The American produced Street Fighter: the Series tends to get quite a bit of flack from fans, some going so far as to call it “the worst video game cartoon ever made”. Hey, it wasn’t perfect, but in no universe was it ever as bad as the mid-90’s Mega Man cartoon. But that’s another story.

Street Fighter: the Series was a loose continuation of the live action Street Fighter film starring Jean Claude Van Damme. That sentence alone is enough to frighten most people away from ever watching the show, but bear with me. When I say it is a “loose” continuation, I mean it. There are several differences between the film and the TV series, mostly due to the writers “fixing” a lot of the damage done by the film and making the characters and storyline more closely resemble that of the video games. While by and large the Series took more cues from the video games, a few concepts from the film worked their way into the show. Of all the ones to make it in, easily the most interesting was Blanka’s origin. In the movie, he was a character named Carlos “Charlie” Blanka, who was mutated by the scientist Dhalsim (who was under M. Bison’s conrol). In the series, Blanka deals with his new freakish appearance and learns to cope with what he has become. Meanwhile, the experience of being forced to commit crimes against humanity by Bison drove Dhalsim to the mystic arts, turning him into the guru character from the games. A character exclusive to the movie (and the movie-based fighting game), Colonal Sawada, also appears in the series and is actually a pretty good new-comer with some sweet special moves (he channels his chi through his sword for projectile attacks).

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