In 1991, Rare and Tradewest developed Battletoads for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was an attempt to cash-in on the success of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series that debuted four years earlier. 1992 would see Rare and Tradewest partner with DIC Entertainment to produce an animated pilot for Battletoads. The pilot was written by former TMNT head writer David Wise and aired in syndication in the United States during the weekend of Thanksgiving 1992.
Cut to human Alvin and the Chipmunks: Morgan, Dave, and George. They're being yelled at by their principal for being the biggest losers in the history of the school. The boys must stop hanging out with each other or risk suspension. It's never explained why they're losers, so they're just losers, just go with it.
George gets called a toad during the roughest game of street ball I've ever seen. He pulls a Shaq and breaks the damn backboard.
Dave isn't fairing any better with his schoolmates, but he does utter the first 90's line of the show, wimpomatic.
His school poster idea gets rebuked, it's ugly, but not as ugly as you, Dave!
Morgan gets ridiculed by some guys working on a computer and makes the damn thing explode just by typing on it.
Professor T. Bird(get it?) and the Princess sneak off to a secret temple to get some Battletoad juice. The Dark Queen crashes the party and the prof says they need to head off to Earth, the most insignificant and backwards planet that isn't even worth conquering.
Back to our lovable losers in the town of Oxnard, California, they're hanging out at the Stop N Scarf, playing arcade games and dreaming about what every teenage boys dreams; cruising the galaxy and fighting aliens.
The bird and the professor come through one of the arcade cabinets to lay down some more exposition and offer these dweebs the toad juice, which sounds cosmetically cosmic to George.
The boys get slimmed from a seltzer bottle and transform into the (teenage) Battletoads, just as the villains pour themselves out of a Squishee machine. These ungrateful dorks almost let The Dark Queen get away with The Princess, but save her by throwing an ice cream cooler on top of her.
Testing out their "brain-bashing" powers with a food fight, a cover of Dick Dale's Misirlou plays in the background while the toads make food puns. There's a gag of the store clerk oblivious to what's happening around him.
Princess Angelica dubs the toadboys as Rash, Zits, and Pimple. Names that they think are psychotronic, incredible, and cosmoriffic.
Needing a place to stash the princess and the prof, they turn to their favorite teacher, who doesn't believe their story, even with an anthropomorphic chicken checking out his tv.
The princess and prof start to settle in, with T. Bird working an old car and Angelica getting a job at The Scarf N Donuts in her best sexy maid outfit.
Back at base, the bad guys come out of the washer and dryer with the battlecry: it's time to pop a zit, squeeze a pimple, and scratch a rash. Not the best of battlecrys, but it's on par with lets get warty!
The brain banging, mud stomping, mega toads make little work of The Dark Queen's jobbers, but while this happening, she is able to get the drop on Angelica and kidnaps her to the other dimension or planet or wherever.
The toads and T. Bird give chase in their toadster, the old car that Bird has been working on, and where they're going, they don't need tires, his words,not mine.
They easily scale the phallic tower where the princess is being held and stop the queen from blasting the princess, but can't stop the queen from smacking them around with her tornado attack.
Tired of getting their asses kicked, they turn the blaster intended for Angelica towards the tower's center and escape through the head of the tower's dome.
Crash landing back onto their school campus, they interrupt their principal eating a comically tall sandwich. The Mr. Weatherbee look alike isn't having it and wants to have the boys committed to the loony bin.
The Dark Queen returns in a saw blade saucer, vowing to destroy Earth, one mall at a time. The toads bounce into battle and board the saucer, walking into a trap. Luckily for them, The Dark Queen's henchmen have the aim of a Storm Trooper and bring their own ship down, causing the queen to retreat.
The show closes with the above graphic, unfortunately for Rare, Tradewest, DIC, and everyone who worked on this pilot, it was not the beginning, but more the end of the beginning. The pilot wasn't picked up, despite ads in Gamepro Magazine stating otherwise.
DIC Entertainment didn't give up though, they just waited till 1994 to try to capitalize on the turtles popularity with a new series called Street Sharks. This time around was a success and lead to a spin-off series in 1997, Extreme Dinosaurs.
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