Rayman: The Animated Series - Lac-Mac Napping

This might just be the unluckiest series I ever have to do. Reading about what had happened in the production of this show is really sad. This is the kind of show that other shows use as an example, a horror story of shows, but first, let's talk about the videogame this animated series was based off of, Rayman.

Aw yeah, this game rocked.

Rayman is a platformer game series that debuted in 1995 on the Playstation and PC (well, okay, also the Atari Jaguar and the Sega Saturn, but who the hell owned one of those?) and starred a really strange thing named Rayman that was vaguely humanoid and had a bunch of disembodied floating limbs rotating around a purple ball. It was a delightful sugar-coated happy romp full of bright colors, whimsical characters, and ball-crushing difficulty spikes. I've interviewed everyone in the world and I've found out that most people saw the maze full of sharp musical notes in Bongo Hills (or the maze of sharp tacks in Picture City), said "To hell with this", and returned this game and exchanged it with Spyro the Dragon.

The game was good enough to get a sequel, Rayman 2: The Great Escape aka "one of the best platformer games ever" (my main source being my own personal opinion of course). No seriously, play this game because it's fun. Rayman 2 was more manageable in difficulty, but it traded the sugar coating and the bright colors with a darker and edgier atmosphere filled with giant spiders, poisonous swamps, killer robots from outer space, and zombie chickens.

I'm going to stress the zombie chicken part.

The writer of this blog still can't play the Tomb of the Ancients level without breaking down and sobbing.

And the sequel spawned a TV series. A very ill-fated TV series that lasted...wait for it....

FOUR EPISODES.

Fun fact: Creepy Crawlers the Animated Series is also French. French shows have the worst luck.

Yes, this show lasted four episodes. The entire show is four episodes long. I've seen series pilots that were longer than Rayman's show. I've encountered farts that lasted longer than this. It never even got broadcast in the United States and literally the only evidence of this show in the United States (besides the Internet) was Nintendo Power hinting towards its existence and a VHS that's rarer than the Creepy Crawlers action figures.

It was planned to be a 13 episode season, but lack of funds and presumably poor writing (although that didn't stop Captain Planet) made the producers pull the plug early. Since Rayman isn't exactly the most popular videogame star in most parts of the world (he's popular in French-speaking countries since he's a French creation, but that's about it) and the relative obscurity of the episodes, this show is pretty much unknown.

But I'm going to talk about this show because what the hell, I might as well. I personally love the Rayman games (at least until they decided that they were going to fill the series with minigame collections instead of releasing a goddamn Rayman 4 like we wanted them to), and it'd at least be fun to see how they interpreted it for the small screen.

That being said, boy, am I in for a ride, because this show happened to follow the Sonic Underground line of thinking in that as long as they stick Rayman in an unrelated setting full of unrelated characters that have nothing to do with the original games, it's still a Rayman cartoon. So thus, let's talk about the first episode of this series. Let's find out what happens when you call a show "Rayman" but really make it about this unrelated blue guy in...

Lac-Mac Napping