![]() ![]() Many years later, we find that Pac-Man is now a teen and goes to high school in kind of a boarding school setting (he lives in a dorm, for instance). ![]() But Pac-Man’s aunt hid and raised Pac-Man, the last of the yellow Pac-People. But before they were able to do this to Betrayus, he wiped out all the yellow Pac-People on the planet, including Pac-Man’s parents. So basically they were killed and sent to Hell. After a great war, Betrayus was finally defeated, and as punishment, he and his army were stripped of their physical bodies and forced to live as ghosts in the underworld. ![]() Betrayus was the leader of the group of bad guys who wanted to take over the planet (the people of the planet should’ve known better to trust someone named Betrayus anyway). Many years before Pac-Man was even born, the people of the Pac planet were in a great war. They have futuristic technology, including transport tubes, hovering cars, hologram newspapers, etc. In the new toon, Pac-Man lives on a planet inhabited by other round Pac-People of all different colors. Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures has a totally different plot than the old 80’s cartoon, and Pac-Man as a character has been reworked, too. Plus, the kids who played Pac-Man in the arcade originally are now old enough to have cartoon-watching kids of their own. Sometimes even multiple times! And every kid I’ve talked to knows what Pac-Man is and likes playing the game. Like Angry Birds, you can find Pac-Man to download on any smartphone, tablet, computer, and all the game consoles, too. Or is he? Even though kids today can’t play Pac-Man in arcades like they used to, Pac-Man is still a very accessible game. So why make a new Pac-Man cartoon? Pac-Man’s nowhere near as popular as he was in the early 80’s. Especially in the second season when they introduced Super Pac-Man, voiced by the late Lorenzo Music, who is best known as the voice of Garfield. And like many other H-B creations, while some of their cartoons may have been less than subpar, the voice work was fantastic. Like many other cartoons of the era, they were rushed for time to poop out so many episodes, and considering they had to make a cartoon out of a simple maze game, I think they did the best they could. Plus we didn’t have the Internet back then, so any way we could get our video game fix outside of arcades, we took! Of course, you really can’t blame H-B too much for the old Pac-Man cartoon’s quality issues. But I liked the cartoon as a kid anyway because I didn’t know any better. Awful writing, poor animation, and dopey plots abounded. While I loved to watch the Pac-Man cartoon as a kid, I will admit that it was a pretty horrible cartoon. For a while, Six Flags Over Texas renamed their kiddie park Pac-Land, too! It’s true! I went there as a kid! Here’s the commercial for the Pac-Man pasta: Namco and Midway even made a 2-D platformer based on the toon characters and music called Pac-Land (which came out a full year before Super Mario Bros.). Chef Boy-Ar-Dee had Pac-Man canned pasta with a commercial based on the toon. Here is the intro song to the old cartoon: Not sure if you can get them there now anymore or not. For a while, you could order both seasons of the old Pac-Man cartoon on DVD through the WB online store. As most H-B cartoons of its time, the Pac-Man cartoon was very gag oriented. Did you know that in the early 80’s, when Pac-Man was huge and super popular, Hanna Barbara produced a Pac-Man cartoon about the light hearted adventures of Pac-Man, his wife, baby and two pets, as they thwarted the ghost monsters’ plans to steal the Power Pellet Forest and bring it back to their leader, Mezmeron. So here it is!īut this isn’t Pac-Man’s first cartoon. As a huge Pac-Man fan, you KNOW I’d be writing about it sooner or later. All through this summer, the classic arcade dot and ghost muncher is starring in a brand new computer animated cartoon series called Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures, airing on Disney XD. And now, Pac-Man has done the very same thing. I think only Mario, Sonic, and Mega Man have pulled that last feat off, maybe Street Fighter if you count the anime toons. And even fewer get multiple shows based on their electronic adventures. Very few video game characters get their own cartoon show.
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