"Ape Escape" was one of my childhood games, if not one of the first games I've ever owned, and the picture looked interesting enough. But in my search, a different video caught my eye: an episode from the Western cartoon series, and watched that one instead. Afterwards I remembered what I was doing, clicked one of the Ape Escape anime episodes, and checked out this masterpiece.
I was bored out of my mind.
The cartoon series was cheerful, silly and insanely cute, while the anime was filled with your basic anime-clichés and looked weird, despite of how accurate it tried to be to the game. But I guess that's a good thing, so I shouldn't really attack it for that. Anyway, in the episode I watched, Spike chased a monkey for circa 9 minutes. And not much else happened.
Now, you'd think that's as close to the game you can get and that's why it should be good, but that's why the game is a game and this anime doesn't work. Looking at someone run after something the entire episode long doesn't add much to the plot. It made me impatient, so I skipped through most of the video, until I got to see Specter. I was not impressed by him, either. It was painful, I always liked that jerk.
The only thing the anime did better than the cartoon was the intro song, but since the cartoon only has a handful of 2 minute-episodes, I guess it isn't fair to expect a full intro.
It was interesting to discover I'm a sad minority on this, but that was to be expected. I seem to be a minority on basically everything in life.
Fans were just enraged by the cartoon series, while I've never seen such an innocent cartoon ever in my life. It's just trying to entertain you with silly stories and isn't forcing any specific emotion on you. I understand that people might not find it "ha ha"-funny, but I've certainly seen worse. At least it presents us with an awesome, funny, sexy caricature of that emo monkey-kid, Specter.
I love him.
Still, fans want to state the obvious that the show "is not canon", or more precisely,"is so fucking bad, they never want to consider it canon for as long they Goddamnfucking live". In reality, this cartoon doesn't offer much that should anger people. At most people should feel indifferent.
I've also seen comments from people who hate it because it wasn't made by Japanese people/isn't anime, including the people who have only seen one screenshot of the show ever.
But, even after having said all this, the main problem isn't even the episodes or the nationality of the people who made it: cartoon Specter is considered the cherry on top.
Because cartoon Specter dares to raise his voice in a comedic manner, he's considered an insult to the character from the game, as to the character from the anime. But I really like his voice. The only other voice I always really liked was the British voice from the first game. If we ignore the fact I was raised with the British version of the game, I think Specter should always be British.
For a game with such a silly theme, you'd think its fans would have an awesome sense of humor. But they don't. They are, dare I say, complete assholes and like everyone else.
I'm pretty sure that if the fanbase was a bit more supporting, this cartoon series would've made a whole lot more clips, and maybe developed itself into full length episodes with a good overdosis of creative humor and storylines. If we look at the amount of episodes they made in total, it's basically one or two full episodes; meaning these people were just getting started.
Yet they were not given a chance because of some crybabies stuck in nostalgia, who portray the game like it's the Holy Bible and demand the creator's head on a pike for touching it.
I wanted to see more of these episodes, I wanted to see this cartoon succeed, I want that version of Specter on a damn shirt. If Flash animation is so bad, then why is My Little Pony popular. Why is Flash itself popular. Everybody wants to have the damn program, yet nobody wants to see the fruits of it, because even though the software is insanely expensive, its products are considered cheap.
I gave both animated series one chance to impress me. It sounds like a lazy way to go, but if a show does it right the first time, doesn't that mean it's a good show? If both shows didn't do it for me the first time, I would've watched more, but I already made it clear the cartoon series impressed me more.
While the anime didn't do it for me the first time, maybe I need to watch the rest to be able to say what I really think. But it's not something I'm looking forward to, so it's probably going to leave my thoughts.
I think if I didn't see so many people passionately hating on the cartoon, I wouldn't have bothered to write this article.
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