Saturday Supercade

A year, roughly, took them a year to catch up.

A year after Pac-Man's debut, CBS launched the Saturday Supercade, produced by Ruby Spears Productions.

That's a studio that was founded by two former Hanna-Barbera writers, Joe Ruby and Ken Spears.

Whereas Pac-Man had bet everything on a single character, Saturday Supercade hedged.

It was an anthology, four separate segments built around different arcade stars, all sharing a single Saturday morning slot.

Now, the first season rotated through Frogger, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., and a segment that alternated weekly between Pitfall Harry and Q-Bert.

And this is where it gets kind of wild, Ryan.

Do you remember the Supercade at all? Or did you just come in like the Nintendo era?

I think Pac-Man would be cuter if he had a big old honker.

By the way, to answer your question, there was an animated cartoon called Saturday Supercade that aired in 1983, which did include a Q-Bert.

I think each episode maybe was like a different arcade game, and one of them was Q-Bert.

Hmm.

It was just kind of nothing.

But it was the theme song to Saturday Supercade's Pitfall.

I'm sorry, I'm reading about Yipes the Zebra.

Okay, what are you learning?

This episode that we watched... is the third episode of seven that were made.

Okay.

And there are a few uploads going around that claim to be the entire first airing of Saturday Supercade.

But they all use this episode rather than the one that actually aired the first day Saturday Supercade aired.

In the early 80s, Cullen provided voices on some shorter-lived animated shows like the Little Rascals cartoon, the Mr. T cartoon, and the Dukes, the animated spinoff of the Dukes of Hazzard.

Cullen was also the voice of Mario on the Donkey Kong segments from the video game inspired Saturday Supercade show.

We got a super extra giant size banana pizza with two kinds of

cheese

You know, he also did the vocal effects for the Predator in the movie Predator.

And then if you remember the old Donkey Kong cartoon and the Saturday Supercade, he voiced Mario, like the original Mario, not the Itzumi.

Not that one that we remember from like the late 80s.

Remember the Mario Super Show? He didn't voice that one.

Oh, please do.

Tammy Vance is voiced by longtime voice actor Judy Strangas, who is best known to me as Pauline from the Ruby Spears Donkey Kong cartoon that aired in the 80s as part of Saturday Supercade, on which she often says, help! And she says help three different times in this episode.

And I think that's a callback to her playing Pauline.

I can't prove that, though.