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The Disney Afternoon Collection Gallery Spotlight: Pencil to Pixel

Mar 23, 2017 // Yuri Araujo

On April 18, we get transported back to the early 90s with The Disney Afternoon Collection, but in the meantime, let’s hop backstage and take a look at some of the rad extras featured in this package.

In addition to 6 classic gems, a nifty Rewind feature and new game modes, we’ve gathered a variety of original artwork from the games’ development and marketing of that era and put them all in one gallery, divided into 4 categories: Pencil to Pixel, Museum, Original Artwork, and Odds & Ends.

This week, we’ll take a look at Pencil to Pixel, a really cool category for fans of the games, the TV shows, or those that just like to see creation processes… or all of the above.

Starting with the header image, we see the original reference drawings for the TV show, on the left, and the rendition in the game, on the right. Stare at these long enough, and you’ll start to notice the details that were deemed critical to each character and object, and which had to be left out or simplified to fit the games’ 8-bit graphics and run on the original hardware.

In the game, each Pencil to Pixel art piece also includes brief notes from the developer we’re working with on this collection, Digital Eclipse, on what they were able to find regarding the original pieces. Here’s the blurb on the Chip ‘n Dale piece above:

“The iconic robot bulldogs from the first level of Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers were originally designed for the episode ‘Catteries Not Included.'”

“Often, iconic character illustrations were reproduced as faithfully as possible by Capcom Japan’s artists in the games, such as Darkwing Duck’s appearance on the game’s title screen.”

Of course, these are not limited to in-game sprites, as we see in the example of the title screen (above) and a background (below).

“In the pre-internet days, it was typical for Disney Software producers in the United States to use fax machines to correspond with Capcom in Japan. That seems to have been the case for this illustration of St. Canard, used as a model for Darkwing Duck’s level select screen.”

“Fax machines”? Wow! Talk about ancient treasures, am I righ-… actually, just kidding: I was just informed that we have a fax machine somewhere here in our office… in 2017. D:

The real treasures here are these classic games and all the original art we managed to unearth for this compilation. Check back next week for a look at the next category of the archive material included in the The Disney Afternoon Collection. And for a full scoop on the game offering, check out our announcement blog post here .