When it comes to television or film adaptations of its franchises, fanmade or legitimate, Nintendo's track record is a far cry from sterling. The Legend of Zelda series is no exception to this rule. The only thing worth remembering of the 1989 cartoon is a silly, recurring one-liner. The live-action Hero of Time fan film, arguably okay at best but better to riff on with friends, was pulled by Nintendo and forced to halt distribution just weeks after its release. More recently, Satoru Iwata shot down rumors of Netflix being in the early stages of collaboration with Nintendo to produce a live-action series adaptation, for better or worse. There is perhaps one beacon of hope left that we can turn to; not for its excellent craftsmanship and certainly not for its adherence to the source material, but for its complete absurdity. The lovechild of an talentless but ambitious writer, and a small team of pranksters willing to go the extra mile to make his deluded idea a "reality", The Legend of Zelda: The Light of Courage might be the only adaptation of the videogame series you'll ever truly need.
For those unaware, The Legend of Zelda: The Light of Courage was a series of animations based off the scripts of Joe_Cracker, an IGN forum user desperate to get his work off the ground somehow, despite his lack of industry knowledge and even more appalling lack of writing skill. He was approached by several other users - SexualBurgerKing, Cellius, and Orquiox - under the guise of John Grusd, the man who directed the Legend of Zelda cartoon series, who then took several scenes from his script and proceeded to bastardize them with intentionally-shoddy 3D animation. The scenes copied the script almost verbatim, typos and all; and the animation repeatedly mocked Eian, the comic relief and Joe_Cracker's obvious self-insert character.
The following unedited correspondence occurred in December 2007, when I was curious to learn more of the backstory; and was posted to a now-archived Light of Courage thread in August 2008, but is being reposted here to conveniently archive the exchange alongside the necessary context for anyone unfamiliar with The Light of Courage. If you have not watched the animations yet, they are available through the links below and it is highly recommended you do so before continuing. You're also missing out big-time otherwise.
Watch (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)
My Fanmail
Hey, I saw your Light of Courage videos on Youtube, and those were the funniest things I've seen in a while!
I have some questions to ask of you.
From what I understand, some kid kept posting a stupid script, because he wanted to be the writer for the next supposed LoZ animated movie, and then you guys created the animation based off those scripts.
The Response
Greetings!
Thank you for your email. It's been a few years since we made these animations, but such emails still trickle in occasionally. Here is a very long email summarizing the history of The Light of Courage.
In a nutshell, what happened is that we discovered Joe_Cracker advertising his Zelda script on a forum, and we were amazed at how tenacious he was in believing he truly would be getting his script produced. The appalling lack of talent he displayed with this home-made trailers and his own English language rules endlessly amused us. His determination seriously was admirable; if only he had the talent and means behind it he probably would have done pretty well in a film career.
We being curious to read this famed script, we decided to pose as a defunct Hollywood producer (John Grusd) and told him we could produce his script and jumpstart DIC Entertainment. He sent us the script (50 pages of rambling incoherent garbage) and for fun we extracted a few scenes to make into "test" animations to demonstrate to Cracker that Grusd was indeed making progress. We let Cracker record a character's lines for each. We intentionally made the first two so terrible that anyone would realize it was a joke. Cracker didn't realize it. He thought we really were legit. Anyone with a brain would understand that those animations are NOT serious.
During this period we discovered Cracker was in his mid-20s and had serious mental problems (severe OCD, autism, aspergers, stereotypies, etc). Essentially he is a complete delusional shut-in who believes he is a talented "underground" filmmaker with unlimited internet fans. This makes him unbearably arrogant. He is thoroughly convinced of his immense talent and he will never grasp reality. It is extraordinarily frustrating to deal with him.
Anyway, we broke the news to Cracker that we played a joke on him and he more or less accepted it. The only lingering animosity he has is that he blames us completely for the failure of his "film company." We stopped communicating with him. So after a long period of nothing we saw how much the first two animations spread around the internet with various reactions (from bafflement to hatred). We decided then that since we had so much fun with the first two we thought we'd get together one last time and make a third animation, which occupied roughly 8 months of time. As usual we copied the dialogue verbatim (which is pretty much all the entire script consists of) and we crafted the 6-7 minute animation. As I'm sure you've noticed, we had the most fun with #3.
As far as putting a huge amount of effort into these animations, we all have pretty extensive educations in each of our respective fields so as they went on, they were made less to trick Joe Cracker and more for the actual experience of collaboration and artistic creation. Pretty valuable experience, believe it or not. These things are great demo reel material!
So a few years later we decided for the complete fun of it to create a TLOC4. We do work on it from time to time. We've picked a scene, recorded the lines and gotten a portion of storyboards completed. We're not real sure when we'll finish it; we don't have a set deadline. We work on it whenever we're available and feel like making progress. We don't want to rely on old gimmicks from the other animations; it's always important to keep your humor evolving, but still in the spirit of The Light of Courage. It will certainly be ridiculous. Our site, DancingTriforce.com, gets updated once in a while with minor progress reports, whether or not it's even trafficked anymore.
Anyway, that's pretty much it. Hopefully this lengthy email satisfies your curiosity. Keep your eyes open for #4! It will definitely make its way around the internet once it's done, I'm sure.
-GRUSD
---
As mentioned, the exchange occurred in 2007, and some of the information in the response is outdated. Their website, DancingTriforce.com, no longer exists; and there has been no word on the anticipated fourth installment in over 7 years. One can only hope it achieves fruition sooner or later, and I will certainly await that day. The fact that a higher-quality version of the third installment was released on their channel fairly recently provides some hope.
References & Additional Material
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Looks like we're in trouble, Princess!
For those unaware, The Legend of Zelda: The Light of Courage was a series of animations based off the scripts of Joe_Cracker, an IGN forum user desperate to get his work off the ground somehow, despite his lack of industry knowledge and even more appalling lack of writing skill. He was approached by several other users - SexualBurgerKing, Cellius, and Orquiox - under the guise of John Grusd, the man who directed the Legend of Zelda cartoon series, who then took several scenes from his script and proceeded to bastardize them with intentionally-shoddy 3D animation. The scenes copied the script almost verbatim, typos and all; and the animation repeatedly mocked Eian, the comic relief and Joe_Cracker's obvious self-insert character.
The following unedited correspondence occurred in December 2007, when I was curious to learn more of the backstory; and was posted to a now-archived Light of Courage thread in August 2008, but is being reposted here to conveniently archive the exchange alongside the necessary context for anyone unfamiliar with The Light of Courage. If you have not watched the animations yet, they are available through the links below and it is highly recommended you do so before continuing. You're also missing out big-time otherwise.
Watch (Part 1) (Part 2) (Part 3)
My Fanmail
Hey, I saw your Light of Courage videos on Youtube, and those were the funniest things I've seen in a while!
I have some questions to ask of you.
From what I understand, some kid kept posting a stupid script, because he wanted to be the writer for the next supposed LoZ animated movie, and then you guys created the animation based off those scripts.
- Could you tell me more, a link to the forum thread would be nice?
- You realize you've probably set a world record for putting the most effort into a prank, right? Two years?
- Does this Joe Cracker still believe that you're actually John Grusd, or does he know the truth?
- Is there seriously a part 4 coming out? If there is, how much is done?
The Response
Greetings!
Thank you for your email. It's been a few years since we made these animations, but such emails still trickle in occasionally. Here is a very long email summarizing the history of The Light of Courage.
In a nutshell, what happened is that we discovered Joe_Cracker advertising his Zelda script on a forum, and we were amazed at how tenacious he was in believing he truly would be getting his script produced. The appalling lack of talent he displayed with this home-made trailers and his own English language rules endlessly amused us. His determination seriously was admirable; if only he had the talent and means behind it he probably would have done pretty well in a film career.
We being curious to read this famed script, we decided to pose as a defunct Hollywood producer (John Grusd) and told him we could produce his script and jumpstart DIC Entertainment. He sent us the script (50 pages of rambling incoherent garbage) and for fun we extracted a few scenes to make into "test" animations to demonstrate to Cracker that Grusd was indeed making progress. We let Cracker record a character's lines for each. We intentionally made the first two so terrible that anyone would realize it was a joke. Cracker didn't realize it. He thought we really were legit. Anyone with a brain would understand that those animations are NOT serious.
During this period we discovered Cracker was in his mid-20s and had serious mental problems (severe OCD, autism, aspergers, stereotypies, etc). Essentially he is a complete delusional shut-in who believes he is a talented "underground" filmmaker with unlimited internet fans. This makes him unbearably arrogant. He is thoroughly convinced of his immense talent and he will never grasp reality. It is extraordinarily frustrating to deal with him.
Anyway, we broke the news to Cracker that we played a joke on him and he more or less accepted it. The only lingering animosity he has is that he blames us completely for the failure of his "film company." We stopped communicating with him. So after a long period of nothing we saw how much the first two animations spread around the internet with various reactions (from bafflement to hatred). We decided then that since we had so much fun with the first two we thought we'd get together one last time and make a third animation, which occupied roughly 8 months of time. As usual we copied the dialogue verbatim (which is pretty much all the entire script consists of) and we crafted the 6-7 minute animation. As I'm sure you've noticed, we had the most fun with #3.
As far as putting a huge amount of effort into these animations, we all have pretty extensive educations in each of our respective fields so as they went on, they were made less to trick Joe Cracker and more for the actual experience of collaboration and artistic creation. Pretty valuable experience, believe it or not. These things are great demo reel material!
So a few years later we decided for the complete fun of it to create a TLOC4. We do work on it from time to time. We've picked a scene, recorded the lines and gotten a portion of storyboards completed. We're not real sure when we'll finish it; we don't have a set deadline. We work on it whenever we're available and feel like making progress. We don't want to rely on old gimmicks from the other animations; it's always important to keep your humor evolving, but still in the spirit of The Light of Courage. It will certainly be ridiculous. Our site, DancingTriforce.com, gets updated once in a while with minor progress reports, whether or not it's even trafficked anymore.
Anyway, that's pretty much it. Hopefully this lengthy email satisfies your curiosity. Keep your eyes open for #4! It will definitely make its way around the internet once it's done, I'm sure.
-GRUSD
---
As mentioned, the exchange occurred in 2007, and some of the information in the response is outdated. Their website, DancingTriforce.com, no longer exists; and there has been no word on the anticipated fourth installment in over 7 years. One can only hope it achieves fruition sooner or later, and I will certainly await that day. The fact that a higher-quality version of the third installment was released on their channel fairly recently provides some hope.
References & Additional Material
- Fantendo article on The Light of Courage
- Nintendo CEO addresses rumors of Legend of Zelda Netflix series
- Nintendo shuts down Zelda: Hero of Time fan movie
- But really, the Hero of Time movie is still up if you're THAT curious.
- The easiest place I could find the original LOC script in its entirety
