Felix the Cat 1
Hello everyone! It is great to have you back in McLepke-land. Let’s see what’s new!
A birthday and a week ‘off’
This week had my birthday in it, which brings me all the way up to the age of 37. Whoa!
Back when I used to work in an office, I always took the week of my birthday off of work. It seems like a logical time for a break from a few angles. For one, it could usually combine with the 4th of July to get you an extra day off here in the US. It’s also right at the start of the second half of the calendar year, so that always felt like an extra ‘pacing out the year’ reason to take time off.
Nowadays I still sort of practice this, although since I no longer dread my everyday life, a week ‘off’ doesn’t look as different from a normal week as it used to. After all, I quit working in order to start actually enjoying my life all the time - not just on weeks off.
This year, in addition to my birthday and the halfway point of the year, this week also coincided with the end of a 10 week Mr. Nutz speedrunning era. When the week started, I thought to myself, ‘well, this is great timing. I will take a week off of game dev and speedrunning and come back fresh.” By day two of this supposed break, I was already back to speedrunning. Like I said, my day-to-day life is pretty enjoyable as it is.
I did take a full week off of game development work. Game dev requires a measure of focus and problem-solving that while fun, can still be hard to show up for. Every day I do have to push myself to sit down and do it. It is part of my best life, but it’s probably the hardest part of it. I do feel refreshed after the break.
Looking back over the first half of this year, a lot of good happened in game dev. This most-recent project restarted this year. I can see the skeleton of a game forming. Most of all, I can feel how much better I am at programming right now than I ever have been. I can think of ideas in the abstract and program them into being more efficiently than I have ever been able to.
I say this to myself because it’s important to keep track of yourself getting better at a project as large in scale as making a game. No one is really going to notice you getting 1% better at it. You have to keep getting 1% better at it until one day, there is a playable game. Today, to end my week off of game dev, I declare that I am noticing that I have gotten better at game development so far this year.
a year of speedrunning
I touched on the opportunity for reflection that I associate with this middle-point of the year. I was looking back through my notes from around this time last year, and there was one thing that actually amazed me.
This time last year, I was still speedrunning Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time. My final Turtles run actually wasn’t until August 25 of last year.
McLepke speedrunning aficionados know that TMNT IV was my first speedrun project in the modern era of my Twitch channel. That means that every time I have other than my old Donkey Kong Country 2 runs were done in the last 365 days.
That time span covered these games:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time
Zombies Ate my Neighbors
I love all my children equally, but between you and me, I would say this is my favorite speedrun project I have ever done
Mickey’s Magical Quest
Claymates (two categories)
Adventure Island 3
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II (this project was a bit of a stub, cut short by my eye injury)
Chip N Dale
Mr. Nutz
That is a LOT of ground to cover in one year. Put into this frame of reference, I have to say I am very proud of the last year of speedrunning. This is how you build a LeHulk-style portfolio of speedrun accolades; one game at a time, year after year. On to the next one.
getting started with felix the cat
Felix the Cat for the NES came out in 1992. Interestingly, it never came out in Japan, even though the game was made in Japan. It was made by Hudson Soft, the same group that made the Adventure Island games, including Adventure Island 3, which long-term followers of McLepke speedrunning will know as the game I have the warpless world record in. Hehe.
If you’re familiar with games from this time period, you might be aware that Disney had an agreement where Capcom made video games featuring their intellectual property. Both Mickey’s Magical Quest and Chip N Dale are examples of games I have speedrun thus far that fit this bill, and were made by Capcom. With Disney being so prolific during this era, you had to reach outside the box a bit if you wanted to make a cartoony game and you weren’t Capcom.
Felix the Cat the character is over 100 years old. He first appeared in silent cartoons in 1919. Only three of the original order of 25 Felix the Cat cartoons are available in any capacity. Not just viewable to the public… I mean available, like, on Earth. They were all lost to time.
The second run was from 1922 - 1925 (still silent), and consisted of 64 cartoons. A handful of these are lost today, but most are still available, and are in the public domain. You can find the ones that are not lost to time on YouTube.
A third order of 78 cartoons ran from 1925 - 1928 (still silent). In 1929 some of the older episodes got a reissue where the text was taken out of the cartoon and sound was added in for the first time.
You know a cartoon is old when you click on the “Revival” tab on Wikipedia, and the first revival is itself from 1958 - the first time Felix the Cat ran as a television show. It lasted 5 seasons and 260 episodes.
These are the last Felix the Cat cartoons that exist prior to the creation of the video game. The first episode of the series is called “The Magic Bag”, and indeed Felix’s magic bag is the item causing all the conflict in the video game. Felix has it, and the bad guys want it. As far as I can tell, this is the first time the magic bag becomes a thing in Felix lore.
There was also a Felix the Cat movie that ‘released’ in 1989, though it seems to have been something of a disaster. It was originally intended to release during the holiday season of 1988, before getting delayed to 1990, and eventually canned altogether due to financial issues. It technically had a debut screening in Los Angeles in January 1989, which is why I say it was ‘released’ then, but there was no official release in the US until it went direct to VHS in 1991.
Interestingly, Wikipedia does note that the movie was a staple of the Disney Channel roster during the 1990s. Perhaps that link is part of the reason the Felix video game got greenlit; it could attract some of Disney’s audience, without actually being a Disney licensed creation, and therefore the video game domain of Capcom. If you scroll back up to the video game cartridge I posted a picture of, it does look a lot like this movie poster.
The movie does also feature the magical bag of tricks, as well as the two main antagonists of the game, characters named The Professor and Poindexter.
On a Poindexter side note, the character Poindexter is a genius nerdy scientist kid who is the evil Professor’s nephew. There’s some speculation out there that the Dexter from the 1990s Cartoon Network show Dexter’s Laboratory is either based on him or pays homage to him. Here are the two. They don’t look THAT much alike, but IDK it does seem very plausible that there is some relation between the two.
Finally, a reboot called The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat comes on air from 1995 - 1997, lasting two seasons and 21 episodes. I wonder if this revival was being plotted and had anything to do with the decision to license a Felix the Cat video game. Who knows. After the 1992 video game being discussed here, there was never another Felix the Cat video game, save for a make your own cartoon software thing that came out in 1994.
Felix history aside, a few things have come to mind since starting this project. First, I have been gaining a new appreciation for how difficult Mr. Nutz was to learn as a speedgame. In one week of dedicated practice, I already feel like I am close to being able to stream some early attempts of Felix. In Mr. Nutz, entire days of practice would routinely be dedicated to learning just one level, or ~4% of the run.
And yeah, Mr. Nutz is a little longer. The Nutz world record is 29 minutes and change while the Felix record is 22 minutes and change, but even accounting for that difference, Felix is orders of magnitude easier to learn. Mr. Nutz had 28 levels and Felix has 23 levels, so in both cases it’s close to a minute per level. The one minute level in Mr. Nutz was just a lot denser - more inputs, more precise timing, and a lot more work to memorize and internalize. Looking back, Mr. Nutz was kind of exhausting. I’m glad I spent the time learning it, but I am also glad it’s over.
One nice thing about Felix being an easier run to learn is that I feel confident that I will be able to run both categories of the game during this speedrun era. People compete in two categories of Felix the Cat speedrunning. The main category is any%, which has 57 total participants, and a world record of 22 minutes and 35 seconds set two years ago by Russian runner JosephHTobinJr. The second category is low%, which entails beating the game without picking up any powerups. Low% only has two total participants, with the current world record standing at 26 minutes and 26 seconds, set 3 years ago by the American runner Razul.
My plan is to tackle any% first. I am anticipating still having enough Felix juice after finishing any% to then learn and run low% afterwards. We will see!
some new books
With the Zoey Ashe series in the rear-view mirror, it was time for me to start down a new book path. I actually read two books this past week, both by Megan Miranda. Miranda has written quite a bit - she has seven young adult books, and eight adult books. They are all thrillers.
Miranda’s Wikipedia page also has this really insightful bit about her creative process: “Miranda reportedly uses spreadsheets to plan the plots of her novels.” Whoa…
I’ll provide the screenshot because it’s kind of funnier when you see it as its own paragraph like the site has it.
I had never read any of her books, but borrowed her first two adult books from my brother. The first is called All the Missing Girls, published in 2012, when every book had a name that was kind of like this. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl on the Train, The Woman in Cabin 10, Girls in the Woods, Gone Girl (I only made up one of those names).
I loved this book. It’s a murder mystery with a female lead character. There’s a little bit of a blue-collar white-collar clash of your past and present that I identified with a lot. The main character returns to her hometown after living in DC and being engaged to a lawyer. She’s not home for long when, lo and behold, a young woman goes missing. It’s a page turner. I give All the Missing Girls an 8.5 on the unofficial McLepke scale.
Miranda’s next adult book after this is called The Perfect Stranger, published five years later in 2017. This book features a female lead who leaves her busy high-achieving lifestyle in Boston for a simpler life in Western Pennsylvania. Remind you of anyone?
Of course, she’s not in Western PA for long before some stuff starts going down. Murderous stuff. Complex stuff. Stuff only spreadsheets could keep adequate track of.
I liked this book even more than the first one. I give The Perfect Stranger a perfect 10 on the unofficial McLepke rating scale. Awesome book, highly recommended.
Miranda’s got five other adult books which I do want to check out eventually, but my brother only owned these two, so there will probably be a diversion to something else first. Books!
That’s all for this week’s update. I hope you all have a great week. I believe in you.
