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If you're a child of the 1980s and spent any time in a video arcade, you no doubt remember the Dragon's Lair video game. With animation by Disney veteran Don Bluth, players helps Dirk the Daring as he tries to rescue Princess Daphne from the evil dragon Singe. It was a pretty advanced game for its time and mixed humor with adventure.

While the game was still very popular, Ruby-Spears Productions made an animated series for Saturday mornings. The 1984 series roughly follows the format of the game and a storyteller asks viewers how they would solve Dirk's delimma before each commerical break. After the break, viewers are shown the results of each of the possible choices.

The series didn't really catch on and Dragon's Lair lasted just 13 episodes. The show features the voice talents of Bob Sarlatte, Ellen Gerstell, Fred Travalena, Michael...

Once upon a time I edited a magazine called Comics Scene and early on, I had the opportunity to be in Ireland where I was invited to visit animator Don Bluth and his operation. At the time, he had left Disney and was busily working on The Secret of Nimh but also interactive animated arcade games. In 1983, he was poised to unleash Dragon’s Lair. After explaining the premise, Bluth let me play the latter for a while.

Boy was it fun.

While it and the subsequent Space Ace made a splash, they didn’t ignite a new generation of gaming, largely I suspect because these were expensive to create and manufacture and were limited by the technology of the day. Still, Dragon’s Lair proved popular enough for it to be licensed for Saturday morning television. Rather than use Bluth’s studio, the weekly work was turned over to Ruby-Spears.