DARKSTALKERS (1995 ), NIGHT WARRIORS: DARKSTALKERS' REVENGE (1997-98)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical*

DARKSTALKERS started out as a fighting-game from Capcom, who attempted to expand on the franchise twice, first with an American series aimed at kids, and then with a Japanese OVA series. Neither was overly successful and the franchise seems to have languished, apart from the occasional nostalgic comic book revival.

The 1995 show, lasting 13 episodes, quite naturally cut out any sexual or ultraviolent content. The game's original concept was that of an Earth which now harbors diverse monsters because the Earth-dimension began to merge with a demon-world, which wasn't a particularly good explanation for the existence of simple science-anomalies like the show's resident "Frankenstein," the bolt-necked "Victor von Gerdenheim." The TV show alluded to a panoply of elder races on Earth, which at least explained the super-hirsute people of the character Bigfoot and the ruins of Atlantis, inhabited by mer-folk and ruled by their king Rikou (named for Ricou Browning, the performer who did all or most of the swimming for The Creature from the Black Lagoon). But the other characters had occult origins: European vampire Dimitri, Chinese vampire Hsien-Ko, succubus Morrigan, werewolf John Talbain, cat-woman Felicia, mummy Anakaris, zombie rocker Lord Raptor, cursed samurai Bishamon, and monster-hunter Donovan Baine. For good measure, the American writers worked in a couple of Arthurian characters. Morrigan was descended from Morgan Le Fay and new insert-character Harry Grimoire was descended from Merlin. And all twelve characters were, in one episode or another, were pitted against the forces of the alien fire-being Pyron, who wished to press-gang the monsters-- i.e., "Darkstalkers"-- into becoming his soldiers in a plan to conquer Earth. Pyron did enlist Dimitri and Morrigan into his service, but the other Darkstalkers were so much trouble that Pyron probably would've been better off just going forward with his Earth-conquest schemes.

It's faint praise to state that I've seen many worse cartoon-shows than DARKSTALKERS, but I can see why the series flopped. In the first episode Felicia bonds with teenaged Harry, and they're usually the viewpoint characters through whose eyes the audience watches the latest designs of Pyron and his allies. But twelve characters, even though usually only four or five appeared per episode, were probably too many for kid-audiences to identify with, particularly since one could not "play" them as one could in the fighting-game. 

All the characterizations are one-note, though occasionally the writers threw in nuggets of sprightly humor to compensate for flat characters. (At least three times, different characters comment that Rikou, unlike his Gill-Man model, is uncannily handsome for a merman.) The show kept at least some sense of shifting loyalties, for the samurai Bishamon starts out serving under Pyron's general Dimitri but splits off when Dimitri acts without honor. The monster-hunter Baine takes an early dislike to Felicia, despite her being the least "monstrous" of the Darkstalkers, and to his last episode he still wants to duel her to the death.

The animation was rudimentary, though I did notice that the animators did come up with some good choreography for the many fight-scenes, and that they sometimes gave the characters interesting new powers. But the characters simply couldn't move well enough to impress even an audience that didn't have high expectations. The show's most interesting aspect was that in my opinion all the titular Darkstalkers, whether allied with or opposed to Pyron, form the ensemble of the series, instead of the "heroes" being the stars to whom the "villains" are subordinate.

Though there's not a lot to like about the 1995 TV show, I still preferred it to the OVA series. Once again, Pyron is the invader who puts the Earth in peril, though, as if seeking to confuse the narrative, the script also claims that the vampire Dimitri has somehow occluded the light of the sun so that it does not reach Earth. Neither the Pyron-plot nor the Dimitri-plot really contributes much coherence to the narrative. As if the writers sought to emulate the game, most of the sequences are just setups for different fight-scenarios: Felicia vs. Lord Raptor, Dimitri vs. Morrigan, and so on. Even after I listened to a podcast by a reviewer who liked the four OVA episodes more than I did, I still felt that nothing about the story hung together properly. The animation was many times better than that of the American show, but there was next to no attention paid to making even one character interesting. 

Ironically, both American and Japanese comics did better renditions of this grab-bag of monster-mash characters, so it's probably for the best if the franchise stays confined to that medium for the duration.