Rendering Distance is a feature where we look at the influence of video games on other forms of media, whether it’s a straight adaptation like the Prince of Persia movie or general inspiration like the Scott Pilgrim comics.

It’s curious how classic Mega Man, who’s been around for over 30 years and has been consistently more popular in America than in Japan, has never had a good cartoon to his name. The only two non-anime ones he’s had so far have been loudly aimed at kids, which is often an early warning sign of poor quality, similar to how voluptuous women placed front and center tend to indicate that a piece of media is compensating for something.

Kids are a difficult audience to develop for because they’re energetic, hate being talked down to, and are at the phase in life where you do the most learning, so they are always smarter than adults give them credit for. Their short attention spans mean they have far less tolerance for mistakes than adults do and their lack of tact means they will always point out when the emperor is naked, so any imaginary world you build for them has to be watertight, with no egregious plot holes or contradictions in its canon. If that’s too great of a demand, you can skip it by making a variety show that teaches letters and numbers, but kids, and little boys in particular, are rowdy to the point that they will turn ANYTHING into a weapon, so you need to compensate by finding a wide variety of weird and creative ways to teach that keep kids engaged and get their parents, aka adults, to recommend your show to other parents. It’s the adults who are the gatekeepers in children’s lives, so anything trying to target kids has to get past them first. Walt Disney himself even said once, “You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.” Besides, why should the adults that make kid’s shows create something they don’t also enjoy? So if you’re creating a kid’s show correctly, it’s going to attract a healthy adult audience too, like Sesame Street, Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, Adventure Time, Animaniacs, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Danger Mouse, Sharon Lois and Bram’s Elephant Show, even Lamb Chop’s Play-Along. When shows like that say they’re for kids, they’re simply stating a basic fact, not making excuses for themselves.

Suffice to say, Mega Man Fully Charged ain’t no Steven Universe or Miraculous Ladybug. It’s at least unique though in how the story it tries to tell comes across as totally fake more than anything else, making it a master class in what not to do when making a cartoon. It was originally pitched as a show for kids 6 to 9, including their parents who grew up with the games, but ended up as a production with no direction. It tries to be everything to everyone and ends up being nothing to no one. It’s like someone took as many kid show tropes as they could find and stuffed them all in a blender, not even using the recipes established by good kids’ shows as inspiration. Brats with attitude, dark rivals, schoolyard antics, useless sidekicks, stupid supervillains, secret identities, cheap animation, punny episode titles, forced aesops; a pound of everything is dumped in here and it all comes out half-baked and tasting awful, simultaneously oversanitized and surreal. The last time the Mega Man series begat something that corporate, we got Rockman X-Over, a game that was never exported from Japan due to popular request. It wanted to be a celebration of the franchise, but came out so rote and joyless that even its official trailers made it look dreadfully boring.

I could probably stop there. I don’t have to go on. Buuuuuuuuuut…