Nobody's hero

This week, we're talking about uncanny animations, fighting game villains, and a sight that made grown men sob.

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Donkey Kong used to sing about being depressed

In 1996, the French made a 3D cartoon where Donkey Kong sang about his fear of an imminent ass-beating (“I’m gonna take a thrashing…by the time he’s finished pounding, you’d never recognize me”), proclaimed that “I see bananas when I look in your eyes,” and belted out a classic about being miserable:

The show, which was co-produced by a Canadian studio, has a place in animation history as the first TV cartoon to lean heavily on motion capture technology. But the incongruous singing voices, surreal plots, and glitchy facial animations have turned it into classic webjunk. After a first wave of memes around “Nobody’s Hero” more than 14 years ago, we got more than a decade of “what were they thinking??” videos and vaporwave remixes; you still see threads today where posters pour out their favorite links for the uninitiated. But DKC TV also floats around the web without any context — just as random pics of DK’s ass — leading many to assume they’re looking at something from a fan-made web animation, rather than a real show that aired in the US, Canada, and France (in a programming block called “La Planète de Donkey Kong”).

More:

• A retrospective from a childhood DKC fan partly explains why the production was so disjointed — the original scripts for early episodes were scrapped mid-production for being too offensive