In early 1990s America, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was at the height of its popularity, the Super NES and Sega Genesis were right around the corner, and arcades have experienced a revolution led by Capcom's Street Fighter II and Midway's Mortal Kombat. The rapidly growing popularity of video games made the game companies want to cash in by expanding their franchises into other products such as toys, comic books, novels, movies, and animated shows. In regard to animated shows, Japanese anime adaptations of popular video games made in Japan such as Capcom's Street Fighter and Darkstalkers have come to be regarded as the most faithful to the source material. On the other hand, American cartoon adaptations of popular video games have been reviled by fans as not only unfaithful to the source material but insulting to everything they cherish about their favorite games by using cheap (read poor quality) animations, degrading popular game characters in the day as what the contracted American studios deemed "tasteful" and "acceptable in the eyes of parents," and writing in cheap morality lessons/public service announcements that were in all likelihood ineffective. At their best, they were inferior knockoffs of the more well-known and better cartoons that were aired at the time. At their worst, they were canceled after only a few months, or even less than a week, of the first season.
