Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars

Bucky O'Hare started as a comic. Writer Larry Hama and artist Michael Golden created him in the late 1970s, and he finally appeared in May 1984 in the first issue of Echo of Futurepast, an anthology from Neal Adams's Continuity Comics, in six eight-page chapters collected as a graphic novel in 1986. The setup was a parallel universe where the mammals of the United Animals Federation fought a Toad Empire whose consumerist population had been taken over by its own computer, KOMPLEX. Bucky, a green hare from the planet Warren, captained a frigate called the Righteous Indignation with a crew that included Jenny, a cat with hidden psychic powers; Dead-Eye Duck, a one-eyed, four-armed former pirate; the one-eyed android Blinky; and Willy DuWitt, a boy from San Francisco who stumbled into the war through a photon accelerator at home.

In 1991 the comic was expanded and republished to go with a cartoon. Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars was produced by Sunbow with Marvel Productions and distributed by Hasbro's Claster Television, and it ran in syndication from September 8 to December 1, 1991, thirteen episodes in which the toads captured Bucky's home planet in the premiere and lost it again in the finale. Hasbro's action figures arrived the same year: Bucky, Dead-Eye, Willy, Blinky, Bruiser, and Commander Dogstar against Toadborg, the Air Marshall, a Storm Toad Trooper, and Al Negator, plus two vehicles. The show existed to sell the toys, and when the toy plans fell through, the cartoon ended with them. Only that first wave was ever released; two more were planned, and a Jenny figure never made it to shelves.

What kept the name alive was Konami. Its NES game, released in North America in February 1992, had Bucky rescue his crew from four color-coded planets and then switch between them on the fly, each with a different weapon. It was directed by Masato Maegawa, whose team left Konami that year to found Treasure, and it became a late, sought-after NES title, ranked 24th in Retro Gamer's reader poll of the best NES games. A four-player Konami arcade game followed the same year. The cartoon itself reached VHS on six tapes and, for most kids, the memory is the toy aisle: one wave, one fall, gone.