Saturday Supercade (1983-1985 Ruby Spears)

Saturday Supercade is an hour long cartoon series that premiered on CBS on September 17, 1983. It is a compilation show of various cartoon shorts based off popular video games at the time. Because of all the various copyright issues involving each of the video games this show is based off of, the show has not reaired since CBS last aired it on August 24, 1985, with the exception of the Space Ace shorts which aired on Cartoon Network and Boomerang on various occasions. The rest of the show became lost, and for a while, very little of the show became available on the internet.

Many tape trading sites have been trading and selling two full episodes, and were the only two episodes fans had access to before we started seeing more of the show posted on the internet. One of the tapes were a full CBS Saturday Morning block from April 1984, and was uploaded on Myspleen and other torrent sites around 2005. The Saturday Supercade episode included Spaced-Out Frogs (Frogger), Gorilla My Dreams (Donkey Kong), Krazy Kamp Kreature (Q-bert), and The Teddy Bear Scare (Donkey Kong Jr.). It was, for a while, the only full episode of Saturday Supercade to be posted on the internet.

Some viewers had access to the second tape. Unlike the first tape, this one doesn't contain the original commercials. It wasn't posted on the internet until much later. The cartoon episodes included were Hyrdofoil & Seek (Frogger), Mississippi Madness (Donkey Kong), Masked Menace Mess (Pitfall), and Sheep Rustle Hustle (Donkey Kong Jr). The ending of the Dkjr episode was cut off as the tape transitioned into the Pac-man cartoon. Also, the included Pitfall episode is still, to this day, the only Pitfall episode available.

Eventually, at sometime around 2008 or so, an Ebay seller was selling 16mm film copies that contained episodes of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. The film copies were purchased by a cartoon collector, and the films were transferred to a bootleg DVD, of which, it was being sold on sites like iOffer. It is unknown where the main source of the films came from, but it featured a different set of credits that wasn't shown during it's CBS run, and were distributed by MCA TV... possibly an attempt at trying to show the cartoons in syndication. These films also remedied the missing ending to Sheep Rustle Hustle. The DK and Dkjr episodes were later posted on Youtube.

Also, around 2009, Crackle posted some Minisodes of Q-bert. This implies that Sony owns the rights to the Q-bert segments, which would make sense as Gottlieb, the developers of Q-bert, is owned by Sony. They were shortened versions of the Q-bert cartoons, and not the full episodes. Some of the full episodes were eventually uploaded on Youtube, but there's still episodes in which only the Minisode versions are available.

As Youtube continued to grow, so did the interest of uploading nostalgic content on the internet. This led to a few Youtubers uploading some Saturday Supercade cartoons that haven't been previously available on the internet, including two Kangaroo episodes, and the Season 2 intros being made available for the first time. While there's a bit more Saturday Supercade cartoons available on the internet now, there's still a good number of them that remains missing, and probably won't be surfaced until they're made commercially available.

In 2010, Warner Archive announced that they might release Saturday Supercade on DVD, but nothing has come out of it since. Most likely, because of all the copyright issues with the individual video game characters. Not to mention Sony seems to own the rights to the Q-bert segments going by the Minisodes.