Mortal Kombat (Miscellaneous)

Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm (1995)

Oh, dear, oh dear. Back in the ’80s and ’90s, when any franchise did particularly well, it would often end up getting an animated series tie-in made soon after, which usually tended to tone down the more objectionable elements for the younglings. Sometimes this worked, like in Batman or The Real Ghostbusters, but sometimes not so well, like in Rambo and Street Fighter. Care to make a guess in which category this series that ran for 13 episodes on USA Network ended up? The good news is that Defenders of the Realm isn’t quite as stupid as the Street Fighter animated series that aired on the same network. That also means it’s much less infamous across the internet, since it lacks such ‘classic’ scenes as M. Bison’s rejoicing or Dee Jay inexplicably shrinking. That doesn’t, however, mean it’s any good.

The show is actually something more along the lines of Power Rangers or GI Joe than anything you’d expect to see from Mortal Kombat: A bunch of bad guys come from another dimension to attack the planet, a team of heroes beats them up, roll credits. The contuinity seems to be a mix of the games and the movies, since everybody wears their MK3 outfits. Stryker and Nightwolf also make up the main team of good guys. On the other hand, the show seems to take place shortly after the original movie, as it’s mentioned that Liu Kang ended up killing Shang Tsung and Sub-Zero’s older brother during the tournament. Since this is a kid’s show, however, Sub-Zero’s death was changed from him getting impaled on his own ice to being frozen solid.

Most of the episodes involve some kind of bad guy showing up with a bunch of mooks to take over Earthrealm. The show does a pretty good job of representing the different characters that had shown up in the series to that point, even more obscure bad guys like Rain and Baraka. Oh, sorry, that’s not Baraka, that’s ‘Kabrak’, who is an entirely different character that just happens to be a general of blade-armed mutants. Oh, and that green-clad ninja who turns out to be an acid-spitting lizard? That’s Komodai, not Reptile. Original character, do not steal. Almost all the fighting is done against non-humans like Tarkatans or cyborgs, which means it’s OK for the good guys to smack around people without soccer moms getting upset. The characters frequently use their special moves from the games, except for Stryker, who doesn’t get to use his gun because it’s a kid’s show..

When the heroes aren’t fighting off the villain of the week, they spend most of their time arguing among themselves. Seriously, if it weren’t for poor Raiden around to babysit them, the first epsiode would have probably ended with them all killing each other. And their own quirks don’t help, either. Sonya’s kombat strategy, for one thing, involves her running headlong into the enemy while screaming “Kombat Time!” at the top of her lungs. The entire team makes Nightwolf stay in their secret lair and be their computer geek while they go out and do all their fighting. When he believes some calculations he did went wrong, they immediately shift all blame on him and start talking about how badly he screws up all the time. Stryker is now a germophobe who at one point, tells another character the story of when his wife left him. It’s an incredibly bizarre thing to mention on a children’s cartoon, and at no point is it ever brought up again.

Raiden’s probably the only character who hasn’t had his character ruined, probably because his voice actor, Clancy Brown, makes him drip sarcasm with every line. He’s probably the best character on the show, especially since his voice actor, Clancy Brown, makes him drip sarcasm with every line. Given the rest of the cast, however, he comes off less like “wise thunder god” and more like “Put-upon babysitter trying to keep himself sane watching over all these whiners”. Even he’s not immune to his dumb moments, however, especially since he gets lines like “Then kick your jets and JAM!” Raiden also ends up getting one of the best scenes in the series when he takes on Shang Tsung without using any of his powers and still manages to win.

If you look up the show online, you more than likely find one of the ‘Defenders of Stupidity’ videos, originally done by TheSwitcher of Two Best Friends fame. These are much more entertaining than the actual show itself, mostly because they take all of the many, many stupid moments across the show and compile them into a couple of videos. How about the scene where Jax laments about how naked and alone he feels, at a point where the colorist has apparently forgotten to color his pants in? Or the scene where Jax admits to Sonya about how fat he was as a kid? We’re not talking a little pudgy, either, we’re talking the fattest kid in school. Or maybe you’d prefer the scene where “Komodai” repeatedly kicks Sonya in the side?

What’s actually pretty interesting is that this show is where Quan Chi made his first appearance, even before Mythologies saw release. He’s not immune to the rampant stupidity that affects everyone else in the show, either. For one thing, any time he appears in the episode, he has his own dark metal theme song that kicks in, every time. And during one of his fight scenes, he pulls out a snake staff, that spits out another snake, that spits a bunch of smaller snakes. Yo dawg.

The series only lasted 13 episodes, only half of even what the Street Fighter cartoon got. It’s got its moments, sure, but for the most part, the only real value it has is comedy. If you really feel the urge to watch this show, you might want to be on the look out for the ‘annotated’ version, where people use Youtube’s annotations to heckle the show, MST3K style. Mortal Kombat would never again see a cartoon after this, and honestly, that’s not really surprising. How this thing even made it on TV in the first place is a mystery all on its own, even on such a low-rent network of the time like USA.

Links:
The infamous ‘Reptile kicks Sonya a lot’ scene.

Mortal Kombat: The Journey Begins (1995)

A few months before the release of the MK movie, an animation outfit known as Threshold Entertainment released this, presumably to get people hyped for the feature film. With its lack of any redeeming qualities, however, it’s shocking that nobody who saw it ended up taking a baseball bat to the first Mortal Kombat cabinet they encountered. It’s that bad. Journey Begins actually seems to be based more on the original game than the movie, since everybody’s using their designs from the game. Before we really tear into this short, it needs to be said that the casting is actually very good. You’ve got Jennifer Hale in one of her first roles playing Sonya, along with Jeff Bennet playing Johnny Cage. Appropriately enough, he also does the voice of Johnny Bravo. Jim Cummings does a great job of making Shang Tsung sound like a slimy jerk, while probably wishing he was back doing SatAM the entire time.

Sadly, that’s the only thing about this movie that could possibly be considered good. The story takes forever to actually play out, mostly because half of it involves the heroes walking around and listening to Raiden spout out exposition. Even during the CGI flashbacks, Raiden just drones on and on, usually explaining things that are actually happening on screen. The movie mixes terrible hand-drawn animation with terrible CGI, the sort of pre-Pixar stuff that would have gotten laughed off of an episode of The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest. If you look closely, you can even see the characters occasionally clipping through themselves. The CGI scenes are used to show canon events from the games, like the fatal fight between Scorpion and Sub-Zero. If you wanted to see how it played out in CGI that’d look terrible on an Amiga, at least.

That’s not to say that the drawn animation is any better. In fact, it’s actually somehow worse. Nobody can even walk properly, with all of the characters having a ridiculously overexaggerated walk cycle. The crowning moment of awful would have to be the fight scene at the end, where the heroes face off against a few dozen Tarkatan warriors. The animators handle this by repeating about five scenes over and over and over again. See if you count the number of times you see the same Tarkatan running towards the camera, or Johnny Cage’s ridiculous crab-walk/shuffle. And no, animators, blurring the footage and making it play in slow motion won’t make it look new, either. That’s just lazy.

Overall, The Journey Begins is pure garbage, and you shouldn’t even consider watching it unless you’ve got a few friends to share the pain with. If you have to watch it alone, maybe you could close your eyes and pretend that the movie is about Commander Shepard, Johnny Bravo and Liu Kang, who are going out to fight Dr. Robotnik. Honestly, that’d be a much more entertaining movie than what is delivered here. Threshold Entertainment is still somehow alive today, with their most notable release these days being Food Fight, a movie where Charlie Sheen plays a dog detective who’s also a mascot of a breakfast cereal. It’s hard to say whether it’s worse for sure, but it’d be a really close contest.

The biggest part of the whole trainwreck, is that the VHS claims that it has a secret kombat kode for MK3 at the end of the video. Apparently, if you try to enter this code, it won’t actually do anything.

Links:
An accurate representation of the movie’s climactic fight scene.

Mortal Kombat: The Movie (1995)

By 1995, Mortal Kombat mania was at a fever pitch. With three games that had set the arcades of the ’90s, it seemed Midway could do no wrong, even with stiff competition from Capcom and SNK. Merchandise was inevitable, including movie plans. Capcom already had their shot on the silver screen a year before with Street Fighter. Aside from a few good lines and a fantastic performance from the late Raul Julia, it generally wasn’t very well remembered. The first Mortal Kombat film, however, ended up being quite a lot better, and it’s still probably one of the best game to film adapations you’re likely to see. Wasn’t exactly the next Citizen Kane, of course, but for a martial arts movie and a video game adaption, it does pretty well.

The script is an adaption of the plot from the original game, with Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade, and Liu Kang taking a boat to Shang Tsung’s island to compete in Mortal Kombat. Johnny and Sonya have more or less the same backstories they did in the games, with Johnny wanting to prove that his martial arts skills aren’t faked, and Sonya out to capture Kano. Liu’s backstory, on the other hand, gives him a brother named Chang who ended up being murdered by Shang Tsung. Not entirely accurate to the games, sure, but it gives him more of a motivation besides being ‘the chosen one.’ Raiden, played by Christopher Lambert of Highlander fame, takes up the mentor role once again. He doesn’t actually do much here besides sitting around and offering advice to the heroes, usually trolling them in his gravelly accent.

The movie gets a slow start until the second act when the setting changes to Shang’s island, where the tension starts to pick up. The fight scenes are choreographed pretty well, with one of the highlights probably being Johnny Cage’s long, drawn out fight with Scorpion in the Netherrealm. All the characters from the original game are given the time to show off their moves, and for the most part, they’re represented pretty closely to the games. There are some more subtle references in there, like Shang Tsung shouting out “Flawless Victory!” after Goro kills Johnny’s buddy, Art Lean. The only real low point of the fight scenes would probably have to be when Reptile shows up, since for half of the fight, he’s a terrible CGI lizard creature.

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