During the heyday of the point-and-click adventure, there were two big names: LucasArts and Sierra. Of course Westwood and Revolution got a good few in there too, but there’s another name that all too often gets left out: Burst Studios. That’s the team behind Toonstruck, and, er, no, that was the only adventure it ever made. But damn, the Christopher Lloyd-starring mix of cartoon and FMV was a classic, and today marks the 30th anniversary of its release.
Unambiguously inspired by Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which of course also starred Back to the Future‘s Christopher Lloyd, Toonstruck was a glorious mix of hand-drawn cartoon animation and live-action video, somewhat less-than-seamlessly combined in what still felt like a technical marvel in 1996.
It’s all very meta at the start. Lloyd plays Drew Blanc (sorry), a cartoonist who is condemned to work on the saccharine Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun Show, and is slowly losing his mind. His boss, played by Ben Stein (sorry about that, too), drags him back into work one night and demands that he create a collection of new bunnies for the show before the morning, but Lloyd can’t stop thinking about the character he wished he were working on, purple thing Flux Wildly. Then, er, he’s sucked into his TV and finds himself trapped in a cartoon city called Cutopia. Flux is there (and voiced by none other than Dan Castellaneta!), there’s an evil Count Nefarious in the nearby area of the Malevolands, and between the two lies Flux’s homeland, lunatic town Zanydu. Nefarious, voiced by the wondrous Tim Curry, is turning all cute things evil, and it’s up to Blanc and Flux to save the day.
Yes, the premise is stone-cold insane. And perfectly so. Toonstruck is a celebration of the anarchic nature of early-20th-century cartoons, and it takes the silly subject incredibly seriously. Along with the astonishing cast already mentioned, it also featured some of the best voice actors in the industry in smaller roles—the likes of David Ogden Stiers (MASH), Dom DeLuise (The Cannonball Run, An American Tail) and Jeff Bennett (Johnny Bravo himself). And their quality is paired with the animation, celebrating everything from Tex Avery to Disney with both love and irreverence.
Even the puzzles are great! Well, apart from a couple. But it was a mid-’90s adventure game, so, y’know. Also rather of its time is an incredibly uncomfortable moment in which Flux shouts out the r-slur, and there’s a peculiarly incongruent S&M scene with barnyard animals that perhaps wouldn’t make the cut today.
Infamously, there was supposed to be a sequel to Toonstruck, but the original game’s development had been a deeply fraught time, and it was (undeservedly) a complete bomb on release.
Fortunately, it’s far easier to play today than it has been at most points in the previous 30 years. Previously relegated to an awkward fit in Dosbox and refusing anything after Windows XP, the game now boots beautifully via ScummVM, which is all done for you when you buy the game via Steam. It’s outrageously expensive at $20 for a three-decade-old game, but given it’s a whopping 10 hours long (huge compared to so many adventures of the time), you’ll get your money’s worth. There’s nothing else quite like it, and it deserves to be heralded alongside Day of the Tentacle and Space Quest IV. Happy birthday, old friend.