The Legend of Zelda cartoon and comic books weren’t known for their subtlety. The early-1990s comic book had a number of unbelievable moments, like Link turning into Ganon.
Before Link was saving Hyrule from a mysterious spreading rot and other malevolence in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, he had a much simpler mission: Kiss Zelda.
You don’t remember that part from the games? That’s because it’s not part of any of Nintendo’s oeuvre. Kissing Zelda was Link’s driving force in DiC Entertainment’s 1980s cartoon The Legend of Zelda, and it was used again for a comic book from Valiant Comics in the early ’90s — well before Nintendo started to get much stricter about how its franchises were portrayed.
American networks at the time were always on the lookout for things to adapt into cartoons. Nintendo’s properties were primed for that: Games such as The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link have storylines, but they’re relatively simple in both graphics and narrative. In other words, there are a lot of gaps to fill in and various plot points to flesh out, which will (hopefully) end in a kiss.
The Legend of Zelda comic book is just one part of Valiant’s Nintendo Comics System collection, which had comics based on Super Mario Bros. and Captain N: The Game Master, a cartoon that mashed together different Nintendo characters. Like the cartoon created by DiC, Valiant’s The Legend of Zelda was much wackier than the franchise we know today — Link, Zelda, and a new fairy called Miff were up to a ton of hijinks. Here are a few of our favorite bizarre moments from the brief run.Hyrule uprising
In “Trust Me,” the second story in The Legend of Zelda’s second issue (it has two stories, as do the rest of the issues), Ganon visits the town of Saria (a location introduced in The Adventure of Link, not to be confused with the character from Ocarina of Time) to talk shit about the franchise’s iconic duo. The town quickly recognizes the shadowy, hooded figure as the prince of darkness; Ganon snatches up a little boy and sits him on his knee to evade suspicion, and then convinces the village that Link’s actually the malevolent villain.
