Trivia / Bubsy

• Acting for Two: In the pilot, Pat Fraley voices both Arnold and Virgil, whereas Tress MacNeille voices both Oblivia and Bubsy's nephew.
• Colbert Bump: The animated pilot definitely got a boost after it was riffed by The Annotators and reviewed by Mr. Enter.
• Creator's Apathy: The production staffs of Bubsy II and Fractured Furry Tales have openly admitted that they hated working on the games and did not care about their quality. They reportedly disliked the title character so much that they strung up Bubsy dolls from the office ceiling as if they were executing them and sarcastically repeated Bubsy's one liners to annoy each other. This probably explains why the two sequels weren't as good...
• Creator Killer:
  • Besides doing the visual effects for Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie, the pilot was one of the last major projects by Calico Entertainment, as well as their last animated production.
  • Cyndi Kirkpatrick, who was lead programmer on the first game and then lead designer on Bubsy II, hated working on both games so much that as soon as development of the second game was complete, she quit the video game industry altogether, without even waiting to see how the game performed critically or commercially.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: In the animated pilot, Bubsy's nephew is voiced by Tress MacNeille.
• Disowned Adaptation:
  • Original creator Michael Berlyn hated Bubsy II, which he didn't have any involvement in.
  • Most at Accolade didn't think fondly of the animated series pilot.
• Dueling Games: The Woolies Strike Back was released against Super Mario Odyssey, which came out a few days before, and Sonic Forces, which released a week after. While getting substantially better reviews than 3D, critical reactions to the new game were still mostly negative and it was overshadowed by the Mario and Sonic releases.
• Genre-Killer: The huge subgenre of "anthropomorphic Mascot with Attitude runs around Sugar Bowl setting" platformers pretty much died off — though they'd been dwindling for some years — dooming James Pond, Jazz Jackrabbit, Plok, Superfrog, Zool and others to obscurity. Only Sonic the Hedgehog^note being the multi-million selling originator of said subgenre and Rayman^note having survived the crash by being created two years after it survived and Bubsy managed to return in a new official game of his series 21 years later... which also got negative reviews and was overshadowed by concurrent Mario and Sonic releases, though it wasn't enough to keep Bubsy from getting another game only two years later, achieving a more middling reception albeit still falling under many people's radar.
• Inspiration for the Work: Michael Berlyn wanted to break away from the story based games and text adventures he was known for at the time and make a Sonic style platformer. His producer at Accolade originally refused but eventually decided to greenlight the project if Berlyn wrote an analysis on why Sonic the Hedgehog was a great game. Berlyn played the first Sonic game for ten hours a day for research and his producer accepted the resulting analysis.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: Woolies Strike Back has the "Purrfect Edition", which includes at least the game's soundtrack.
• Money, Dear Boy: This is the only reason Rob Paulsen doesn't completely regret voicing Bubsy in II and the pilot (though he still does regret it greatly).
• Referenced by...: Joueur du Grenier spends a large part of his 2010 video "From 2D to 3D" making a (very harsh) review of Bubsy 3D. In a 2020 retrospective of all the games reviewed in Joueur du Grenier, Fred crowned Bubsy 3D as the the worst game ever featured in the show.
• Sequel Gap: Bubsy is 3D in Furbitten Planet was released in 1996. A new installment wasn't released until Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back in 2017, 21 years later.
• The Other Darrin: In the first game, Bubsy was voiced by Brian Silva. In the second game and the animated pilot, he was voiced by veteran VA Rob Paulsen. In 3D, Bubsy was voiced by Lani Minella, another veteran VA. Doug Erholtz, yet another seasoned VA, is the current voice of the character as of The Woolies Strike Back.
• Troubled Production:
  • When putting the first game on the Genesis, Accolade reverse-engineered Sega's cartridge copyright protection. They did this in order to avoid having to pay Sega's licensing and publishing fees and to avoid having to exclusively release on the Genesis. This got them sued by Sega but the judge ruled in Accolade's favor, claiming that Accolade's actions fell under fair use as they wrote most of the cartridge code themselves and since Bubsy was a multi-platform game it wasn't dependent on the Genesis to be successful. This lead to Sega offering Accolade a much more favorable contract for future legitimate game releases.
  • Accolade wasn't prepared for the marketing costs needed to successfully advertise a game like Bubsy and the first game almost bankrupted the company. This led to them avoiding creating any new side scrolling mascot games.
  • As pointed out under Creator's Apathy, the production staff of Bubsy II and Fractured Furry Tales hated working on the games and didn't care about making them good.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The first game was originally envisioned as a Chester Cheetah tie in, but Michael Berlyn wasn't willing to pay Cheetos's licensing fees for the character.
  • Fractured Furry Tales was originally meant to be just an Updated Re-release of the first game for the Atari Jaguar, but the developers instead suggested using the game's code as the starting point for a Gaiden Game that would do more to demonstrate the system's capabilities. Between the Jaguar's notoriously finicky hardware and their disdain for the character, they quickly came to regret not having just produced the quick-and-dirty port they were originally asked to, but by then it was too late to back out.
  • According to the December 1992 issue of GamePro, one of Bubsy's original death animations was going to involve his head being cut off in a cartoonish style. This was removed at the request of Nintendo of America in order to get their Seal of Quality.
  • According to the same issue, there was also originally supposed to be a catnip item that looked like a green leaf, which would have made Bubsy go nuts. This was considered inappropriate for the game's audience, and was replaced with banana peels as a hazard in the final game.

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