Battletoads is a series of videogames developed by the now-defunct studio Rare (later Rare Limited) that began in 1991 with the release of the first game in the series, Battletoads, for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Despite having its roots on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, being made by one of the most well-known game developers of the time, and the series itself having outlived Rare (the most recent release was in 2020), Battletoads never quite reached the heights of other legendary videogame mascots of the time such as Mario, Link, or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Regardless of why this is, the game series is still around as the original '90s games were re-released as part of the 2015 Rare Replay collection. We also saw the series' main character, Rash, guest-star in the 2013 game Killer Instinct (another Rare series that was lucky enough to outlive Rare itself). Both Rash and the series' other main character Zitz were also bosses in the much-loved 2014 game Shovel Knight. So the series has its fans, but could Battletoads be more than just a videogame series? Could it be adapted to other forms of media?
An attempt to adapt Battletoads into a series has been done before. In 1992, not long after the first game's release, American animation studio DIC attempted to make a pilot for what would have been the jumping-off point for a full-fledged animated series starring the Battletoads. Unfortunately, it was not picked up, and the animated pilot that DIC made was lost to history (although it is now available on YouTube). However, with time, hindsight, and nostalgia, there is no reason another attempt cannot be made today, especially since most fans of the original Battletoads are now adults with more money to spend.
Can the Difficulty of a Videogame Be Adapted for Audiences?
Despite the series still being around and having its fans, something most people remember the original Battletoads for was its controller snapping levels of insane difficulty. In 1991, the original Battletoads was one of the most frustratingly difficult video games ever made. It was almost impossible to play two-player because the game's programmers decided to enable friendly fire between teammates. Not that any of this stopped anyone from playing, as even then, the game was still entertaining, and its difficulty was seen more as a challenge than a wall. It could be argued that the original game's brutal difficulty is one of the main reasons that the series survived for as long as it has. Nowadays, live-streamers and speed-runners still, on occasion, play it if only to show off that they can actually complete the game.
So, because the game's brutal difficulty is one of the main reasons for the series' survival, if Battletoads is ever adapted, could its brutal difficulty be somehow translated into another, non-interactive media? As movies and shows are more about “showing” rather than “playing,” the challenge that any adaptation of Battletoads will be figuring out a way to show how difficult the characters' challenges are while people are watching it rather than experiencing it for themselves.
The scriptwriters will need to get more than a little creative, as they will only have the reactions of the characters within the story to work with to show difficulty, not just the audience. Perhaps one of the best ways to do this would be to show the characters taking hits and allowing for some failures rather than showing them as simply unstoppable juggernauts of awesome.
The Intentional Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Connection
As the Battletoads themselves are humanoid amphibians that beat people up with truly bizarre abilities, a comparison to the more popular Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will always be made. This is not a coincidence or an accident. Rare has fully admitted that the original Battletoads was made to capitalize on the popularity of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their video games. As the series has gone on, the Battletoads themselves have done a bit to distance themselves from the Turtles. But the fact that they were always meant to cash in on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles's popularity cannot be separated from them.
Battletoads was hardly the first attempt by anybody to try and cash in on the popularity of the Turtles, as DIC, the company that made the unaired pilot for their animated series, actually tried this themselves twice with Street Sharks in 1994 and Extreme Dinosaurs in 1997. However, this means that should another attempt to adapt Battletoads be made, it would behoove them to both differentiate and distance themselves from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Copyright laws aside, there is no reason that they need to be so similar.