Street Fighter: The Animated Series

Not only did the live action movie suck, but this crappy cartoon sucked even worse.

Possible the worst version of Street Fighter ever. The Anime followed the game much closer.

Definitely crap not worth watching if you're a true fan.

To start off we have crappy character designs, and even worse plot lines. It's no wonder this show went off the air so quickly. It's much worse than the Street Fighter II V series, which was a total disappointment and left us with more questions then answers. Thank god it will probably never see a DVD release.

Okay, so you probably watched this show as a kid and came back to it to realize how much it "sucks," or you managed to see some M. Bison "YES!" videos on YouTube and decided to explore the rest of the show. You then realized that the show wasn't quite what it was cut out to be, huh? I challenge the notion that the show is what's at fault, but rather it's the viewer's perspective that needs enlightening. I'll explain.

Street Fighter: The Animated Series is not only a series that merits watching, it merits rewatching. I've personally seen each episode at least 8 times. You can't just be the passive couch-potato observer, however. This isn't an action flick meant to engage semi-dispassionate viewers dragged into the cinema by their friends, this is a (clearly) low budget cartoon made by some people who only had a cursory understanding of what Street Fighter was really all about. Maybe they watched the 1993 movie and played some Street Fighter II Turbo during the breaks to get some ideas for the characters, but that's really it.

So why is it so great? Why bother even watching past the first episode? When you look past the recycled and poorly done animations, the cheesy action, the continuity and drawing errors, and so forth, it's because this show is outrageously funny. In fact, everything I just listed contributes in some way to this show's value, but it really shines with the characters themselves.

So the way I propose for you to watch this cartoon is like a hawk. Try to find out the badass things Bison says (the best acted character on the show). Seek out all the goofy dialogue. Try to ascertain whether or not the creators of the show were seriously putting in effort, or if they thought the many glitches of the show were actually rather hilarious (especially considering that they had to have known exactly what they were). I cannot walk away from the show without the feeling that Will Meugniot wasn't making a piece of crap, but was rather stringing together a collection of inside jokes for the audience to pry into if they could.

As for the content of the show itself, like I said it really shines with the characters. Bison and Guile diametrically opposed in their struggle of good v. evil. Deejay being as stereotypical as possible ("Yes mahn! Dhe champ is bhaak!"), Honda the ace computer hacker, Cammy the ho, T. Hawk the lovestruck... hawk. The characters are all just completely amusing in their own ways. The second season features (for the second and final time since season one) Col. Sawada (how did he raise in rank from the movie? Watch to find out!) talking at a million words per minute. Have some fun trying to repeat his lines or make up some of your own in a Sawada-esque speed and style. The same can be done for Chun-Li, who in my mind can easily be exaggerated into a manly sounding woman.

So go away if you expect this show to just unravel itself for you. Please do watch this show if you want to try to find all the little nitpicks and to enjoy the cartoon with a critical eye, especially if you love Street Fighter.

I watched street fighter 2 v first and that show was amazing.

Coming in to this I expected the same.

Well... Ai only was able to endure 2 episodes because it was bad and dumb. Ryu and Ken are dumb in this version.

Guile is a boy scout.

Chung Li is cringe.

Its obvious that Americans produced this because it was bad.

Please skip this tv show. Rewatch sf2v 20 times before you even touch this version.

As much as I hated the movie that this series follows I can at least says that Zangief was amusing. The animated series is quite possibly one of the worst things ever produced. The animation is quite often inconsistent, although it does stay consistently bad. The shape of a characters face is even capable of drastically changing in the same shot. The script and voice acting also leave something to be desired since most of the cast seems about as talented as the cast of a third grade drama play. Characters like Cammy and DJ are so forced into stereotypes of their nationalities that episodes containing them are almost physically painful to watch, not that the series isn't painful on a regular basis anyway. Episode plots seem to strive to reach new levels of lame with every turn and are so full of plot holes it amazes me they had time to show commercials. Truthfully, it amazes me anyone wold pay to advertise during the show. In addition to being a bad series it is an even worse adaptation of Street Fighter. Many of the characters maintain the failed adaptations from the movie. Examples include Ken and Ryu being idiot con men (even though Ken is supposed to be rich), Blanka being Guiles friend Charlie, and Chun Li being a reporter. It takes talent to take something as bad as the movie and make it worse.

Street Fighter: The Animated Series had a very rocky start. It was based off of the Street Fighter film, one of the biggest examples of miscasting and plot contriving of the 90's, and part of a trend of increasingly bad video game to movie conversion given to hack directors. Hopes for a show like this were reasonably low. And the first season of this show gave no reason for anyone to think any differently. To be blunt, it was GI Joe with Street Fighter characters shoehorned in, and was indistinguishable from the dozens of other cartoons out at the time. Showing how derivative the American animation scene had become, it tried to take cues from both Joe and the animated X-Men series, failing on both counts. Poorly plotted, animated, the first season was not faithful to the true source material at all.

However, the second season managed to turn things around a good deal. Someone must have seen the incredibly animated Street Fighter 2 anime or watched the II V TV series, because by the time the second season came around, the producers hired a more expensive animation studio for better artwork, went away from stand-alone episodes to create something of an ongoing plot, and most importantly, distanced itself from the live-action film by adding characters from the Street Fighter Alpha and Final Fight games and developing the current roster of characters. True, hardcore Street Fighter fan-boys might have been disappointed by the absence of Sakura from Alpha 2, and certain problems with the first season, such as the tendency to serverly overuse the American characters continued (For instance, in the episode with Akuma, the American born Ken is the one to best him when nearly all other media suggests Ken can't even touch Akuma), but the show did a rather admirable job of introducing the new characters they did use.

So first season bad, second season good. That said, the anime versions of Street Fighter far exceed this effort in almost every way.