Video: Maniac Mansion TV Series Intro
Maniac Mansion was one of those games which, unless you played the original PC version, seemed like it was truly a crappy game. The original version was actually a pretty cool adventure title, but the other versions were pretty terrible. I should know, seeing as how the NES version almost killed the entire genre of adventure games for me when I was a young lad. It's OK, though, because Day of the Tentacle more than made up for any inadequacies we gamers might've experienced.
However, when my friend and I were investigating the film career of Joe Flaherty via IMDB, we learned that he starred in a 1990 sitcom based on the game. Sadly, a couple of hours of investigatin via the net only turned up some nonsense clips and the intros to the show's first and second seasons. Above is Season One's intro; Season Two's sequence can be seen after the jump. The show actually won a couple of awards... I'm not sure how it managed to last past the first season, though, given how stupid the theme song is. It may not quite be Infogrames' Company Anthem Awful, but it's still pretty heinous.
Boy of Tomorrow
Posted to Videos on 26 November 2007
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: maniac mansion, series, tv, video
I remember how much I loved the old Commodore 64 version of this game, so I was really excited when the television series came to be...I shouldn't have been. From what I can remember, it was terrible. I think I only made it through a few episodes before just completely giving up on it.
Much better, IMHO, was the Honey, I Shrunk the Kids television series. I know, it wasn't based on a videogame, but it was still lots of fun and with a sense of humor about itself, too. Had the series version of Maniac Mansion enjoyed that kind of attitude it might have been a really great show.
OMG! I remember this show. I've had the strangest memories of it since I was little. Thank you.
Wow, from all the TV shows that I watched growing up, this was definitely not one of them. Eugene Levy was a series creator? Interesting... he's probably the most successful thing associated with this show.
Awful, awful theme song.
Be glad you missed out on this show. I was a huge fan of the Maniac Mansion series and I remember as a child being so excited when I heard this show was coming out.
It had almost nothing to do with the game series at all. It had the same title, a meteor, and some of the same names. That was it.
I completely blocked out that theme song though. That was painful.
Didn't the show come before the game? I thought the game was based on the show. I could've been wrong.
Really...I loves this game though. It was such a weird different type of game that you didn't see on the NES. I remember it was fun just poking around trying to find everything. I thought it was awesome.
you're definitely wrong. the original game was released in 1987 on home computers.
i also remember being incredibly excited for this show and what a total disappointment it was. i don't think i even ever watched a second episode, though i could be wrong. i'd completely forgotten about it, however, until now. hooray!
I watched quite a lot of Maniac Mansion the series, and I rather disagree with the negative assessments above. I quite liked it.
The show had a gentle humor about it, and not a little SCTV influence, most intriguingly it often went the direction of pathos and drama as much as comedy.
Some episodes could even have been considered tearjerkers.
The show had, as described, virtually nothing in common with its source game content or feeling, but was instead very much its own entity.
I cannot call it a great work of television, but I would argue that it was superior to the majority of what sprays forth from the great electric teat.
It had a final episode, in which one of the characters, a child tragically transformed into an adult body, somberly reflects upon his life while he works at the desk of a vast corporation. Everyone else in the story has died in this episode; he had outlived them all.
This was not a series retrospective, it was all new material that made the flashbacks to his past. He finally concludes that for all he had lost, such as his childhood, and as weird and sometimes traumatic as his life had been, he was grateful for the love of his eccentric family - such love made up for it all. He finally leaves his office, the end, fade to black.
That sort of thing is why it won awards.