Legend of Zelda Commercials are Magic and Prognostic

We’re all intelligent enough to know that ads are silly. Especially in the postmodern era, when it is more in vogue to either go full ham on pushing your product as ambrosia or to stab your tongue so hard into your cheek that it ruptures. Remember when Old Spice’s whole strategy was “ripped dude rambles at you almost incoherently”?

That’s precisely what I’m talking about.

In the wild world of video games, commercials have been absurd from the beginning. Like this commercial that created a horrific reality where Mario is the host of some half-vaudevillian, half-variety-hour program in Bowser’s kingdom. Or this incredibly advanced Intellivision ad that ran in theaters. But perhaps the most fascinating, or at the most perplexing, is the series of advertisements for The Legend of Zelda that have been batshit from the very beginning.

And I do mean from the beginning. Here we see a Japanese father and daughter, presumably, from a running series of ads for various Famicom titles. These commercials established a formula that the Zelda ad doesn’t deviate from:

A.) talk about the game and then

B.) something bad happens and one of the two gets angry.

Mind-bending? No. Neither was the American equivalent, which has become infamously known as just “the Zelda rap.”

But that’s not why I’ve gathered you here today. No, no. We’re here to look at the good stuff.

It’s legendary in its own right. It’s a step above anything that had come before. It’s tragically ahead of its time in the promotional game. It’s the original Japanese commercial for The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Hoo boy.

First off, it’s not a stretch of any kind to see the direct inspiration the production crew took from Thriller. It makes sense. Even though the album and subsequent video were almost a decade old by the first airing of this commercial, it was still seeing regular play anywhere that dared to air music videos.

What blows me away about this commercial, even now, is the amount of work that clearly went into it. From a production standpoint, this is peak care and attention. Sure, the Stalfos/skeleton guy is a Halloween Express bodysuit looking thing. But everybody else! The detail on Link’s uncle, including a cartoonishly extreme mustache. A Wizzrobe with a hat brim so wide that you cleverly can’t see the performer’s face. Full on mummy wraps for the Gibdos. A crumbling statue! I’m no expert on theatrical design, but even I can tell that that much costume and set work took many hours.

I know very little about dance and choreography, so I reached out to Abi Elliott, a friend and professional dancer, for a take on the sequence from that perspective. I asked her how much time and effort she thought would have to go into the dance work. She had this to say:

“Assuming all of the actors in the commercial are professional dancers/have experience, probably not more than an hour to learn the full sequence. The entire combination lasts for roughly six and a half 8 count phrases. The opening is repetitive (they do the same 4 count sequence 4x) and the formation of dancers pretty much stays the same, so the actors just have to focus on the steps. 

The choreo itself mostly requires good rhythm/sharp dynamics - since it remains vertical (rather than the dancers moving down to the floor/etc), it fits well in a smaller space. It reminds me a little bit of pop-up or flash dances. The hand movements are memorable and can be easily reproduced by someone with less experience watching the commercial.”

Which makes a lot of sense to me. Keeping in mind that the primary audience is younger children, getting them to mimic the dance moves seems like a great way to plant a little brain-seed.

If you’ve been making the rounds on the internet for a bit, you’ve probably seen that Link to the Past ad before. But have you seen the original Link’s Awakening commercial? It’s got puppets. Full on marionettes.

Now, Japan has a long history with puppetry as a legitimate form of theater. Bunraku, a form of this, has origins dating back to the 16th century. But to my thinking, that history has a lot less to do with this commercial’s inception than the 1960s puppet-based action-drama Thunderbirds. Shigeru Miyamoto once claimed Star Fox was directly inspired by Thunderbirds and gave the impression he wasn’t the only Nintendo figure inspired by that same television program. This commercial feels a lot like an already off-beat scene from Thunderbirds squeezed through a Japanese filter.

It isn’t a perfect fit, sure. Maybe it’s a combination of the two. What really matters here isn’t what came before, but what came after. Here’s the official reveal trailer of Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (2019):

Do you see a resemblance? It’s not precise. But this new version of Link’s Awakening is clearly going for that plastic aesthetic. Toys, puppets, and tiny diorama worlds. That’s what we got out of the Zelda team when they had to introduce Link’s Awakening to a new generation. And looking at these commercials for Zelda, especially how ingrained something like the Link to the Past ad can become on our collective psyche, makes me wonder if Nintendo isn’t pulling from its own vault for new ideas.

I’m not trying to claim that the team behind Link’s Awakening (2019) definitely took inspiration from the original commercials for the source material. But would it be so strange? Throughout its history, Nintendo has crafted together little pieces of ephemera into franchises that now may be larger than the source material. Donkey Kong borrows his surname from cinema’s most prolific ape. Mario’s name came from a landlord. And Star Fox was based around a then three-decade old series of puppet adventures. Nintendo has been producing pieces of pop cultural importance for so long that it wouldn’t be crazy to see them reaching into their own past for little bits of inspiration now. Would it?

Either that or the hiring process at Nintendo requires a passion for puppetry.