#it would be unlisted on steam if i get enough interest so its not a virus. yay!

[saltedsour]

Waddup rain worlders. Who would be interested in playtesting my mod.

[coolgreatwebsite]

Wonder Boy (2010)

Editor’s Note: This article is about a video, if you don’t want to read the whole history I’ve generously written out just for you (yes, you!) at least head to the very bottom and watch it because oh MAN. Also, very special thanks to the Something Awful Retro Game Thread’s Random Stranger for getting this whole nightmare snowball rolling with a lot of the initial info and digging.

I feel like making this post is just asking for the subject matter to disappear, but my desire to share this is too strong. If you’ve looked at this website before, you’ve probably realized I like old video games. I can’t say Wonder Boy has been a series I’ve cared about outside of finally playing and really liking Wonder Boy 3 and Monster World 4 semi-recently, but there’s one thing that’s kept the series in my mind for the past 4 or so years. Actually, I’m getting way ahead of myself here. Any of y’all remember Chakan the Forever Man?

Chakan is a real piece of shit Sega Genesis game that managed to be mildly successful mostly by just kinda being there while the system was hitting full steam in America. It managed to make enough of an impression that it still gets brought up in retro game discussions every so often, mostly in the context of “remember that trash fire?”, but there’s one person in particular who refuses to let the Forever Man die: Chakan’s creator, Robert A. Kraus.

I’m not sure how many people who ended up playing Chakan and never thinking about it again realized this, but it’s actually a licensed game based on a comic book series that started sometime in the 80s! The word is that Ecco the Dolphin creator Ed Annunziata met Kraus (or RAK, as he signs his work) at a comic convention and the two somehow ended up collaborating on a Genesis game from there. The game came out, Annunziata and the rest of the world moved on, but RAK remains dedicated to Chakan. And you know what? More power to him. His aggressively late-90s website’s Chakan section is packed full of attempts to keep the property relevant, from new comics to board games, and as much as I think Chakan is maybe not so great on any level I admire his drive. RAK is not who I’m here to talk about. The true subject of our particular story can be found within the weirdest attempt at making Chakan hit it big, the Chakan the Forever Man movie. Specifically, we're here to talk about its combination Star/Director/Writer/Producer/Editor. Enter Robin Morningstar.

There’s not really a clean “origin story” for Morningstar that I can find online, but the scarce info that is available pretty much tells you everything you need to know. His IMDB page attaches him to six movies, of which he is Actor/Writer/Producer/Editor/Director on five. His sole interview about the project paints a vivid picture of an undeservedly egotistical independent filmmaker, especially when combined with this deleted comment (fortunately preserved by Something Awful poster wa27). The only surviving image of the Chakan movie (above) looks like something my friends would have made in high school. All of this is funny, but admittedly not TOO crazy outside of the fact that someone decided to make a bad movie that can be sorta tied back to an obscure-ish Genesis game. But if you take a closer look at that IMDB page, that’s where things start to get interesting. The first film Robin Morningstar is attached to is... Wonder Boy? And his biography page (almost assuredly written by the man himself) says he worked on it with... Uwe Boll?!

I’m being a little anachronistic by putting in a picture that was only available after the fact, but the trailer was the first thing that was found and it doesn’t seem to be online anymore so it’s a stand-in for that. Anyway. Digging deeper initially raises more questions. If Boll was involved, why didn’t he get a director credit? The movie appears to be entirely computer generated and at a level of quality that almost seems like an actual joke, so how did he even factor into it at all? As usual, information is scarce but just enough is there to piece things together. First, and most importantly, a defunct print-to-order Amazon listing confirms that this does exist and isn’t some weird fever dream. The entry on Morningstar’s bio mentions the film was “jinxed”, and the film’s trivia section references a news story in Retro Gamer Magazine issue 51. A quick google search reveals the “news story” was actually an (EXTREMELY buckwild) interview with Morningstar from about two years before the film’s release that goes into how Morningstar and Boll were having trouble getting the Wonder Boy rights from Sega and Westone. Wonder Boy’s IMDB FAQ gives the final word, saying that Boll left the project after failing to secure the rights, leaving Morningstar to take the helm and release an unauthorized CGI version two years later that was still about Wonder Boy and also named Wonder Boy.

With that mystery solved and nothing beyond the trailer to be found, the Wonder Boy movie seemed doomed to the obscurity of a funny sequence of forum posts and the occasional outside person seeing the IMDB entry and going “wait, they made a Wonder Boy movie?” However, the sequence of discovering all of this formed a sort of unbreakable link between Chakan and the Wonder Boy movie in my mind. If I ever saw Chakan get brought up for some reason, I kind of HAD to say “oh hey, did you know the Chakan guy still makes Chakan and some weirdo made a Chakan movie and also a hellishly awful looking CGI Wonder Boy movie?” That would always be the first thing I’d think of.

Flash forward to today, where Chakan was mentioned in a Discord server I’m in. I did the usual “haha oh boy get a load of this” routine, only this time I couldn’t find the trailer. What I found instead was a “review” of the movie on YouTube, uploaded 10 months ago. It’s one of the most 1000% unfunny things I’ve ever seen so I’m not going to even link it, it splices in some footage of some Spanish show and fake subtitles over them and it’s just really not worth even glancing at. But I noticed it was using footage that wasn’t from the trailer. Then I saw it. At the bottom of the description, under the “show more” button, was a link to another YouTube video. An unlisted YouTube video on a different account, uploaded in 2015. It was lying hidden for two years. I’m so happy to finally say this.

Please enjoy the entirety of the 2010 feature length motion picture Wonder Boy.