Street Fighter the Later Years…Sonic Prunes

A legacy of video games that shaped the arcade world from a dying out culture to that of a one on one battle of game play that would spawn other video games to follow suit. As well the legacy of Street Fighter spawned multiple video game sequels, comic books, cartoons and even a feature film. I remember playing street fighter in the arcade shop till my fingers bled and reciting the words and phrases such as “Sonic Boom” “Tiger Uppercut” & “Yoga Flame” to my friends in many conversations.

Now we all age, except those fortunate enough to have fountain the fountain of youth located in the Florida everglades…which will be another topic for another time. So as I said, we all age, we all get old and at some point we won’t be as “agile” as we once used to be. So should it be any different that our favorite characters of long ago should not be susceptible to the same aspect of life that we face??? My vote is no for a number of reasons, one reason being that we can’t live in the past as much as we would like to and the other reason that it is comedy gold. That’s right, watching our heroes/legend of long ago grow old and fumble about life is pure comedy, except in the case of Steven Segal running around as a make believe cop…now that was just plain sad, there’s a reason why they didn’t want him in The Expendables.

Ok, back to my point to old people, heroes and comic gold…I stumbled across a website about a year ago called CollegeHumor.com and it’s basically a sketch comedy website. If you have never been there to check out their stuff or you have only seen a couple of vides from them I highly recommend you go there or go back and look at everything they have to offer. They have a number of sketch comedies and even a few web series, all comedic and all well filmed, edited and presented. Sometimes I like to go to the site and click around at some of the things I have seen before when I am feeling a bit down…the stuff is just that funny/entertaining.

So in my most recent of returning to the site I discovered a 9 part mini-series called “Street Fighter The Later Years”, which presents the classically famous and original Street Fighters aged and put out to Pasteur by Capcom, the creator of the video game series. You see all your favorite characters and their current life status like Dhalsim being a Taxi driver, Blanka being an electrician, Guile pushing a hot dog cart and Chun Lee as a dry cleaner. So yeah, when you look at it, it is a bit stereotypical, but it’s done in a funny way.

Its starts with Zangief and Dhalsim meeting up by accident and talking about their old times and having one last tournament. They meet up with M Bison, who is completely aged and in a wheel chair, and convince him to help them train and hold one last tournament. Oh and for the record they are not only old, but they are way out of shape, on a number of levels and in some aspects they have lost their powers and spend some time getting them back. They spend a good chunk of time trying to hunt down the other members and it comes out that Capcom has pretty much cut off any royalties to them and wants them all dead.

The story line is very solid and entertains you at every twist and turn so it makes the mini episodes seem go fast and leaves you wanting more and more. There are a few twists and turns in the sub plots and while some were obvious there was one at the end that was not and that right there was well worth watching all of the episodes. The only bad thing I can say about the overall series is that they didn’t make more than 9 of them, I wish they had made more. I would love to see what they could do with other series like Street Fighter, maybe something in the line of Mortal Kombat the Later Years.

Again though I can’t stress enough how funny it is and how much you should check it out, so what are you waiting for???

Be safe and remember that the thousand hand slap is the cheapest and easiest move to kill someone with,
John Cannon

P.S. One EVO a guy won the whole tournament with Zangief, the worst player next to Balrog, go figure.