The Creators Of The Super Mario Super Show Had Plans For Metroid And Castlevania

Hey paisanos, remember the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, the afternoon block of Mario cartoons in the early 90s that behooved you to swing your arms from side to side? If so, you might also remember some other adjacent character shows, like Captain N: The Game Master and The Legend of Zelda. Turns out the company that made all those cartoons had plans for other cartoons based on Metroid, California Games, and Castlevania and boy were they something.

The news actually comes from an eBay listing, where a user by the name of Lance Cannon is selling some pre-production posters from DIC, which were presumably going to be used to pitch these shows. The California Games and Double Dragon ones are interesting, though not particularly notable. Double Dragon did get its chance at airing, but California Games was never released on TV.

The adaptation of Metroid is actually seemingly fairly faithful, in that it takes place in space and involves shooting a space alien. The major problem is that Samus is a man in the art, and presumably would be in the cartoon, which is obviously not the case as we know 30 years later. At the time, Samus’ gender wasn’t exactly a closely guarded secret, though the game’s instruction manual did erroneously or secretively use male pronouns, but it wasn’t particularly well known either. If this cartoon had ever come out and become really popular, I wonder how it would have affected Metroid canon over the years.

The other poster for Castlevania definitely takes the license to places far beyond Metroid. Rather than showing a whip-wielding warrior Belmont, the poster seems to present two young kids facing off a number of classic movie monsters. So it would presumably be less like Castlevania the game and more like an excuse to use the Castlevania name and a bunch of golden-age monsters.