if they had stuck with this art style and storyline and gave it a few seasons to develop the plot up through.
Louder for people in the back!
DeleteI've always been of the opinion that if we just got something that was true to the source material, some fans might be more accepting of odd stuff like this.
DeleteLike, the closest there's ever been to a Classic Mega Man anime or cartoon (Upon a Star aside) has been the Ruby Spears series, which... I love it, but I also recognize that it is VERY different from the games.
The only other ones to get animated series were the two parts of the BN/SF timeline. BN was fairly true to the feel of the games at first, then deviated into henshin mania, then kind of split the difference with SF after, which was true to the feel *because* it was henshin.
But Classic-X-Zero-ZX-Legends has yet to get anything like that. Instead, we got Captain N, the aforementioned Ruby Spears, and Fully Charged, which feels halfway between Classic, Captain N, and being its own thing.
I wondered that too until I happened upon a YouTuber who put it an interesting way: Mega Man isn't really a singular brand like Sonic. Mega Man's fanbase is splintered in as many directions as there are subfranchises. Classic, X, Zero, ZX, Legends, Battle Network, Star Force, each potentially have their own communities around them that only want more of their flavor. That's the big difference between the Mega Man and Sonic communities.
Delete...That and the Sonic community at least gets over itself enough to try new things.
@LBD 'Nyterayn' The thing about Mega Man Classic is that it doesn't really have much story to begin with for an animated adaptation to be faithful towards. There's some basic lather rinse repeat plot elements and some basic character roles and personalities and such, but beyond that the series is focused on the raw gameplay first and foremost. "Dr. Wily is doing bad things again, go stop him!". I suppose there is the (unfortunately canceled) Archie comics series that was doing a pretty decent job of feeling like a good adaptation of the games, but even that did have its differences. I wouldn't be against that getting an animated series, but I don't think that's really what you're asking for, or that what you are asking for is really something doable. There needs to be more substance injected into what little we have to work with from the games, and the very act of injecting that substance in is going to be treated as a betrayal by the purists anyway. This is one of the big reasons why many animated adaptations just go ahead and do their own thing anyway.
DeleteX, Zero, ZX, and Legends give a lot more to work with to do a faithful animated adaptation of the storyline from the games, and I always have felt like Capcom was sitting on a gold mine and doing nothing with it regarding that. Legends in particular although technically a part of the same timeline is kinda just doing its own thing so that could be its own individual series, but X, Zero, and ZX are connected enough to be included in the same series across different seasons. The Archie comics were doing a neat sort of thing where it would flash forward to the X series timeframe and then connect that to what was going on in the Classic series timeframe. A similar thing could probably be done with an animated adaptation focusing on the X series by using the Classic series as a sort of background lore, and those core themes could also be used to connect it to Zero and ZX as well. For instance, leaning into Dr. Light and Dr. Ciel sharing the same dream for the future.
What little animated content we do have for these series such as Day of Σ and the commercials for the Zero/ZX games and the ZX series animated cutscenes have always had me convinced that faithful animated adaptations would be a really great way to bring these stories to life in a way that's more accessible to those less interested in the games. That being said, if they did decide to go a bit of a different direction with it to make it stand out rather than just being a 1 to 1 retelling, I'd be willing to be open minded about it and decide later whether I enjoy it as a standalone take. To go back to my DMC example from earlier, the DMC: Devil May Cry game is generally bad (or at least not really particularly good) in regards to its story in my opinion, but I do enjoy the gameplay. As a standalone take on the franchise I generally feel rather mixed towards it as they had a lot of good and innovative ideas from a gameplay standpoint but the story feels more generic and tries way too hard to nail that angsty 2000's vibe without really seeming to understand what made that vibe or the original DMC games popular to begin with. Different doesn't necessarily mean bad but it's not mutually exclusive either, so I'd hope that the bigger takeaway people get from me is to be open minded towards original takes rather than blindly supportive of them. I do believe that faithful adaptations can be good when there's enough to work with from the source material, but I don't believe that adaptations have to be faithful to be good or valid.
Because a lot of people value the series for specifically what it is, where-as works like SatAM were explicitly made by people who believed the source material was uninteresting, in spite of works such as the OVA or other classic-themed animation showing how there are works that appeal to those more interested in the games.
DeleteClassic Mega Man doesn't need a supposed deep story to be adapted as an animated series, there's nothing wrong with a show having a simple story instead of trying to go for wider appeal by being supposedly deeper, people who want a classic Mega Man show would precisely prefer something that doesn't have some writer believe that the simplicity is an issue and use it as an excuse to use the aesthetic of the series for whatever tangentially related thing they actually want to do. Even if you insist on supposed depth, something like Ariga's manga offers that while being significantly more preferred by most classic fans than DMC Netflix was for DMC fans.
Personally, I'd heavily prefer for future classic (or not) works to steer away from Archie as well, given the many issues that series went on to have and the obsession with lore/references. That might be more of a preferrable way for a lot of classic fans I've seen, but it's something I greatly dislike from a writing standpoint. Fully Charged seems fine and obviously separate from the classic series, so I don't mind it, but it came out at a time when a lot of people wanted a new work relating to the main series.
It's not hate so much as disrespect towards something you care about. You can't tell people how they feel about something even if you genuinely didn't mean to offend. In the case of megaman the show the only thing I liked about it is the bad box art megaman became an actual character. Like this dorky guy trying to be a superhero but, otherwise they added things people didn't really need as there's enough in the series for it to not need the extra detail. For example, why was there another guy in his helmet when it wasn't needed? Why not make that auto as mission control thus adding to auto as a character? You can have a new girl to replace roll or you can add onto roll as a character thus making that series much better. In the Archie comics whether people noticed or not they took parts of the descriptions from megaman and bass of all things like flash man hating that he's bald and seeing megaman with all his hair makes him angry. We got other scientists who made other robots so it's not just the 3 we know in game. I even think they used parts of that in megaman 11 thus adding to future games in the series l. So certain new things are good but, when you don't respect that or try to add onto it then it's comes off as confusing at best and pretentious at worst.
Delete@TimeGear
DeleteI will say, I think you’re underestimating the potential of 20XX’s story. Just look at the manga, both the standalones and Megamix/Gigamix (though the latter is close to being its own thing like RS/FC/SL).
And the X series isn’t much better than 20XX for having an overarching plot. Any conservative adaptation of X3 is gonna feel like filler. Even Day of Sigma had significant changes (Sigma deciding to be a Maverick without the virus and Dr. Cain dying before the first game come to mind).
I feel the same way about different adaptations. In the case of Fully Charged though, it was developed in parallel with Mega Man 11 and didn't synch with the franchise's resurrection. Are kids supposed to go from this show to the games and other merchandise that has nothing to do with the show? Where’s the synergy? How does this effectively expand the brand? Even Capcom understood this problem following Mega Man 11’s release when Osaka prefecture’s police force selected classic Mega Man over Megaman.EXE as the Cyber Security Ambassador for Cyber Security Awareness Month in 2019.
DeleteBut that's only enough to make a show a bad business decision, not a bad show overall. The actual reason Fully Charged was bad because it seemed to deliberately keep itself generic. The art style had a distinct plainness to it, the characters had no motivations, the setting had no compelling lore, and whenever the show had a chance to do world building and develop a strong, organic narrative, it gleefully skipped the opportunity, instead making things up as it went along, forcing characters ahead with plot fiat, jamming aesops down the audience’s throats, and doing anything for a cheap joke. The worst characters were Mega Mini, who mostly just sat there and contributed nothing to the show, and Sgt. Breaker Night, who was so lame, wooden, and braindead that he was actively destructive to the show's quality.
Comparing the Ruby Spears cartoon to Fully Charged is like comparing Sonic 2006 to Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric. Fully Charged never manages to break as badly as the Ruby Spears cartoon did at times; it has nothing as unwatchable as “Curse of the Lion Men” or “Robosaur Park”. But that’s also the final nail in the show’s coffin because it means Fully Charged doesn’t have much spectacle either, so it’s not even something you can love to hate. At least the Ruby Spears cartoon secured its immortality through genies, werewolves, and other spectacular errors, which caused it to spawn memes like “Super Fighting Robot” and “Guts Man’s Ass”, while Fully Charged is ultimately a sort of bland bad that’s not even much fun to make fun of.
That's why today, people are still watching and loving the Ruby Spears cartoon while nobody remembers Fully Charged.
@Damien125
DeleteThat's the thing I don't resonate with. Why does an adaptation doing its own thing need to be a bridge point to the games? There's lots of people who like SatAM or the Archie Sonic comics and couldn't care less about the games. I've known a few people over the years who were surprised to find out characters like Sally aren't in the games lore because they were fans of the show as a kid but never really played the games and so had no idea the story was any different.
I don't see adaptations as bridge points, I see them as alternative media that allow a franchise to reach more kinds of people. Some people are more into watching than playing, and so animated adaptations are a way for them to engage with a story without having to do the more interactive stuff that comes with having to play through a game. I would like faithful adaptations to exist too, but I don't think it should be treated as a mandate rather than allowing an adaptation to stand on its own two feet and form its own unique fan base. Branching out like this allows a franchise to reach people who might not be the types of people to enjoy previous adaptations, whether it be because of their particular story elements or because they're not really gamers or etc. I don't think that's a bad thing, and I don't think it invalidates the love for the games that fans like us already have.
@Jark Spore
At least with the X series there's something different happening from game to game, even if the end goal of "stop Sigma" remains consistent. There's individual vague details with some of the Classic series that could serve as a basis to expand from, like Roboenza in MM10 and the whole Double Gear thing in MM11, but those are more premises than full fledged story arcs. The Classic series overwhelmingly uses story as an excuse to justify the gameplay, while the X, Zero, and ZX games lean into their lore more heavily and so flesh them out more. Most of the X series does do this less than Zero and ZX, but from X4 onwards it's still enough that you could make a faithful adaptation that doesn't feel like most of the story has to be interpreted from the original rather than simply transitioned into animation and voice acting. It would be more like filling in the gaps between scenes we already have.
@CK20XX The thing is that the debate about it as a business decision has already been asked and answered several times. How is any kid supposed to follow between classic and X, or X and Legends, or Zero and Battle Network? From my own recollection as a long time fan, there wasn't really a problem to speak of. As well, unless you pulled that from some insider source at Capcom Japan, let's not assume we can meta-analyze every move that Capcom makes and will make, that's how we buy into completely unsourced stuff.
DeleteNext, consider that you're declaring a show made for 6-11 year olds 'generic'. I'll agree that Fully Charged as it was and as it became wasn't the absolute peak of writing, but that isn't really a reason to single it out as being uniquely poor. We're generally speaking from the perspectives of a 25-40 year old audience, not only well outside of the target demographic but the fact we even consider the Ruby Spears series relevant at all says that nostalgia is playing a factor in our judgments. That said, even the shows our age range considers classics didn't do massive world building in every single episode, that was spread out through little tidbits in-between episodes, as it is with Fully Charged, and as it was with... Every single Mega Man project ever given *a* story.
Nobody remembers Fully Charged because nobody wanted to give it a chance to start with. The 24-40 year old demo insisted so heavily that the 6-11 year old demo would not like the show so they never tuned in. Plus, there's been a wealth of comments on this site alone showing just how visceral the distaste for the show was from the moment it was conceived.
@TimeGear
DeleteHmm, I think I see what you mean. I still think 20XX is more complex than “go beat up Wily for being evil” though, especially 3, 4, 5, 9, and 10. The fandom treats the tried premise of 20XX games like it’s a problem, but I think it shows depth on Wily/Mega Man’s part. Throughout the whole series, Wily is still a person with redeemable traits, which is why Mega Man et. all still show him mercy and the benefit of the doubt. Whereas Sigma is just an immortal misanthropic jerk that everyone with any sense is fine with murdering. It’s ironic that 20XX has more depth and moral ambiguity for its main antagonist than the rougher and edgier X.
@Jark Spore
DeleteWily isn't evil (He's just a grumpy old jerk) and he does have redeeming traits, but the reason Mega Man doesn't "finish him off" is because he can't. His programming won't allow it. Despite the localized text in MM7, Mega Man really isn't capable of crossing that line. As a creation of Dr. Light unmodified by Wily, he's a helper robot at the very core of his programming and everything he does must be in line with that core directive. X was the very first robot capable of true human level free thought and free will. If he were to decide crossing that line was necessary, he was the first robot truly capable of making that decision and taking action on it by himself without needing modifications in his code to make it acceptable first. He decides what is and isn't acceptable based on his own standards, and that technological advancement is what makes him the very first Reploid from which all others are derivative of.
It still remains the case that that's just characterization though. Actual story beats beyond basic character roles and story premises require things to happen and characters to act and speak within that setting. MMC's formula is to provide a little bit of story context at the beginning and end of the game, and maybe sometimes a tiny sprinkling of it midway through, but the total amount of actual story content will be maybe about 5~ minutes. To flesh each game out into a full fledged animated adaptation, you'd have to take the character personalities and those basic story premises and flesh it out by inserting new dialogue and making new things happen during what would otherwise be gameplay. Out of the entire franchise, MMC is the one that would need this the most. X1-3 were very slightly more fleshed out but would still require the next most amount of work to adapt. X4-X8 give a pretty good idea of what a full animated adaptation would be like just from what's in the games themselves, and Zero/ZX are basically just playable movies with how much they lean into their lore. Those would be the games that need the least amount of new content inserted into them to flesh them out into animated adaptations, although the ZX adaptations in particular would need to either choose one of the two stories or merge them into a single story. That is to say, either Vent/Ashe or Aile/Grey, or find a way to merge the two stories into one. I happen to think there's enough in-game evidence and information to make merging them work, but I'm also aware that that's a contentious discussion in and of itself so I'm not going to get too into that here.
The main point is just that the MMC series is so light on story already that there's no good way to adapt it "faithfully" in the way that the purists would be satisfied with. You'd have to flesh it out and that means adding things that are new and that will get treated as a betrayal by a large (or at least very vocal) portion of the fanbase. As noted before, we already kind of have this adaptation in the form of the Mega Man Archie comics (which I actually really enjoyed) even though that is a comic and not a cartoon/anime, and I'm aware that even though those comics do have their fans there's also quite a few fans of the games who will tell you all about everything they think it does wrong for being different or having a tone they don't like or jokes they don't like or etc. I don't see any reason to believe that any other attempt at turning the MMC games into a cohesive fleshed out story narrative would go over any better with these types of people.
@TimeGear
DeleteSatAM and Archie have caused the very effect you describe: people who want characters from those to be in the games, for game stories to be more like these works, for shared characters to act like SatAM/Archie versions, and so on, which led to disagreements between people that persist to this day. The business benefits of doing something like this ignore long-term consequences of it.
In spite of the main Mega Man series being criticized for spreading appeal, 2D action series would often share similarities to some extent, and other series are clearly separated. Of course, this didn't stop people from being bothered by Legends or BN/SF, or even various 2D series, but those more involved with the series tend to understand that one series or another isn't for them, and all of them share the niche nature of Mega Man. Aside from Mega Man 8 and RM&F, there haven't been cases where a sub-series' influence caused changes to the appeal of another, and people stick to the series they like.
Lore doesn't make stories much easier to adapt, it can just as much create difficulty or potentially take away from a story. Your usage of the word lore is odd to me, as something like side material or references to past works is usually separate from the writing and interactions that happen in a story. Zero series might not necessarily be easy to adapt, as a lot of the character details are isolated to descriptions or side material. Similarly, a show, classic or not, doesn't necessarily need to be adaptations of every game; faithfulness can be achieved through care given to characters, tone and the approach to writing.
The classic series also has tons of what can be considered lore in the form of Japanese side material, and many side works that deviate to some extent (Ariga's more, other manga less), and you can use these as reference for how to handle an adaptation. Even a gag manga, while not wide in appeal, can be faithful, where-as the Archie comics have characters liike Proto Man deviate heavily from what is considered canon in favor of taking more from fan perception/concepts. As a result, it was appealing to a lot of fans, but not necessarily faithful. As such, you can take an odd approach, like short animations or a series about the daily life or misadventures of classic series characters, and it might end up being faithful and liked.
Some classic series works go against what you state as well, being the idea of X being the first human level/free will robot, which is instead an idea more specific to the X series, rather than applying to classic. This relates to the controversial discussion of whether the series are to be considered in relation to each other, or separately, but that aspect is not particularly clear, save for Capcom potentially having no intent to make a work that involves tying one series to another explicitly.
Aside from all the well thought-out analysis being made here, one thing to keep in perspective is that any fanbase is overwhelmingly made up of people we would likely consider "casual".
DeleteI'm well into my 40s and have been perusing Mega Man fansites/forums since the late 90s. What I can confidently say at this point is that whenever we have in-depth discussions around lore, what we all refer to as "lots of people" is really made up of hundreds, maybe just dozens, of hardcore fans who also peruse said sites. We're all in the same very small bubble and no matter how long we may debate certain topics, what really determines the future of the franchise is not us but the other 99% of the game-buying public.
@Sprite Recreator
DeleteThe "Lore" of a series are the in-universe facts of a series. It can include side content that is considered canon, but it also includes the main in-game story itself. The real issue has more to do with purists than what is and isn't lore though. When fans say "I want them to make a faithful animated adaptation of the Mega Man Classic series of games!" what they are really saying is that they want to see MMC's adventures from the games translated to a cartoon, anime, or movie series that could be considered canon in and of itself, and that comes with different people having very different ideas in their head of what would and wouldn't be considered acceptable. Now, clearly you and I would be fine with them taking some liberties, Source some lore from guidebooks and other canon sources, make some interpretations regarding what certain characters would be like such as certain Robot Masters, and fill in the blanks that were treated as gameplay rather than given dialogue boxes and animations. They could make a series like that and fans such as you or I would probably enjoy it.
But then there's the side of the fanbase that really delves into the nitpicking when it comes to their purism. Inevitably this animated series would need to take some liberties for the sake of telling the story in a format that isn't a video game, especially in regards to the details that there's not really anything to go on other than the gameplay itself and what the characters and places look like on screen. These purist superfans who insist on the adaptation being 100% faithful so that they can accept it as canon to the games are going to notice everything that gets added in and reworked for the sake of making it enjoyable, including the tone itself. If it comes off as too light hearted and kiddy or too gritty and mature, they're going to complain about it.
Take the story of Mega Man ZX and you have what basically amounts to a completed story narrative, ignoring the two protagonists problem for now. You wouldn't need to source information from any outside source at all to make a fully faithful animated adaptation, because there's so many in-game cutscenes and dialogue boxes that the story is already pretty much finished. The only blanks left to fill in would be making what happens in the stages and boss fights a little bit more narratively involved, but even these are given enough story context in-game to make doing this fairly easy. As long as the characters are behaving in-character and the tone doesn't shift from what's presented in the game it shouldn't be hard to please the purists when it comes to an adaptation of this. MMC is harder because it doesn't lean into its storytelling even remotely close to as much. You go from one stage to the next toppling boss after boss with hardly so much as a single dialogue box. Mega Man doesn't generally have an operator, and it's only in a small fraction of the games that he engages in small talk with the Robot Masters before he fights them. Powered Up is considered non-canon, which pretty much just leaves MM8 and MM11 for Robot Masters that you get a proper glimpse at their personalities. Otherwise, an interpretation would have to be made just based on what they look like in their artwork.
@Sprite Recreator because the post was too long
DeleteX being the first robot with true free thought and free will is a canon fact of the series, and nothing throughout the MMC games contradicts this aside from localization. Localization is also responsible for the ambiguity over whether X is a reploid or not, but it's abundantly clear in the Japanese scripts that he is in fact a reploid and that what makes all other reploids "reploids" is that they're based on the same reverse engineered technology that went into making X as cognitively advanced as he is. This goes for Zero too, as Wily designed him based on him copycatting Dr. Light again as usual. All of the robots in the classic series are bound to their programming, and so their personalities and actions are pre-programmed into them. Rock's primary directive is to be a helper robot, so he's able to be a hero and save the day because that falls in line with "helping". Bass is effectively the opposite, his core objective is to prove himself to be the strongest Robot Master, and so he has a compulsion to fight for that sake even if it means thwarting his creator's ambitions from time to time.
Rock and all other robots built by Dr. Light and left unmodified from there are incapable of intentionally harming a human, because their programming forbids it for the sake of safety and ethics in line with Light's dream of robots and humans living in harmony. This limitation can be removed by modifying their code, but these modifications also come with alterations to their core objectives that make them more hostile in personality and behavior as well. Usually these are intentionally crafted changes by Wily, but in some cases such as with Roboenza the process is able to be automated. In all cases, the changes aren't permanent and can be fixed by further modifications to their code to return them to how they were before, or in the case of Wily's own creations to at least make them less hostile since they don't have original peaceful states to return to. Regardless, without their code being modified a construction robot for example can't just suddenly decide they want to topple buildings instead of build them, or to be an air conditioning robot instead, or etc. The robots of this era distinctly don't have free will, and have more in common with early real life AI language models that are programmed to play a role and act within certain ethical guidelines. X was canonically the first to have human level cognition and decision making potential, truly thinking for himself and making his own choices for his own reasons without needing outside assistance to do so. There's no hard limit on what he or any other reploid can aspire to, so it's completely up to him whether he wants to fight for peace or live in peace or work at a restaurant or get into real estate or become a brutal dictator or etc.
@Sprite Recreator
DeleteWith all due respect, avoiding “fanbase fragmentation” is a fool’s errand for any series with enough popularity, prolificacy, and longevity. Just look at Star Wars. The prequels were widely detested when they came out, despite being in the same universe, by the same director, and with many direct connections and returning actors from the original trilogy.
And you have similar splits just within the Mega Man games. If you asked 10 different people what they want X9 to be like, you’ll get 10 different answers. Mega Man 9/10 style throwback game, direct follow up to X8, Elf Wars the Game, etc.
You can even have splits in a single piece of media, like the deep disagreements over which Armored Core VI ending is the “good” ending.
@FusionArmorX
DeleteThe thing is, Fully Charged wasn't designed for 6-11 year old kids. That was just the excuse it made for its lack of quality.
Kids are a difficult audience to develop for because they’re energetic, hate being talked down to, and are at the phase in life where you do the most learning, so they are always smarter than adults give them credit for. Their short attention spans mean they have far less tolerance for mistakes than adults do and their lack of tact means they will always point out when the emperor is naked, so any imaginary world you build for them has to be watertight, with no egregious plot holes or contradictions in its canon.
Besides, Walt Disney himself once said, “You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.” So even if your show is just designed to teach letters and numbers, you'll know it's well made if it attracts a healthy adult audience too, like Sesame Street, Lamb Chop's Play-Along, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Sharon Lois and Bram's Elephant Show, or Reading Rainbow. When shows like that say they're for kids, they're simply stating a basic fact, not making excuses for themselves. Suffice to say, Fully Charged was no Steven Universe or Miraculous Ladybug.
As for following along with all of the spinoffs, most of those are on the same timeline or well-established in other ways. Fully Charged was brand new, and the worst time for a new spinoff is when you're trying to revive a dead brand. A tree has to grow its trunk first before it can support any branches.
I'm not sure if I agree with the assessment of this having a heavier tone aimed at an older audience. The art style might be different, but the writing feels exactly the same as the final show.
ReplyDeleteHe even still has trouble controlling other Robot Masters' power. So zany!
DeleteWow, over 20 years later and I'm still out here figuring out Mega Man Voice Actors. Below is by no means a definitive list, but here's what I've figured out so far based on recognizability.
ReplyDeleteMegaMan/Aki Light - Max Mittelman
MegaMini -
Suna Light - Laura Bailey
Dr. Light - Fred Tatasciore
ElecMan - Steve Blum
Bert Wily -
TurbineMan - Travis Willingham
Sergeant Night -
GargantuMan - Roger Craig Smith
Seems to be a lot of folks that were working on the 2016 reboot of Ben 10, which would have been around the same time that this pilot was being produced. If anyone has any ideas for who the other characters might be, feel free to chime in!
The designs look far better in 2D than 3D, however, I totally see why they went with CG animation looking at how cheap it looks in motion (no such thing as "in-model" in this pilot), not even the later seasons of Ben 10 looked so janky
ReplyDeleteAlso, those two original Robot Master designs are soooo Ben 10-coded they look out of place
DeleteWell all I care about is the fact a MM12 and maybe more games could be coming out. The Ruby Spears MM I remember in the 90s was interesting, but if they do a MM cartoon, how about anime style and serious tone like the cutscenes we see in the PSX or even PSX2 or ZX games and actually tie it to the game storylines.
ReplyDeleteTbh, I am a fan of both This pilot and the final show, but if I were to keep anything from this, it would be that awesome Elec Man design.
ReplyDeleteI speculate that the reason why the show went from 2D to CGI was at least partially because we fans made sure to signal that the show was a brand risk through and through. From attacking the concept art, to the basic premise, and even adapting (heh heh) the Sonic fandom's fears about Sonic Boom as our own towards this show. Unlike Sega, though, there was nothing ever said about this series replacing Mega Man's legacy, but was all about creating something new with it.
ReplyDeleteThis show was not aimed at us. Neither this pilot nor the final product were. It was made for new fans, and it ended up awfully characteristic of us as a community to reject it so harshly.
I loved the direction it was going! Aki in the pilot is so quirky and I adore it! I immediately recognized the voice since I watched Future Avengers. I would've loved this if it weren't changed to CG animation.
ReplyDeleteAki and Suna Light are originally going have a Ben & Gwen Tennyson like sibling rivalry relationship. I am glad they dropped that & changed into it’s own thing in the final version.
ReplyDeleteNot just that, but Dr. Light was going to be just another Grandpa Ben where it's eventually revealed he's a badass who knows more about the hero's power than we were led to believe (except that in Dr. Light's case it was always a very dumb twist; how is the creator of Mega Man *not* supposed to know that his creation has those powers, do the writers think kids are dumb or something?)
DeleteInteresting! I'm always a sucker for 2D animation and the glowy tron lines, it's neat how they look in 2D. The design language is a little different than what we got in the final show, but I don't hate it. It definitely wouldn't have translated to toys as easily as the 3D ones do, but they probably would've been further redesigned if it had been approved in this state. I was still a fan of the final show despite its awkward New IP problems, but it does make me wonder if they would've done the same story with it or not.
ReplyDeleteNeeded more Elec Man though, he barely showed up but at least he looked cool :)
Was that Frost Man in the opening? Kinda wish he stayed in the final show, but that's just me wanting to see the non NES era robot masters in other media.
ReplyDeleteThis look so much better than the 3d version, and in fact it kind of reminded me of transformers animated combine with Ben 10: Omniverse. Though, it still won't help the show since the changes and writing is just as mediocre as the final product. I truly wish we gotten proper Mega Man cartoon or at least an anime one because I wanted to see MegaMix get adapted.
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