Mariner's Run: A True Sea Dog

You know what I always like discussing? Well, yes, Trouble Shooter. Oh, and Gravity Rush too. And don’t get me started about Angel Cop. I could go on for days. 

However, I also enjoy talking about canceled stuff: games and movies and other creations that never saw the light of day. And it’s especially fascinating when those projects are effectively finished and qualify as lost media. That’d be actual lost media, the sort that is possibly gone forever, and not just something that you can’t find on YouTube or the Internet Archive after an intense eleven-second search. 

Mariner’s Run, or Sea Dog in Japan, might be one of these. It’s a rare sort of genre-hybrid video game, mixing an RPG with oceanic explorations. Vic Tokai announced it for the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Famicom in 1991, and screenshots appeared in a few publications. It was to follow The Krion Conquest (Magical Doropie in Japan) on release schedules, but Vic Tokai decided to join those companies pulling out of the Famicom/NES market once it was clear that the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis were taking over. Cowards, all of them. 

So Mariner’s Run was canceled everywhere, leaving behind some vague descriptions, a few images, and speculation about whether or not it was even finished. Games from the NES era had short development times, remember, so it wasn’t out of the question that a completed and market-ready title would get the axe.

 

Well, Mariner’s Run at least existed as a working game. Here’s some very brief footage of it running at what was probably an exhibition in Japan, as the game has the title of Sea Dog. We get short glimpses of a ship navigating ocean depths, plus artwork of a half-cute mecha-submarine with arms, a missile-launching mouth, and a helmet that Metroid’s Samus Aran might have worn. 

I’ve mentioned Mariner’s Run before, and I still think it’s among the most interesting unreleased and as-yet-undiscovered NES games, right up there with Bandai’s Ultimate Journey. For one thing, it has few direct relatives. The blend of submarine expeditions and RPG features sounds unique; the aquatic dives were apparently side-view action, while the other half of the game involved wandering towns with an overhead view. There are other games with similar mixes, including Deep Sea Adventure on the PlayStation, but there was nothing like this on the NES back in 1991. 

I wish I could credit whoever shared that video on Twitter back in 2022, but the account no longer exists. I saved it at the time and uploaded it to YouTube just this month, so let me know if you’re the one who originally posted this video…or the person who shot the footage in the first place.

At least I can properly credit this clearer scan of a Mariner’s Run screenshot. It was posted by Frank Cifaldi of The Video Game History Foundation, and it shows one of the few known images of the game in welcome detail. We can see the layout of a town that the player would visit to…um… 

Wait. Is that shopkeeper a dog?

 

Perhaps it’s just a trick of the pixels, but that looks like an apron-clad merchant with the head of a dog or possibly a cat. Yes, an actual sea dog in Sea Dog. While it might just be a typical white-bearded vendor (as implied by another, blurry town screenshot), the figure has a wide grin and an actual nose that none of the other human townspeople possess. One of the neater elements of Mariner’s Run is the implication that it takes place in some futuristic world of rising ocean levels and lost technologies, and perhaps mutant animal-people were part of that mix. 

Even if I’m wrong and Mariner’s Run possessed a more mundane setting, I’d keep calling it a standout among unreleased video games. Vic Tokai has a very intriguing catalog, from Clash at Demonhead to those Trouble Shooter games I always bring up, and a submarine RPG would fit right in there. So I hope we’ll one day find Mariner’s Run or Sea Dog or whatever else it might have been called. It would show the world a promising, perhaps unfairly canceled game. Or at least it would solve the mystery of that shopkeeper.

My Stinkor Story

He-Man and The Masters of the Universe is less a toy line or a cartoon than it is a case study in ruthless, well-timed marketing. The rush of commercialized animation in the 1980s is fascinating in its mercenary layers, but the short of it is that Mattel began it all by relentlessly promoting He-Man action figures with a cartoon thanks to loosened FCC restrictions. This may go down as one of the lesser machinations of the Reagan administration, but the competition there is fierce. 

Evil or not, toy companies swamped the airwaves with their TV shows. Among the creations that sprung from this ominous entwining of advertising and entertainment, He-Man wasn’t the most enduring. Transformers, Ninja Turtles, My Little Pony, and G.I. Joe arguably got better mileage. 

Yet He-Man was first, and He-Man was massive in its day. It wasn’t just toy sales or after-school cartoons, either. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade had enormous He-Man floats. Dave Barry mocked He-Man toy names (“Lob-Stor”) in his books. Concerned Christian parents saw demonic imagery in the villainous Skeletor and fretted that their children might attach quasi-religious proportions to He-Man’s tagline of “The Most Powerful Man in the Universe.” 

I enjoyed this almost by accident. I was a little too young to catch the full weight of Mattel and Filmation’s toy-cartoon assault, but I had plenty of Masters of the Universe paraphernalia. Much of this was due to my grandmother, who of course spoiled me and my sister with new toys whenever we visited. I soon had He-Man and Skeletor and a good share of their dueling entourages, and a trip to the grandparents usually meant a new addition. 

One day in 1985, my grandmother brought out Stinkor.

Even those distantly familiar with He-Man toys may recall that every figure had some gimmick, such as spring-loaded punches or interchangeable arms or a water-spraying robot elephant trunk. Stinkor’s contribution to this feverish creativity was that he smelled bad. 

Yes, that was all. Stinkor was a skunk-colored action figure who emitted an actual odor.  Of course I found this amusing, and when my grandmother presented me with Stinkor I joked that I would leave him on her bed one night to spread his presumably fetid aroma. 

Grandma was not amused. Though not upset, she declared that if such was my intent, I would get no Stinkor. 

I’m certain she would have relented if I had apologized, but that’s the strange thing: I didn’t. 

Part of this doubtless came from me being a little brat, but the fact was that I no longer cared that much about Masters of the Universe. Transformers and GI Joe and Starriors (hey, they’re underrated) all interested me much more by that point, and I’d had my fill of He-Man. The cartoon seemed repetitive and preachy, and a lot of the action figures were suspiciously similar. I was hardly a discerning consumer as a kid, but even I could see that Stinkor was just the line’s earlier Mer-Man figure painted like Pepe Le Pew. His orange armor was reused from Mekaneck. And he didn’t even come with any accessories beyond a boring little shield. If you’ll pardon the phrase, Stinkor was running on fumes. 

So my grandmother put Stinkor away. I don’t recall if I got in trouble over this, but it made no difference to me at the time. Only many years later did I realize how dumb I’d been to turn down a toy. More importantly, I worried that I’d hurt my grandmother’s feelings by callously rejecting her gift. 

If I was outgrowing Masters of the Universe, I wasn’t alone. The series declined in popularity by the mid-1980s. It may have been a stagnation of ideas, as the line tried to introduce dinosaurs and a new lead called He-Ro to little effect. It may have been the general life cycle of a toy that isn’t a pop-culture keystone. Some even blamed She-Ra, He-Man’s sister, and her series for making Masters of the Universe seem like a property for girls. I don’t entirely believe that, but it’s sadly true that a lot of boys back then stigmatized any remotely feminine pastimes. That’s another tale for another time. 

Whatever the cause, He-Man was in a slump by the time the live-action movie arrived in 1987 with Frank Langella and a lot of Jack Kirby references. Masters of the Universe was the first big toy-and-cartoon onslaught of the 1980s, and so it was the first to die off. It became a symbol of Reagan-era excess, a hyper-macho hero shamelessly sold to kids in every way the government and media would allow. 

In that case, Stinkor was the decade’s toy industry at its most absurd. He didn’t have laser eyes or a grappling hook or some battery-powered talent. He just stank. 

Stinkor never had an easy time in the He-Man ranks. The staff for the cartoon reportedly laughed him out of the writers’ room, and he never appeared in the show (he would have presented a confused moral anyway, showing kids that you should in fact judge people by how they smell). The 2002 Masters of the Universe series featured him and tried to develop some backstory, but there’s only so much you can do with a character called Stinkor. 

The recent Masters of the Universe: Revelation, continuing the 1980s cartoon, tries to make up for Stinkor’s original absence by giving him a few moments before he’s thrashed by more popular characters. He does not appear in the trailer for that new Masters of the Universe movie, which looks almost bland and safe enough to ignore something as goofy as Stinkor.    

Even so, there are Stinkor toys aplenty. We’re in the grip of rampant 1980s nostalgia pandering to momentarily soothe our slow capitalist decline into ruin and chaos, so you’ll see not only multiple He-Man lines but multiple He-Man crossovers with Ninja Turtles, Thundercats, Transformers, and so forth. New Stinkors take every shape from little decorations to his elaborate redesign from Revelation. I resisted all of this. I didn’t need a Stinkor in 1985, so I didn’t need one today. 

Last month, however, my aunt and uncle were housecleaning and sent me some old toys that my cousins no longer wanted. This was among them.

Could it be the same Stinkor I stupidly refused so many years ago? It’s possible. My grandmother indulged my cousins as much as she did my sister and me, so it’d make sense if she offloaded Stinkor on them instead of taking him back to the store. I’d say that my prodigal Stinkor has returned, though to be accurate I must note that I, not Stinkor, was foolish and wasteful in my youth.

And he still smells! Mattel actually baked a patchouli mix into the plastic that composed Stinkor, giving him a distinct but hardly mephitic aroma. 

Perhaps if I’d jested about Stinkor to my grandmother after I received and opened the toy, she would have found the scent unobjectionable and seen nothing wrong with me leaving him around the house like some skunk-man air freshener. Yet this would have lumped Stinkor in with all of my other He-Man figures to be forgotten (and probably sold). And then I’d have nothing to write about this month. 

For further reading on Masters of the Universe and the interplay between toys and cartoons, Brian Brown’s The He-Man Effect takes a thorough look at the history and nature of the whole process. It’s a good primer for anyone navigating the traps of acritical nostalgia, though I think it leaves out a major reason He-Man and similar TV shows caught on: there weren’t a lot of better alternatives in children’s programming at the time. If Masters of the Universe sent kids down a treacherous path, I partly blame Turbo Teen and The Biskitts. And since Stinkor wasn’t in the original cartoon, I can’t blame him all that much.

There’s one more thing. Grandma, I’m sorry I made dumb jokes about Stinkor back then. I hope it’s okay that I’m making them now.

Tailenders: Catching Up

I have to pity Tailenders. It’s one of those perfectly entertaining, subtly fascinating creations that was abruptly buried and forgotten due to superior competition. Here that competition was Redline, Takeshi Koike’s brilliantly detailed and lovingly animated slice of futuristic racing cinema; it remains a marvelous film, and there’s nothing I’d change in my ancient review. Released around the same time in 2009, Redline immediately overshadowed Tailenders, and with good reason. Tailenders is merely an anime short with nowhere near the promotion or impact, and yet it’s almost more intriguing in its tale of sci-fi speed demons.

 

Shiro Tomoe is a wreck across the board. His latest race on the planet Terulus shattered his vehicle, his body, and seemingly his ambitions. As he lies on the operating table, a purple-haired woman named Tomoe Miyagura barges in, climbs atop him, and jams an experimental engine into his heart. She’s a mad scientist with a proposition: she’ll build him into a high-velocity cyborg if he’ll aid her research.

The two bond not so much over their common names but over the fact that they’re both out to win the planet’s next big race. She wants to blow up a troublesome terraformer the size of a small nation, and he wants to surpass the legendary Loser King, a racer who apparently attained such great speeds that he vanished into a dimension beyond all time. 

There’s precious little room for Tailenders to do much. Running under half an hour, it barely manages to introduce Tomoe (the Shiro guy) and Tomoe (the scientist) before dropping them into a vicious race, one where they're seeking not so much first place but rather the bizarre immortality of Loser King. Some supporting characters and fellow racers drop in and out, but there’s really room only for our two protagonists and Shiro’s similarly remodeled rival Goodspeed. Oh, and there’s a short clash with a rollerblading dinosaur who’d be straight out of a 1990 kids’ yogurt commercial if he wasn’t rendered in the weighty style of Tailenders.

Yes, Tailenders is all about visual punch. The heavy shading and muted colors make for a tight atmosphere, and the animation’s generally sharp aside from a few dashes of unwieldly computer graphics. Backed by a heavy soundtrack and bombastic acting, it captures a slick yet grimy tone similar to Hiroyuki Imaishi and Studio Trigger’s flourishes. That suits a story about thrillseekers overwhelmed by their single-minded goals in a world where even a clear sky seems a little ominous. 

To be fair, Tailenders isn't entirely stuck on the surface. The world of Terulus is more than a raceway, as it's dominated by malfunctioning terraformers and moving cities that keep humanity constantly on edge. It’s technically science fiction, but Tailenders is unshackled to perfect labcoat concepts of relativity and physics. Tomoe and Shiro and Goodspeed are all chasing a warped enlightenment in the form of Loser King, and their encounter with him, a scarred apparition stuck in a silent temporal purgatory, is fascinating and absurd. Like the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer film, Tailenders is a glitzy rush that’s primarily about the appeal of a glitzy rush, but here the stakes are higher and stranger.

 

It would, of course, be more compelling if the characters could develop. Shiro’s just all about racing, so Tomoe is the only one who pushes things into interesting turf. Giving off the same scheming, callous energy as Haruko from FLCL, she has a playful curiosity more relatable than the competitive machismo of Shiro, Goodspeed, and other racers who only want to go fast. There’s a mere hint of romantic tension between her and Shiro, and yet it’s another piece of Tailenders that made me want more. 

I should clarify that I didn’t want more of Tailenders in the form of a sequel. I wanted an expanded version of the same story, broadening and exploring the history of Terulus, the origins of Loser King, and the manipulative symbiosis between Shiro and Tomoe. It’s easy to cast Tailenders as a descendant of the brief, eye-catching OVAs of the 1980s and early 1990s, but even those usually ran longer than this. Tailenders sometimes feels like an extended trailer for a full-length movie or six-part series.

   

Nowhere are Tailenders’ derailed ambitions more apparent than its website, still up after all these years. The cast list shows off dozens of vehicles and their drivers: a cage-wearing goth, a helmeted pizza deliveryman, a tree mutant growing out of a zombie, a simple barber, a cyclops alien, and a mechanical mouse soldier who dries a giant toy train in a circular track, just to name a few. 

Most of them put in only the briefest appearances in the animation. Tailenders was part of the Anime Innovation Tokyo project, and I have no doubt that it was envisioned as a much larger deal, perhaps as a TV series or a video game in the tradition of F-Zero. Too bad we’ll never see more of racers like Kyle Triton, the dolphin guy.

 

If Tailenders was a pitch for something larger, it didn’t work out. It made the rounds and got some attention, but there’s only so much that a 27-minute anime can do without some major backing. It’s not hard to find Tailenders these days so long as you add “anime” to the title in your search, but like so many snippets of the OVA boom and the modern anime industry, it’s forgotten apart from the occasional recommendation by a weirdo fan. 

Well, I’ll be that weirdo fan this time. Tailenders is still enjoyable, with a vibrant look and pace that makes me ponder its hints of meaning and wish there was more to it all. It’s worth a watch and deserves mention if you dive into Redline, track the varied offspring of Speed Racer, or examine the surprisingly broad influence that Wacky Races had on Japan’s pop culture. It may not surpass the best of its competition, but if there’s a lesson in Tailenders, it’s that coming in first doesn’t matter. We find our own finish lines.

Emerald Dragon: Updates and Cows

I wasn’t planning on returning to Emerald Dragon quite so soon, but I’ve seen two important developments. One is a complete fan translation of the PC Engine version, which is my favorite incarnation of good ol’ Emerald Dragon. Released by Stargood, it covers the entire game and even enables the debug mode’s helpful features. The translator’s notes also go into extensive detail about the various Zoroastrian terms that the game appropriates and how complicated it was to trace some of them. Good on them for not going the easy 1990s route and just renaming Atrushan and Tamryn (or Tamrin) to Alvin and Tammy.

 

The translators are also blunt about not being too fond of the game, which is refreshing in contrast to official localizations for which the staff are seldom allowed critical comment. I disagree with such opinions, of course, but they nonetheless make clear that Emerald Dragon is an RPG of a certain era and, more importantly, a certain fashion. That’s part of why I like it. 

Anyway, the translation patch is a good excuse for me to play through the PC Engine version again, And hey, if an unofficial English version of the game popped up a month after I finally wrote about Emerald Dragon, perhaps something else will emerge when I mention it again. 

The second major Emerald Dragon development: I noticed that one of the enemies turns into a cow.

 

You see, all of the foes in Emerald Dragon briefly flash when damaged. So what happens when Atrushan strikes this skull-faced creature, who looks as grim and menacing as you can be when you’re about three square centimeters worth of pixels?

 

It turns pale and looks like a stupefied cow. Perhaps this is entirely by accident, but I like the idea of a graphic designer noticing this back around 1994, having a chuckle, and deciding not to change it. 

In fact, that strikes me more fondly now than ever. As the new year dawns we face a world where a lot of alleged entertainment is vomited out by soulless corruptions of artificial intelligence, to the point where we might doubt even the genuine creations. It’s enough to tilt me toward older books and movies and music and video games, all free of such uncertainties. I can rest assured that yes, an actual human crafted that momentarily bovine monster in Emerald Dragon.