The NES era cartoon, featuring Kevin Keene, a normal teenager battling the evil Mother Brain (yes, from Metroid) in "Videoland", is finally coming to DVD. Finally! Now we can all rest easy and watch the intellectual property of a half-dozen franchises birthed on the NES bastardized in digital quality.

If you don't remember this show (I barely do), it featured a handful of beloved characters such as Simon Belmont (pictured) from Castlevania, Mega Man, Pit from Kid Icarus, and an anthropomorphic Gameboy battling Dr. Wily, the Eggplant Wizard, and even King Hippo. It was truly the best cartoon to ever feature a robot boy and a walking handheld console fighting an eggplant and a boxer.

The details crept up earlier this week on the Captain N forums.

I am the producer of the DVD line of DiC titles at Shout! Factory, beginning with the recent COPS: The Animated Series. For the past couple of days, I've been going around the net researching Captain N: The Game Master, because I will, in fact, be producing it for OFFICIAL release (so, PLEASE stop any and all bootlegging you may be working on) later in the year.

I'd like to clear up a few things that I've noticed posted here and a couple of other sites. For starters, Shout! isn't owned by Sony. Sony is our distributor, so for a small percentage, Sony stocks retailers with our product. Shout! Factory is owned by Richard Foos (the founder of Rhino), his brother Garson, and Bob Emmer.

Secondly, regarding Captain N's masters...

I'm dealing with DiC even as I write this and the masters are in excellent condition. There's virtually NO difference between a production master and a broadcast master when you're dealing with animation. The major difference is that a broadcast master has several minutes of black where the commercials should be. Therefore, the masters I'm working with look as good as any that were "destroyed" when Disney took over.

I'm actually in the process of putting together a list of possible special features. While the lists I receive from people are in no way guaranteed extras— because as people have mentioned, Captain N isn't a show on which most companies can spend a LARGE amount of money and expect a return—, I would very much like to hear what the fans are looking for.

If you're interested in throwing out suggestions, please do so here. Do not email me, as I'm working on far too many projects to look and answer a ton of emails from fans. But I assure you, as you can witness in other forums around the web, that I will check back and respond here OFTEN.

Thanks in advance and tell all your friends that the Captain's finally coming to DVD!

Don't take it as gospel, but I think we can at least squeeze out a little "Yay!" for this.