A waka waka down memory lane: the 1982 Pac-Man cartoon

With a new Pac-Man cartoon on the way to television, there’s no more opportune time to go back and re-examine the last Pac-Man cartoon, produced by Hanna-Barbera in 1982 and 1983. If you were too young to enjoy this stuff when it was fresh, get a very small bowl of popcorn and take in the five-minute clip above.

That’s from the first episode, which I recently watched on the Pac-Man: The Complete First Season DVD. Warner Bros. released this to the Warner Archive at the end of January, and it’s now available on Amazon. I took the opportunity to go back through this pilot, taking notes on what was going on.

As a kid, I just took the absolutely nonsensical plotline at face value. Now, after 30 years and, not to brag, a lot of Pac-Man, I can see that Hanna-Barbera was doing some really freaky stuff, both in the name of tying into the near-nonexistent plot of the arcade game and just because.Continue reading A waka waka down memory lane: the 1982 Pac-Man cartoonA waka waka down memory lane: the 1982 Pac-Man cartoon originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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