The second go at a Mortal Kombat cartoon based mostly off MK3 but also follows the 1st film! The good characters form a “Kombat Team” to stop forces from Outworld from invading the Earth!
MK Defenders of the Realm: Kombat Begins Again (Ep1)
The second go at a Mortal Kombat cartoon based mostly off MK3 but also follows the 1st film! The good characters form a “Kombat Team” to stop forces from Outworld from invading the Earth!
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Man, your research on this one is impressive. You really covered a lot of interesting nuances that I wouldn’t have expected. I do remember this show, and I remember it sucking even back then. But I do have a soft spot for this MK classic era (Pre MK4). I don’t know about you, but I really dislike the theme and feel of the newer games. It takes itself way too seriously and lost it’s sense of humor. Also everything looks so ugly, with unlikable new characters. What do you think?
Uuuuuuh. I cannot. Believe. This crappy series is where I. Appearrrrred. For the first tiiiime. At least that is what. Wikipedia. Saaaaayysss.
Uuuuuuuuuuh.
So, in Mortal Kombat Conquest, they load the show with Baywatch girls and Playboy playmates to add as much T and A as possible. In Defenders of the Realm, Kitana’s cleavage doesn’t exist. At all. Mortal Kombat’s TV shows have some serious censorship whiplash.
Seriously though, why did they keep that hole in her outfit, if we suddenly believe boobs are evil?
For the same reason they continued to call this series Mortal Kombat, despite there being no Mortal Kombat tournament and no killing.
While the designers certainly did not put any emphasis in the chest area of the female character, it is worse in Kitana’s case because her outfit is mostly black thus rendering invisible any outline inside the body part. I think they realized that so they added that chest hole to avoid the viewer just seeing black slate as her torso.
This is why you should use dark blue instead of black to make outlines visible (like Batman’s cape from Batman TAS).
Also the MK3 design introduced the chest hole and since it was clearly a major inspiration for the show maybe they lifted that idea from there ?
It mildly annoyed me how Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm’s producers chose to give Kitana a black outfit instead of the blue one that she wore in the games, but it didn’t annoy me that much, since the show bore so little resemblance to the games anyway. DotR felt more like a G.I. Joe knockoff than it did MK. Just try to imagine if G.I. Joe had a Magic and Monsters Unit and that’s pretty much this show.
To me they resorted to a costume similar as what she wore in the movie because the MK II design had a mask which was not really fitting with the cookie fortune-telling persona they chose for her.
When I look at that design though I’m more reminded of Jean Grey from the original X-Men animated series.
Really funny and researched review, a great start for that new review series which I waited for so long.
Animated Siro was the best though, was it AWD who animated it ?
Yes!! It makes me happy to see you review another Mortal Kombat series episode-to-episode like this. This show was… ‘special’ to say the least. A kids cartoon based on Mortal Kombat wouldn’t be SO terrible if it was done well, and done years later. Like, if it’d been done around early-2000’s to now, when it started to be okay more often for characters to die. Sure, it wouldn’t have gore and such, but just that fatalities in Mortal Kombat are rather a big aspect of the franchise.
It’s a shame much of this show was so crap, it got better later on, but got cancelled before the good parts could last. It’s also a shame that it was only 13 episodes. Oh, not that it deserved more, just that more episodes of DotR means more reviews from you :p
This episode had me laughing the whole way through. Great work! The “That’s It!” clip of Siro will never not be funny, so don’t hold back on that one. XD “KETCHUP AND MUSTARD.” Oh my god…
Oh geeze, the USA Action Extreme Team… Back when I didn’t have cable, I’d watch it at my grandmother’s house and hope and pray Sonic SatAM would be rerun on it while I was there. Or really, any of the cartoons based on video games would have worked. But I remember being horribly unimpressed with this show.
Also, Cree Summer did the voice of Dulcy from Sonic SatAM, so that’s where I know her from best. I don’t think anybody else does, though, which is fair, and she was only in like, 10 episodes. Cree also did the voice of Kim from the first Care Bears movie (~1982). She was, like, 14 at the time or something. Pretty young. So her having the same voice throughout the years is amazing.
Great review, Phelan!
I’ve waited for this ever since you started making the MKC videos – it was so worth it)
Fun fact – I actually remember this from childhood. Well, our dub of it any way. Which wasn’t great by the way, they had way less voice actors, so most of the characters sounded very similar. But the crazy thing is… the Russian version of Sub Zero is better. Nothing against Luke Perry, but he just doesn’t sounds like the ice ninja. At least not with the design they gave him. He looks like a battle-hardened warrior, who’s probably older than Liu Kang or Jax. But Perry sounds way to young for it. Our version was colder (pun not really intended) and there was a weight in the voice – I believed, that this man betrayed his former friends and lost a brother.
That’s probably because he was dubbed by Vladimir Vihrov, a.k.a. our voice of Morpheus and Chris Redfield (a little weird combo, now when I think about it). And the guy really got Sub Zero. So, even though our version of the dub is definitively inferior (I didn’t even mention the stupid translation errors), there are still parts of which that I enjoy.
It does look better than that eye-hurting CG hybrid one…but I never knew this one existed.
It’s still pretty ugly and cheap looking.
Not even the great Cree Summer and Clancy Brown could save it. It’s pretty astonishing how the quality of animated shows fluctuated in the 90s from the amazing Duck Tales, Animaniacs, and Batman TAS to this.
I know I watched this series when it was on, but I remember it about as well as Street Fighter TAS, Wild CATS, & Savage Dragon, which is to say that I’m lucky I can even remember watching it.
The faces don’t look bad, but after showing them next to their voice actors, I can’t help but think they might have modeled their faces after them a bit.
IMHO, the best Mortal Kombat movie was all the cutscenes from MK2011.
I love how inconsistently the characters do or don’t cast shadows.
Night Wolf’s face paint looks like a butterfly here.
Did you force Andrew [Funny Last Name] to draw Siro? God, that face almost drove me to tears from laughter LOL
Phelous, please tell me you don’t actually watch Riverdale. I had to watch the pilot because somebody in my TV class is speccing it. It was the worst hour of my life.
Speaking of terrible animated things based on famous video game characters, you should review Mega Man: Upon a Star, a 3-part OVA series that’s only the THIRD worst animated anything starring the Blue Bomber (*cough* *cough* the Mega Man Star Force anime which is worse *cough* *cough* and it’s sequel that’s even worse Ryuusei no Rockman Tribe *cough* *cough*) and a possibly a pilot of sorts to the Ruby-Spears Mega Man series because it was animated by the same studio (Ashi Productions/Studio REED, the studio who also brought us Dancouga).
You can watch it here (if you are willing to suffer through it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXBtQw23s50&list=PL8A3A43F2A64E1F0B