If you haven’t seen Spumco’s latest cartoon “The Ripping Friends,” you are really missing something. The FOX kids show airs Saturday mornings and features four superheroes with more brawn than brain. It’s hysterical in that “Ren and Stimpy” way and contains plenty of content that is truly not suitable for kids, but they’ll never notice.
Spumco’s latest venture puts their characters in the world of video games. Spumco designed characters, settings and look and feel for a Sony video game called “Mariko.” It’s been released in Japan, and it’s definitely like nothing you have ever seen before.
According to the artists at Spumco, “The concept of the game is that you speak the lines for animated characters, being careful to get the timing and the acting just right. The game grades your performance, and when you complete the game, it assembles the scenes you have dubbed into a complete cartoon. It’s sort of like ‘Cartoon Karaoke.'”
Sounds pretty simple, but the language barrier may probe a problem. “But it’s not as easy as it sounds… The game is all in Japanese,” says the Spumco source, “So we haven’t been able to try it ourselves. We’ve seen tapes of people in Japan playing it, and all we can say is that it is astonishing and baffling in a very weird way.”
We hope Sony decides to release the game in the US for all of us Spumco-starved fans.
Get more info on the official Spumbo web site.
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