Not every TV series based on a game can be a real corker like Fallout or Arcane. The Halo TV show was a disappointment. The Witcher series on Netflix started strong but fans found more and more to dislike as time went on. Critics and viewers both gave a pretty strong thumbs down to the Resident Evil TV show.
But I’ve been watching the very first TV show ever based on a videogame, and it’s given me some perspective. We’re doing real good here in the future of television adaptations. We’re spoiled, in fact.
Pac-Man was an animated series produced by Hanna-Barbera from 1982 to 1983, and I probably don’t need to explain this part, but it was based on the Pac-Man arcade games. In the show, Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man (called Pepper, for some reason) and their child, Pac-Baby, live in Pac-Village, in Pac-Land, which is run by Pac-President and protected by a superhero named Super-Pac.
I know they didn’t have much material to work with—in the game Pac-Man is just a circle who eats smaller circles, so it’s not exactly a Sapkowski novel—but could they have put a bit more effort into it? Was the script meeting just an exercise in quickly slapping the word “Pac” onto everything between rails of cocaine? Imagine if the Fallout show was as lazy with its worldbuilding. It’d be a show about Fall-Girl leaving the Fall-Vault, meeting Fall-Ghoul, and crossing Fall-Land to find her Fall-Father.
Naturally, Pac-Man is constantly pursued by ghosts (they’re oddly called “ghost monsters” here) though instead of four there are five: Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Clyde, and Sue, a lady ghost imported from the Ms. Pac-Man game in a move certain viewers today would probably decry as “woke.” The ghosts work for a villain named Mezmaron who somewhat ironically, in a world where creatures fight by eating each other, has a Bane-like muzzle over his mouth. Maybe that’s why he’s so mad. Everyone gets to eat things but him.
This is speculation, but the year before the Pac-Man show arrived, Hanna-Barbera was producing The Smurfs cartoon, and Mezmaron feels like an off-brand Gargamel. He’s obsessed with sending his ghosts to infiltrate Pac-Land to get Pac-Man, because Pac-Man knows where the Power Pellets (those dots Pac-Man eats) come from. Where do Power Pellets come from, you ask?
Why, they come from Power Pellet Forest where they grow on Power Pellet Trees, of course! Some more tremendous worldbuilding.
In a typical episode, Mezmaron will send the ghosts out to chase Pac-Man who runs away until he finds a spare Power Pellet (despite these being instakill powerups, and him being the guy who works in the forest full of them, and the fact that he’s constantly hounded by ghosts, he rarely has one with him).
Then he eats the ghosts one by one and Mezmaron is foiled. Oftentimes there is a gadget involved, such as the time Mezmaron invented an earthquake machine to shake the pellets out of the trees or a nightmare ray that would give Pac-Man bad dreams.
One bit of the adaptation is at least a little interesting: when Pac-Man eats a ghost they turn into eyeballs as in the game, then flee back to Mezmaron’s lair, where he directs them into a closet to put on new “ghost suits.” So, apparently the natural state of ghosts is just eyeballs, and when Pac-Man eats them he’s digesting their clothing. Look, I didn’t say it made sense, I said it was “at least a little interesting.”
I know it’s a kid’s cartoon so the bar is set pretty low, but just because it’s for children doesn’t mean it gets a pass for not being funny or even clever. There’s almost nothing to enjoy about the show. Pac-Man is a dull, good-natured Fred Flintstone type with a job and a New York accent. Despite watching a bunch of episodes I can barely differentiate the ghosts from one another except that one has a deep voice and one is dumber than the rest, which stands out even with them all being pretty dumb. Pretty much every episode ends with an exhausting sequence of Pac-Man consuming the ghosts as they try to hide in various places from his vengeful mouth.
The best thing I can say for the Pac-Man show is the first time one of the ghosts bit a Pac-Person, I thought they’d legit broken his neck:
Turns out Pac-People just deflate a bit when bitten, but it’s still pretty shocking to see for the first time and they seem to have toned it down a bit in later episodes, with most of the actual biting happening offscreen.
Half of the show feels like a poor Roadrunner vs Wile E. Coyote ripoff. In one scene, Pac-Man is being chased by ghosts and pulls out a pack of fast-growing cactus seeds. He plants them and the ghosts get immediately stuck in the cactus. End scene. There’s not even a setup to him having bought the seeds in the first place, he just happens to have them!
In a common B-plot, Pac-Man’s cat wants to do harm to Pac-Man’s dog (such as tricking him to fall into a garbage can), and routinely fails (such as falling into the garbage itself). Maybe this show isn’t the result of cocaine-fueled writers, actually. It would at least have more manic energy.
Another weird decision: despite the legendary Peter Cullen (the voice of Optimus Prime) being in the cast, the villain Mezmaron is voiced by a guy named Alan Lurie. Cullen only does the voice of Pac-Man’s cat, who just sort of occasionally wheezes. What a waste of an S-tier set of pipes!
I’m pretty sure even the glazed-eyed children of the 1980s didn’t love the idea of Pac-Man being an adult who goes to work every day. In Season 2 the show hurriedly added a younger version of Pac-Man named PJ and things got zanier: plots involved Pac-Man becoming a werewolf and the George Washington face of Mount Rushmore coming alive and biting a hole in Mezmaron’s hot air balloon. Okay, I’m leaning more toward the cocaine theory again.
The Pac-Man show only lasted two seasons—though in the ’80s that still meant 44 flippin’ episodes—plus a few specials, and it’s not hard to see why. Even for kidslop, it’s some supremely low-effort work and makes me appreciate how much goes into modern shows based on games. Maybe the Halo and The Witcher shows aren’t perfect, or even that good. But they at least tried.
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