Zelda CD-i

About

Zelda CD-i remixes are a series of mash-up and parody videos based on cutscenes from The Legend of Zelda CD-i games. Due to its lackluster quality in animation and shoddy dialogues, the remix series became immensely popular within YouTube Poop community and spawned hundreds of derivatives featuring characters from Zelda CD-i games. The videos are quite notable for their extreme deviations from The Legend of Zelda canon, including the depiction of the Triforce as a blue pyramid and the premise of having Zelda save Link.

Origin

Background

The Legend of Zelda CD-i (Compact Disk interactive) games were developed in late 1993 as a partnership between the Dutch electronics company Philips and the Japanese videogame publisher Nintendo to encourage production of CD-based games.^[1] The CD-i games were produced without any quality control from Nintendo, allowing three of the worst video games ever to be produced under its brand: Zelda: Wand of Gamelon (Animation Magic, 1993), Link: The Faces of Evil (Animation Magic, 1993), and Zelda's Adventure (Viridis, 1994).^[3] Animation Magic outsourced all of the cutscene animation to a firm in Russia, who also worked on I.M. Meen, another CD-i game commonly lampooned on YouTube.^[4]

Upon release, all of the Zelda CD-i games were criticized heavily for their bad gameplay, horrendous controls, confusing design, and ridiculous cartoon cutscenes.^[5] These games are widely regarded as some of the worst of all time, evident by their bad reviews from Electronic Gaming Monthly and IGN.^[6][7] Gametrailers.com regards Zelda: Wand of Gamelon as the "fifth worst game of all time."^[8]

The CD-i Zelda games have also been unofficially erased from Zelda canon by Nintendo. As a result, they are completely absent from any Nintendo publications, and they did not show up in the 2003 Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition,^[11] which included essentially every Legend of Zelda game to date aside from the CD-i games.

On YouTube

The early development of Zelda CD-i cutscene parodies on YouTube cannot be easily traced, but the original clip of the cutscene was first uploaded by YouTuber and YouTube Poop artist MasterAl on January 26th, 2006:

Spread

Once the Zelda CD-i cutscenes reached the YouTube Poop community, they spread like wildfire, and quickly gained status as one of the most commonly used sources in YouTube Poop videos. Wikitubia rates the Zelda CD-i scenes as among some of the oldest YouTube Poop sources, referring to them as "AIDS" due to their overuse.^[10]

The Zelda games would be followed shortly after by Hotel Mario, another CD-i game with cutscenes that would become the subject of ridicule on YouTube.^[2]

The Cutscenes

The cutscenes from Wand of Gamelon and The Faces of Evil are commonly used as YouTube Poop source material and the derived videos make up some of the most viewed examples of YouTube parodies. The cutscenes from Zelda's Adventure are not widely used because the cutscenes are in full motion video and the drawings are not as exploitable.^[9]

Notable Examples

Popular YouTubePoopers such as Walrus Guy use the Zelda CD-i games frequently as their base content. Throughout the cutscenes, certain lines are particularly subject to ridicule because of the mundane nature of the conversation (such as King Harkinian saying "I wonder what's for dinner") or the strange animation style coupled with bad line delivery (as when Gannon threatens Link with the line "or else you will die"). Often, for the sake of humor or the plot of the parodying video, the characters' original lines are mixed to sound like they are saying something else.

On Angry Video Game Nerd

Zelda: Wand of Gamelon was also featured in an episode of Angry Video Game Nerd, a web video series well known for its retrospectives on poorly-designed video games:

Search Interest

External References