The Warner Archive continues to put out some rarities with its latest release of Dragon’s Lair: The Complete Series.
Most people probably remember Dragon’s Lair as a disc-oriented arcade game with graphics that looked like a moving cartoon. That’s how I remembered it, at least. Though I also remember the animation being a bit… better.
This Dragon’s Lair cartoon ran from 1984 to 1985 on ABC…. meaning, it was after CBS’s Saturday Supercade popularized the “video games as cartoons” genre but before great material like the Disney Afternoon came along in the late 80’s. And – to be fair – most of the cartoons of this era, aside from the ones made to sell toys like G.I. Joe, MASK, Thundercats, or the recently-released-by-Warner-Archive-also Silverhawks… aren’t very good, unless you have fond memories associated with it. Heck, even the Legend of Zelda cartoon had a more three-dimensional princess. That said, if you watched this show at age 6… or are at age 6 now… you’d probably love it.
The music is somewhat cheesy, although I’ll be darned if some of it doesn’t sound a bit like the theme music to the Beauty and the Beast live-action TV show. The characters are over the top. The animation is… not the best. The dragons are particularly silly looking. But if it pokes your nostalgia buttons, you’ll be more into it than I was.
You can get Dragon’s Lair exclusively through the Warner Archive here. (Order me a copy of Silverhawks Vol. 2 while you’re at it?) And although I wasn’t the biggest fan of this 13-episode set based on the content alone, it looks great, it sounds great, and as I keep saying, I love that rarities like this make it to DVD.
