Trivia / Saturday Supercade

• Executive Meddling: According to writer Buzz Dixon, the Q*bert segment was originally pitched as what he called "Road Runner in 3 dimensions." However, Joe Ruby trashed the idea and point blank told him and fellow writer Gary Greenfield, "I want Happy Days!"
• First Appearance: Pretty much everyone makes their first appearance outside of an arcade cabinet, but special mention must go to...
  • Mario, with the first voice actor ever to portray him in animation being veteran Peter Cullen.^note However, the first live-action actor to portray Mario was Harris Shore in a commercial for Donkey Kong home conversions shot in 1981, edging him out by approximately two years. And Pat McBride may have been Mario's first voice, but not for animation.
  • Donkey Kong, voiced by Soupy Sales, who gets an And Starring for his trouble.
• He Also Did: Would you believe Kimberly from the Space Ace segments was done by a pre-Simpsons Nancy Cartwright?
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Considering that the games adapted for this show were all licensed by different companies, it'll be hard to see this in full form on TV again, or on DVD. It doesn't help that the segments are all individually owned by different companies. Warner Home Video said they had plans back in 2010, but as of 2022 nothing seems to have come of them.
  • The rights to the Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. segments are held by NBCUniversal; this was a result of Universal and Nintendo settling a lawsuit over Donkey Kong being a ripoff of King Kong.
  • The Q*bert shorts are owned by Sony Pictures by way of Columbia Pictures (who had owned Gottlieb in the 1970s and early 1980s); Columbia spun off Gottlieb's pinball division during the Coca-Cola era, but kept the rights to their video games.
  • Space Ace is the one in the best sights, being held by Warner Brothers who is very big on Hanna Barbera and Ruby Spears releases and no doubt will get its day on DVD eventually.
  • The official holders of Frogger, Pitfall and Kangaroo remain a mystery, as Warner Archive has never publicly said if they have rights or not to these three like they did the above mentioned four.
  • When Platypus Comix got a hold of CBS' Saturday morning preview special for 1983, which contained rare Supercade clips (including one of Pitfall), they made a point to emphasize that the show was hard to find and that the Donkey Kong clip they provided was the first to be circulated on the Internet without a farsighted Southern Belle being involved.
  • Since the release of the first episode, more segments have been found with Donkey Kong, Q*Bert, Space Ace and Donkey Kong Jr. having most, if not all, of their segments found in some form or another; Frogger has six segments available, while Pitfall and Kangaroo have two each (along with a small segment of a third for the latter). There is a total of four full recordings of Supercade itself floating around the internet.
• No Export for You: In Latin America, only the Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Space Ace segments were dubbed. The rest were never brought there.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Because of the above, this means that any release of the show will likely only be able to come in the form of its individual segments (including an MOD-DVD release of the Q*bert segments from Sony^note And even then, not all the segments are included; two of them are missing. It's believed Sony didn't want to pay music clearances on them. A similar fate happened with Shout Factory on another Ruby Spears cartoon, Punky Brewster).
• What Could Have Been: Warner Archive had hoped to release the show in its entirety, but those plans never materialized, and it has since been confirmed why (as explained above).

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