How many people remember the Donkey Kong Country cartoon? The series ran for two seasons, from 1997-2000, and starred the titular Donkey Kong, fending off King K. Rool’s attempts to steal The Crystal Coconut and take control of the island. The show doesn’t seem to have had much lasting cultural impact in the long run, but it has its own sense of charm, and it has some qualities going for it which would be replicated by later shows like Sonic Boom.
The set up for Donkey Kong Country is simple. All the cast live on Kongo Bongo Island, which Donkey Kong is destined to one day rule. King K. Rool wants to steal the coconut, because whoever possesses it controls the island, and so a typical episode revolves around his latest scheme to steal it. That’s pretty standard stuff for a kid’s cartoon, but the show has a great deal of creativity on display in just how King K. Rool’s schemes are supposed to work. In one episode, he builds a robot duplicate of Donkey Kong’s love interest, Candy, so that she will cut the ape’s hair as part of a curse to remove his strength (very Biblical). In one episode King K. Rool attempts to win the coconut through a dance contest, and in another episode he frames Donkey Kong for various misdeeds to get him out the way. The show even did its own spin on It’s a Wonderful Life.
The characters are standard fare for a 90’s cartoon. Donkey Kong himself is fun-loving, slightly lazy, and a bit bone headed. King K. Rool is nefarious, Diddy Kong is slightly more level headed (for a kid), and Cranky is, well cranky. There aren’t many surprises in the relationships between them and the other various characters who pop up from time to time, but they work well together to get the plot moving in any particular episode. There’s something very similar to Sonic Boom about how the show’s good guys and bad guys treat each other from episode to episode. Yes, King K. Rool is usually attempting to take control of the island, but none of the characters are ever surprised to see him just hanging around, and in one episode Donkey Kong even attempts to rekindle a broken friendship between the villainous reptile and Cranky. It’s very much like how in Sonic Boom Dr. Eggman may attempt to finally defeat Sonic one episode, but ask to crash over at his place the next. The flexibility to the way the characters treat one another is just another way in which its creators are able to shake up the show’s routine from time to time.
Donkey Kong Country is an early example of a completely CGI cartoon, probably as a way of aping (HA!) the games it was based on. Yet it still manages to look pretty decent for what it is, even going as far as to outshine some movies which came after it. The animation can be a bit wonky when it comes to how the ape characters move, but on the show, the show has aged surprisingly well. It doesn’t measure up by today’s standards, but given the technology they were working with, it’s quite impressive.
Animation aside though, a show like this lives and dies on its sense of style, and Donkey Kong Country‘s style as a show is as laid back as the main character himself. The villains manage to get a hold of The Crystal Coconut multiples times throughout the series, but they never have it for long, so the stakes are never very high. There aren’t just plenty of jokes, but a fair amount of songs too. At any point in a given episode it’s entirely possible that one of the characters will just burst out into song, possibly to save on the animation budget, since not much is usually happening while these songs are going on. Luckily for anyone watching it today, Donkey Kong Country tends to go for homage instead of riffing on the sort of references which would have been funny at the time, so it avoids coming off as dated, like many of the lesser shows of its day.
Donkey Kong is the best kind of forgotten 90’s TV show: of its era without feeling dated. Having to create a show which satisfied fans of the video games, while bringing in new fans, all while juggling technology which still wasn’t widely used at the time can’t have been easy, but it as a whole, it works. The show’s creators pulled this balancing act off by taking the limits of the tools they were working with into account and rolling with them, rather than trying to fight against them. Throw in a somewhat formulaic approach to storytelling which still let Donkey Kong Country showcase its unique charm, and the the end result is something with a lot more going for it than could be expected on paper. Old fans of the show might find that it’s just as entertaining as they remember, and someone who hasn’t watched it might be pleasantly surprised by its blend of zany creativity and relaxed vibes. At the end of the day, what more could anyone ask from an old cartoon about a stubborn gorilla?
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