There he is: one gigantic puke-green rabbit rocking a ketchup-red admiral's uniform.
His irises are pink. He may only have one, gigantic buck tooth. Instead of whiskers, he has what appear to be glued patches of his own body fur affixed to the sides of his face.
His grotesque appearance belies no indication of his intelligence and cunning. The average Saturday morning cartoon horror show cannot ever forget his disfigurement when it's surrounded by playful, proportional children. Bucky was better than that. He wisely surrounded himself with other mongoloids to heighten his self-esteem. Creatures like: Deadeye Duck, a four-armed waterfowl with a taste for haberdashery; Jenny, a cat (I think it's a cat, at least) notable primarily for her ridiculously huge pink hair; Blinky, a neurotic, always-say-die robotic cyclops; and some fat kid from San Francisco.
I mean -- goddamn. A group of investors gave a bunch of stoners a fair bit of money to create... this?
Bucky O'Hare is fairly typical of early 90's Saturday morning cartoons, I guess, in that it looks ugly and cheap, and it tells a paint-by-numbers sci-fi story. The only distinguishing feature between Bucky O'Hare and something like E.X.O. is the... intriguing character design. Bucky focuses on the adventures of one wise cracking space rabbit; almost every other sci-fi cartoon show of the era chronicled the adventures of square jawed white dudes.
Sadly, the "furry inspired" artwork was about all the cartoon had going for it. Bucky returned, again and again and again to jokes that were resoundingly not funny. Before one even got to those lame jokes, of course, one had to endure a theme song that was so fucking awful, no English words exist to describe it.
Where did he come from? According to that most reliable of sources, Wikipedia, Bucky O'Hare started as a short-lived underground (or unpopular -- it's never made explicit) British comic book in the late 70's. After a decade of silence, someone optioned a TV series about the hideous mammal for some reason (drugs?), also short-lived and unpopular. Neal Adams, oddly, had something to do with the animated series. He also owns the Bucky O'Hare IP today.
I kinda thought Adams was dead, incidentally.
Obviously, a franchise of this caliber requires all manner of licensed products, and luckily for it Konami was in the middle of a furious fight with Capcom to prove, once and for all, that license games were not always garbage. Both companies were both pretty obstinate, actually. It didn't matter how stupid the license was so long as Capcom or Konami was on the case!
Capcom set the standard with Duck Tales, which I always thought was overrated intellectual property... although I may be alone in this assessment. The NES Duck Tails game is still a lot of fun to play today, though! It's a very solid platformer with great control. Also, the music on the Moon level is so, so good.
Konami one-upped Capcom in the inane license department a few years later, viciously jacking many signature elements from Capcom's flagship series, Mega Man. and grafting them onto, you guessed it, the Bucky O'Hare franchise. And so in 1992 (nearly a decade after the Famicom launched in Japan, if you can believe it) I got Bucky O'Hare for the Nintendo Entertainment System for my 8th birthday. It was the last NES cartridge my parents ever got me.
Christ, I loved that game in 1992. I didn't care about the license; I hadn't seen a single minute of Bucky O'Hare until I started researching this retrospective. No, I loved Bucky because every stage was divided into short sub levels, or "acts." Some acts were no more than 10 seconds long. On the ice planet, you were required to navigate the body of an enormous mechanical worm-toad-thing to reach the next area in the level. This worm/toad always moved in the same pattern, but it was this batshit crazy pattern that sometimes curled back on itself in most unexpected ways. The closest analogue to this section I can think of right now is the frantic "outrun the lava" bit in Mega Man 2, on Quickman's stage. Disregard for a moment that this exact set piece was completely stolen by the Bucky O'Hare team elsewhere in the game. I would die a lot in Mega Man 2 on Quickman's stage, and throw hissy fits in the months prior to discovering that I could equip the weapons of defeated bosses -- I wasn't a bight kid. Bucky prompted no such hissy fits; because there were so many checkpoints, I felt compelled to retry those tricky bits until I mastered them, instead of kicking my NES.
Three or four months ago, Bucky O'Hare was booted up again after a few of my oldest friends and I had consumed great quantities of beer, irish coffee, and I think some paint thinner. At the time, I felt like the game held up far better than I had ever expected it to, and so I decided to write something about the game right there and then.
After finishing my rough draft, I booted up Nestopia to grab some screen captures, so the essay would have some graphical élan. As I played the game on my laptop (with a Playstation 2 controller, I hasten to add), I realized how drunk we actually had been.
The game is competent, sure, and the frequent checkpoints make playing the game a whole lot more fun than some earlier NES titles, but there were a lot of competent platformers available for the NES in 1992. There were also extraordinary platformers: Metroid; Castlevania 3: Simon's Quest; the Mario games; Adventure Island 4; the list goes on for some time. Hell, the cobbled together cash-in nonsense of Mega Man 4 & Mega Man 5 play a little better than Bucky, and those games don't play all that well. By that time, and for reasons known only to the developers, Mega Man moved like his robot body was covered in molasses.
In lieu of the traditional "beat the boss, steal his arm, kill his friends with it," mechanic employed by Mega Man, Bucky could call upon his grotesque friends after rescuing them at the end of each level. Each one of them was supposed to have a unique style of attack and "charge
attack," that behaved in a roughly analogous way to Mega Man's badass gun-arms. Trouble was, Bucky's friends were not badass robotic arms. They were ugly fucking sprites with stupid ass powers.Bucky, he had a little pea-shooter that also gave him the ability to jump very high. So what does Deadeye Duck bring to the table? Well, a little pea-shooter... capable of shooting in three directions. His gun also let him jump very high. Blinky didn't have a gun -- he could lob balls of something out of his back -- but instead of jumping really high like his mutant friends, Blinky floated really high. The pink haired cat and the fat kid did more interesting things with their charge attacks -- she used telepathy, he fired a gigantic laser -- but their roles were compromised by their weak legs. I blame the very hidden layers of sexual tension between them; when you're some fatass kid with a laser capable of committing some rad genocide, you're bound to get a little weak in the knees around mutant kitties.
I've learned a valuable lesson from all of this, however: only play games when drunk.
ROUNDUP RANKING: A BOX OF PUFFINS' CEREAL, WHICH I KINDA LIKE SOMETIMES, EVEN THOUGH IT CUTS THE ROOF OF MY MOUTH
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