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1* CelebrityVoiceActor: Mother Brain is of course voiced by [[Music/FourTops Levi Stubbs, lead singer of the Four Tops]] and the voice of [[Film/LittleShopOfHorrors Audrey II.]]
2* CrossDressingVoices: Although she's female, Mother Brain is voiced by [[Music/FourTops Levi Stubbs]], a man.
3* DevelopmentGag: A planned cartoon that eventually became Captain N (a ''Paperboy'' adaptation called "Buddy Boy") had [[http://filbarlow.deviantart.com/#/d55x9tu a newspaper delivery boy wearing a red hat]] as the protagonist. In the episode based on Paperboy, a kid named Julio appears with a very similar design.
4* EarlyDraftTieIn: The ''ComicBook/NintendoComicsSystem'' adaptation collectively refers to the villains as the League of Darkness, while they are called the Forces of Chaos in the TV series and other marketing materials. The "League of Darkness" name actually originates from [[https://thumbs.worthpoint.com/zoom/images2/1/0618/06/captain-game-master-kevin-nintendo_1_34df276f5040b80c0365b5e1ed274bb1.jpg an early draft]] of the first episode.
5* KeepCirculatingTheTapes: While the series was released on DVD it's now out of print with both volumes going for hundreds of dollars! In addition the completed version of "How's Bayou?" is very hard to track down compared to the, ironically, incomplete version on the DVD set. And finding the episodes with the cover songs intact is a chore in and of itself...
6* MissingEpisode: At least in the [=DVD=] set.
7** The ClipShow episode, "When Mother Brain Rules", a result of not having a bridging story line and having limited narration.
8** "How's Bayou", well, [[SubvertedTrope sorta]]... There were two versions of the episode. The original was never completed, due to time constraints, but when the series was picked up for syndication, a second, more common version was shown with additional scenes and dialogue to keep the storyline in place, but with other dialogue taken out too. Only the original, "incomplete" version was included on the [=DVD=] set, and the more common syndicated version is nowhere to be found in that set.
9** Almost all of the opening teasers save for the first episode and some season three episodes are gone in the DVD sets. Depending on who you ask, either they were not part of Creator/ShoutFactory[='=]s deal with Creator/DICEntertainment, or they were accidentally destroyed by Creator/{{Disney}} during [=DiC=]'s short tenure there.
10** Season 3, which was paired with ''WesternAnimation/SuperMarioWorld'', only contained ''seven'' original eleven-minute episodes, whilst ''Mario'' had thirteen. To compensate, five episodes from Seasons 1-2[[note]]"Nightmare on Mother Brain's Street", "Mr. and Mrs. Mother Brain", "Three Men and a Dragon", "Quest for the Potion of Power" and "Invasion of the Paper Pedalers"[[/note]] were rerun, but of them, four of them were edited down from 22 minutes to 11(!). "Quest for the Potion of Power" did not have any footage cut, and was split instead into two parts. Not that there's much reason to seek out these edited episodes, unless it's out of curiosity or for posterity. Regardless, only "Nightmare on Mother Brain's Street" and "Invasion of the Paper Pedalers" have surfaced on [=YouTube=].
11* RecursiveAdaptation: One of the NES games featured was "Puss in Boots: Pero's Great Adventure". Which was itself was based on an {{Anime}} movie based on two different works of classic literature (Literature/PussInBoots and Literature/AroundTheWorldInEightyDays).
12* ScrewedByTheNetwork: While Creator/{{NBC}} gave ''Captain N'' fair treatment for its first season, the following seasons, especially its third season, became the target of network politics as NBC began to move away from Saturday Morning cartoons; The series was merged with ''WesternAnimation/TheAdventuresOfSuperMarioBros3'' for an hour-long timeslot and NBC stopped promoting the series from that point. This means that viewers would have to rely on word-of-mouth in order to not miss a new episode. The third season in particular was noted for the decreased usage of many licensed characters (including those from Creator/{{Nintendo}}), shorter episode length as the result of sharing a half hour timeslot with its pairing program, ''WesternAnimation/SuperMarioWorld'', dialogue changes and shift to cheaper animation studios (the last of which was in favor for a superior performer, ''Series/SavedByTheBell''). NBC canceled not just the program, but its Saturday morning block without warning after this and block's overall abysmal ratings. Its timeslot was returned to the affiliates once the 1991-1992 television season ended, with most of them shoehorning local news in ''Captain N''[='=]s place.
13* WhatCouldHaveBeen:
14** The original premise was [[http://www.nintendoplayer.com/the-man-behind-captain-nintendo/chapter-4-enter-captain-nintendo drastically different]]. The original concept involved Captain N (originally known as "Captain Nintendo") as a Nintendo employee and the Mother Brain as a piece of programming from a Nintendo game pak (that was infused in an explosion with experimental "organic" [=ROMs=] brought to life by voodoo magic) that went rogue. Captain N had the power to temporarily give life to characters and items from Nintendo games. [[EarlyDraftTieIn These were mentioned in the first two issues]] of ''Magazine/NintendoPower'' in 1988 a year before the show debuted.
15** And [[http://filbarlow.deviantart.com/#/d55x9tu another version of that premise]] by Fil Barlow was also drastically different in various ways from the previous one, with the protagonist of ''VideoGame/{{Paperboy}}'' in the starring role instead of a CanonForeigner such as Kevin, and Mega Man living with a whole mega-family. The denizens of the video game world(s) were fascinated by mundane "real world" things such as newspapers, which is how the protagonist would've defended himself; this was axed for being an inversion of video game addiction, something that the higher-ups didn't want to allude to in a show about video games.
16** An issue of ''Magazine/NintendoPower'' during the show's run indicated that an actual game based on the cartoon was in the planning stages at one point. No doubt the sheer legal mess of using the various characters in one title killed this off fairly early on, however.
17** [[VideoGame/Metroid1 Ridley and Metroids]] are [[YouDontLookLikeYou completely unrecognizable in the TV series]], but it actually wasn't always meant to be that way. [[http://vovat.tumblr.com/post/140100099862/nteamhero-gamespite-nadiaoxford-vovat Storyboards]] reveal that they initially had designs that much more closely matched their original artwork.

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