Remember One Saturday Morning? I have to believe that's not really a thing anymore, like there are dedicated channels for cartoons now instead of a weekend block on ABC or whatever. Or idk maybe the kids don't watch anything except streaming apps or YouTube or TikTok. I don't know, I'm not a parent, I don't know what the kids are up to. But when I was growing up in the 90s we had Fox Kids and Snit Station and One Saturday Morning. I feel so disgustingly back-in-my-day right now.
Anyway, One Saturday Morning aired on ABC in the 90s. For a while this was what I watched in the hours before gymnastics or soccer practice. I loved Recess. This was also an era when commercials were kinda interesting to watch, and there would of course be ads for Disney videogames because ABC was owned by Disney. This is where I actually found out that all the little minigames Timon & Pumba games I was getting individually were actually one big game, Timon & Pumba's Jungle Games. There were also ads for this strange game, Disney's Villains' Revenge.
Everything about this game exists in an uncanny valley of clashing aesthetics. The game opens in the middle of the night. You look around a room in first-person, in an almost photo-realistic looking 3D environment. You hear a voice asking you to find a light switch. If you've seen the character before, you'll know his voice before you find the light. When you find the light, you see that it was Jiminy Cricket talking to you. Jiminy is not rendered in 90s photo-realistic CG, but appears to have been drawn into the scene like transitional 2D animation. It appears as though the character has been lifted straight out of the Disney Pinocchio. But if you don't know what you're looking for, you're just kind of looking for, you're just left to look around this dark, creepy bedroom, with a voice yelling "Hey, over here!" over and over.
Jiminy points you to a weird book on a desk in your room, a book containing all the stories of classic Disney movies. He starts reading them to you, but gets bored, and starts writing new endings. This, apparently, causes the stories to come alive, where all the villains win, and turn their worlds into evil twisted fucked up hell dimensions. Dumbo's Ringmaster runs a circus out of a giant clown head like he's soft cosplaying KarnEvil, staffing his performance with gremlin energy clown freaks, performing to an audience of awful people who just like humiliating the tiny flying elephant. The Evil Queen from Snow White is stuck in witch mode and she turned Snow White's cottage and put her to sleep with a stronger apple, and erased(???) Prince Charming or whoever it was who could wake her up. The Queen of Hearts actually fucking cut Alice's head off and hid the head in a maze, which CALLS TO YOU SO YOU CAN GUIDE HER HEADLESS BODY INTO THE MAZE, WHILE THE PLAYING CARD KNIGHTS AND CHESHIRE CAT ALL TRY TO TAKE YOUR ASS OUT. And Peter Pan grew old and started using a sword instead of a dagger. You gotta help Jiminy fix this mess!
THAT'S RIGHT BAYBEE IT'S ACTIVITY CENTRE KINGDOM HEARTS.
You sword fight with Captain Hook so geriatric Peter Pan can take a breather, and yes, it's very unsettling to see Captain Hook swipe at you with a rapier in first-person. This is a quick time event game and it sucks. Like I said, Alice is trapped in a Wonderland garden maze and it's really fucking weird and disturbing to run around a 3D screensaver maze where you gotta take out the walking playing cards before they take your ass out. It's a quick time event game and it sucks. You gotta make a potion to reverse the knock-out apple Snow White ate, and it's heavily implied that you're on an invisible timer, so you gotta figure out the clues in the witch's drug den to make the wake-up juice. This one's pretty good! You gotta get Dumbo's magic feather back by making a rube goldberg device out of the circus freaks and their acts to take it back from its keeper. This one is okay! AND THEN, FINAL BOSS, YOU PLAY FIRST-PERSON BREAKOUT AND IT'S RIDICULOUSLY HARD. And then you make it to the end of the game, where it just actually becomes an activity centre with themed minigames.
I wanted this game so badly when I saw the ads for it on One Saturday Morning. But then once I got it, I saw just how strange and uncanny the first-person perspective was. This was the first time I felt like a game was weirdly threatening me, which I don't think the developers intended. But I see this game as a precursor to Doki Doki Literature Club or Slay the Princess, games that adopt a first-person perspective with second-person narration that give you a sense of blurred boundaries between software and hardware.
But this game also game with a bonus disc: fucking Nightmare Ned. This mediocre minigame collection with wildly menacing CG was how I ended up with a copy of one of the most disturbing games I've ever played. Not gonna lie though, I'm not upset about that. While there isn't much to say about the actual game part of the game with Villains' Revenge, the aesthetics of this game and the unforced uncanny dread of it all made it fun to navigate for an evening. Plus I've already gushed about Nightmare Ned, genuine work of art that it is.
Other games I've enjoyed from the year 1999:
Super Smash Bros. (N64), Mario Party (N64), Pokémon Snap (N64), Pokémon Stadium (N64), Sonic Adventure (SDC)
