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For all of you ignorant buffoons who think Halo is the best game ever created, you obviously don’t remember the great cult classic ToeJam & Earl and its sequel, ToeJam & Earl: Panic in Funkatron. For those of you who have never played it or have never heard of it, you must reacquaint yourself with the Sega system and get into the Funk Dimension.
Both the original (released in 1991) and the sequel (released in 1993) are designed as side-scrolling platform games for the Sega game console. The games feature single-player and two-player cooperative modes, in addition to random generation of levels and items (so it never gets old or repetitive, no matter how often you play).
At its core, ToeJam & Earl is a comic satire on 1990s urban culture. The protagonists consist of two alien rappers: ToeJam, a thin, three-legged red alien that wears a large gold medallion necklace and a backwards baseball cap, and Earl, a fat orange alien wearing high-tops, oversized sunglasses, and baggy, blue polka-dotted shorts. The characters’ speech in the game is constructed around California slang, and the soundtrack features a unique blend of hip hop and jazz-funk.
In the original ToeJam & Earl, the dynamic duo ToeJam and Earl crash-land on Earth and must embark on a mission to find the pieces of their spacecraft in order to return to their home planet, Funkotron, while avoiding Earth’s antagonistic inhabitants. Should the player succeed, ToeJam and Earl reconstruct their spacecraft and escape back to their purple planet.
The plotline of the second installment of the series, ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron, concerns the duo discovering that a number of earthlings have stowed away on their spacecraft and are wreaking havoc across their home planet. They must hunt down these earthlings and imprison them in order to send them back to Earth. There is also a subplot that involves ToeJam and Earl’s attempt to lure Lamont the Funkapotamus, “the source of all funk in the universe,” back from his hiding in the Funk Dimension.
The best things about Panic on Funkotron include the imaginative characters, the soundtrack, the landscape of the planet, and the other alien creatures that resided there. Throughout the different levels, ToeJam and Earl would come upon various alien friends, one of which is a short three-eyed green alien with a large boom box, with whom ToeJam and Earl would engage in dance-offs. There are also flying hamburgers, cakes, and presents for you to collect for points and colorful bubble graffiti letters appear accompanied with sound effects that call out words like “Funk” and “Cool” when you gain points.
The landscape is rather bizarre, yet no doubt unique and fantastically rendered. In terms of pure distinctiveness, the style and graphics of this game remain unparalleled today. The landscape consists of purple ground, Dr. Seuss-reminiscent trees and bushes, parking meters scattered randomly, and giant purple sponges that the characters must bounce on to reach platforms of land that float above the main ground level. The purple-tufted palm trees were a favorite hiding place for the earthlings.
The earthling adversaries each had personas that were astutely created. They include a drill-crazed construction worker, a camera-wielding tourist that blinds the aliens with his flash camera, the bogeyman, kids armed with pea-shooters, a boy throwing a baseball, and rather round women with ankle-snapping poodles. In order to capture these troublesome earthlings, the player(s) direct ToeJam and Earl to pelt them with glass mason jars. These jars would capture the earthlings inside of them and reduce them to giant eyes blinking behind glass.
When I played this game with my older brother in the early ’90s, I didn’t quite understand all the references made by the game developers. Looking back, however, you begin to realize the sheer genius that went into creating this parody of ’90s
culture.
Besides the game’s humor and my positive childhood memories, it is, most importantly, addictive. It is relatively simple compared to the Call of Duty games that are popular now—anyone can play it, no matter their skill level. It is more on the level of addicting games such as SuperTux (a computer game) that are perfect for playing in class or for hours of fun whenever you don’t have anything else to do and want some mindless entertainment.
