Fil Barlow's original sketches for Buddy Boy
Buddy Boy was the initial concept for a video game-based series to be produced by DiC. While unproduced, many of the initial designs were retained when the series morphed into Captain N: The Game Master.
Development[]
In 1988, just before getting laid off from DiC, Fil Barlow worked closely with Executive Producer Richard Raynis in the early development of an animation based on Nintendo games - originally called Paper Boy, based off the game of the same name. For some legal reason, Nintendo didn't want to use that game's title, so Richard changed the name to Buddy Boy.
Richard and Fil were working with the idea that Buddy was still a paperboy, and, as you can see from the top left image, reality is as addictive to Game World characters as games are to us. See Mega Man on the bike? Buddy is distracting the nasties with newspapers, and they are walking off platforms.
Top right is the six foot high pitch art that Richard took into the meeting to try to sell Buddy to Nintendo. According to Fil, had he (Fil) been the head character designer on Captain Nintendo, the whole show would have been in this rounder style; however, he was in Australia when the show was green-lit, and other artists jostled for the helm. As you can see, only the Eggplant Wizard and King Hippo remained in this style. Fil was also the one that found these characters and added them to the lineup. He always liked the "Death" character that would try to "Game Over" Buddy and kick him out of the Game World back to reality.
Lower left shows Mega Man's family: his Megamum, Megadad, Megabird, and even Megarat. Mega Man was more of a boy, a reflection of Buddy in the Game World.
Lower right is the first time that Kid Icarus meets Buddy Boy (notice his rolled newspaper and bike wheel decorations on his pajamas). Buddy thinks Icarus is an answer to a prayer, but he's only in the real world to plead for Buddy's help in the Game World, accessed through the elevator in the closet, complete with Bellhop.
Fil wasn't the colorist on this art; that was handled by someone else, so the Mega Man colored green thing wasn't his call.
Fil Barlow's photocopy of pitch art for Buddy Boy
All that Fil had was one night to play some Nintendo titles. He focused on Mega Man and Kid Icarus. He played them until dawn and sketched as many characters as he could. That was all that he had to work with, so the accuracy of the characters was entirely up to what he could figure out in one night. He tried to be as faithful as he could with the time that he had. Any differences between Mega Man as he did him in the pitch and his actual look was unintentional; he was just a tiny cluster of pixels on a small TV screen back then. His main intention was to follow how the characters looked during gameplay, which struck him as cute and chunky. The Eggplant Wizard was based on what he saw playing Kid Icarus. It's such a wacky idea that he had to put him in the line-up. He didn't get to play Metroid, so therefore it wasn't part of the pitch.
He said, if he had done the series, it would have been wacky like Alf (the animated series).
In his opinion, the fact that the series continued without any further analysis of characters such as Mega Man shows just how little everyone that came after him, including the Nintendo producers, looked at the actual game, let alone played it.