somedude248

As part of the endless Street Fighter craze in the early to mid 90's, two Street Fighter TV shows were made. One was an American GI Joe knockoff, and the other was II V, a prequel to the Street Fighter II game. Let's compare the two, shall we?

II V is about the main characters of the game, Ryu and Ken, barely out of their teens as they travel the world in a quest to improve their martial art skills, meeting new foes and friends along the way (most game characters of course). No top secret crime fighting organization (US cartoon) or country invasion that has nothing to do with street fighting (US movie), the show actually sticks to the premise of the title, street fighting!

The show does deviate in character designs for a bit, but most are recognizable. Fighting babe Chun-Li looks a bit different from her video game incarnation, but she's still immediately recognizable.

The show is reasonably well animated, not as good as the SF II anime movie (although that's expected considering the budget) but far superior to its American animated counterpart.

And of course, how can you not like a show that ends its previews with "Gonna burn some muscle!" You can't. Unless you're a soulless critic (oh wait...) So if you like fighting anime and don't mind some deviations from the plot in your instruction manual, do yourself a favor and hunt down the DVD's, or wait till it airs on WAM! or Encore Action. You won't be disappointed.

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.