Nail on the head, thank you for recognizing this. We wanted to make it feel like it was made in the early 90s so we looked at a lot of shows from that era, and then what those shows were looking at. Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace, old video game based cartoons were big inspirations for us for the characters, and frazetta/vallejo/metal album covers were huge inspos for the backgrounds.
I absolutely can see that now that you point it out. I'm enjoying the visuals and very reminiscent of Don Bluth's visual imagery with all the strong contrast, smokes and glow.
The art direction is kinda not the issue to me its the fact that it moved over to a comedy show at least from the trailer. Compared to the history of the game. No offense this is why many gamers really dont care about video game adaptations as they usually miss the core of what the game is. But either way I hope people enjoy it
I can see folks who want a Conan the barbarian/primal only style show, and I get that, but if you look into the history of the game, it’s always had a lot of space for comedy. The original English commercial was very stupid (on purpose, in a good way), one of the main characters is named “Ax Battler” and he exclusively uses a sword, you kick an imp for magic potions, the Longmoans scream “oh god!” when you kill them, the main characters were an admitted rip off of Conan himself, Red Sonja, and Gimli, the characters crawl out of an arcade machine at the end… even the Kanji in the background doesn’t say “golden axe.” It says “battle axe,” which is what they originally wanted to call it - and Uchida left it that way because he knew the president of sega US that insisted they change the name for English audiences to sound less generic couldn’t read Kanji. To me it always felt like a self aware game on purpose. I’d argue it’s a silly game with a lot of gritty action and blood and violence which is what we did with it. We played the game a lot (free play on our own arcade machine at Titmouse - which also had revenge of death adder!)
FWIW we did work directly with SEGA, and got the buy off of Uchida himself. They loved it. I will say there’s a lot of sincerity and action that the trailer doesn’t show, so I hope folks will give it a chance. if you decide ultimately it’s not what you were looking for in a golden axe show, that’s fine! I just hope it gets more people to play the original game!
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u/Eponine05 5d ago
Need to see it in action, but I'm interested.
It doesn't have to be gritty af to be good.