Little Nemo: The Dream Master

There isn’t a better NES game to play around holiday time than Little Nemo: The Dream Master. Where better to go during the holidays on a cold December evening with soft Christmas lights painting the room than inside the heart and dreams of a child to remind you of the magic of the season that you once believed in, to take you back to the enchantment of when you used to listen at night for the prancing of reindeer on the rooftop or the jingling of bells downstairs. No matter what your age, Christmas is the time to be swept in a dream world all your own…

Besides the game’s great imagination, another reason why I love Little Nemo is because I’m a huge animation buff. On my walls, I’ve got production cels from shows like Doug, Mario, Spongebob, Simpsons, even a hand drawn storyboard used to make Toy Story. If I had any drawing talent at all, I’d be in California stalking John Lasseter in the bushes at this very moment. Someday I’m going to track down Miyazaki’s cabin in the Japanese mountains and see if there’s a Catbus crossing sign nearby. I know there’s gotta be one somewhere.

One of the early pioneers in animation’s history was Windsor McCay, an artist mostly known in his day for his brilliant Little Nemo comic strips in the early part of the 20th century. McCay was also a revolutionary animator. In 1911, he painstakingly created a technically amazing short animated film with characters from his famous strip, including Nemo and Flip. The animation played around with three-dimensional effects and pushed the media’s boundaries, experimenting with space and movement. Watching the short today, Salvador Dalí and Walt Disney both come to mind – Dalí for the absurd surrealism, Disney for the genuine personality. But of course those artists came after him. There was no one quite like McCay in his day.

Many years later, in 1989, Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland was released to Japanese theaters, a whole three years before Americans got to see our pajama pal. What’s interesting is that famed Studio Ghibli animators Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki, known for such successful (and breathtaking) anime films as Princess Mononoke and Nausicaa, were originally on board to make the film but had conflicting ideas with the American producers and left the project.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen the film, so the details are fuzzy, but I definitely remember the game that its based on. Little Nemo is classic Capcom, and one of their most impressive releases on the Nintendo. The game’s lush dreamscapes do the movie and strips justice, the soundtrack is as catchy as it is whimsical, and the time and effort put into the cut-scenes, as in the particularly dialogue-heavy ending, stands apart from anything else in the genre, or any other genre, for that matter.


Proto


Released

The long NES-TKEPROM board inside the prototype, when compared to the short released board, is anything but similar. Maybe there was different code in the prototype?

After dumping the game and running it through GoodNES, it is the same as retail.

No, Virginia, there is no Santa Claus.