Street Fighter Legends - Page 6
Hollywood comes to town.
1995 saw Hollywood try and cash in on Street Fighter's success. After a string of Martial Arts movies such as Blood Sport, Kickboxer, Double Impact, and TimeCop; success story Jean-Claude Van Damme was cast in the role of "Colonel" Guile. Along with sexy Australian singer/actress Kylie Minogue as Cammy, gorgeous Ming-Na (currently of ER fame) as Chun Li, and the late Raul Julia as the "evil" M. Bison; Hollywood + Street Fighter was sure to be a success. The movie-based-on-a-game was titled Street Fighter: The Movie and hit theatres across the world, and the "lucky" people who paid good money to see it were in for a rude awakening.
Alas, the movie was a major flop; riddled with inconsistencies noticed by "true" Street Fighter purists, coupled with a lame plot, flimsy sets, bad special effects, a quality of acting that would make even cardboard cutouts cringe, and the final nail in the coffin being shocking fight scenes; it was no wonder that it didn't succeed.
It was a bad smell that still lingers today in the minds of Street Fighter fans the world over. Not one to dust off and bring out of the cupboard every once in a while.
Infamously, the movie-based-on-a-game even spawned a spin-off game in its own right! Street Fighter: The Movie was also released to arcades in 1995 with Mortal Kombat-style digitised graphics mixed with traditional Street Fighter-style gameplay. The game-based-on-a-movie-based-on-a-game, as it was amusingly called, was supposed to be a good game with modern graphics.
It had everything going for it, and somehow stuffed it up big-time. Bad graphics, bad controls, alarmingly bad collision detection, and the recipe for disaster was complete. It was another flop, and will go down in history as the worst ever game in existence to bear the sacred words "Street Fighter".
Perhaps as a god-send to Nintendo fans, we missed out on a console conversion of Street Fighter: The Movie, and instead it found its way onto the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation.
Later on, Street Fighter would once again be turned into a movie, and this time Capcom (with a little help from Sony) did it right and created one heck of an animated movie. Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie was born, and featured amazing fight scenes, all of the characters, and is the best example of how to turn a successful videogame into a movie.
This would be followed by an animated series titled Street Fighter II V: The Animated Series which delves a little deeper into the storylines of some of the main characters. While there are some liberal inconsistencies on the part of the writers, the series did well to keep to the spirit of Street Fighter, which is more than can be said of the disastrous live action movie mentioned earlier.
A further animated movie follow-up would be Street Fighter Alpha: The Movie which continued the "tradition" of great animation, fight scenes, and inclusion of everyone's favourite characters.