Why did I volunteer to review the Pac-Man season two DVD?

I remember the first time I saw the Pac-Man video game. I was in a pizza parlor with my mother, father and brother. At one point I had to use the facilities, and there by the cigarette machines (yes, kids — there were not only machines where you could buy cigarettes with quarters without having to present ID, you could go sit back at your table and actually smoke them) was this strange arcade game I’d never seen before: Pac-Man. I gazed in wonder at the strange goings-on on-screen, unable to comprehend the game’s purpose or goal. A yellow disc … eats dots, while multi-colored … hosts try to hit the disc so it blows up or flattens or whatever it is? Too. Cool.

“There’s this game back there and it’s called something-Man and it’s cool and there’s ghosts and stuff and you eat dots or something and it’s sooo cool and can I have a dollar so I can go play it pleeeease!?’ Or so it went something like that, when I got back to my table. Four quarters later, I was addicted.

Though it was — and still is — difficult to explain the premise of Pac-Man exactly, it’s even more difficult to explain the premise of that game as a television show. In fact, it’s impossible to the point that I’m amazed it lived on beyond one season. But, here it is, the second season on DVD, and I volunteered to review it. What was I thinking?

First of all, when I raised my hand to review this DVD set, I mistakenly thought it’d be for the entire series. I haven’t watched this series since it first debuted in the early ’80s, so when only the second season showed up in the mail, I was at a bit of a loss. I’ve abused the hell out of my brain in the years since that day in the pizza parlor, so how am I supposed to compare this second season to a first season I have nary a recollection of? Well, I can’t, to it’ll just have to stand on its own.

In case you have no freaking idea what I’m talking about, the Pac-Man video game — and I know you can’t possible not know about that — was so popular in the early-’80s that some capitalizing minds at Hanna-Barbera decided to further Pac-Man-ize the minds of America’s youth by making a Saturday-morning cartoon about this odd game. In this show, Pac-Man has a family — Ms. “Pepper” Pac-Man, Baby Pac, and a couple of Pac pets (Chomp Chomp and Sour Puss) — and goes about life running away from Inky, Blinky, Pinky, Clyde and … Sue. Yes, they added Sue to the ghostly gang, so they had a female among them — why they didn’t just make Pinky a female character, I don’t know. So Pac-Man lives in Pac-Land with other Pac people, yet somehow this guy got to be THE Pac-MAN of the land. I guess that’s why the ghosts — called “ghost monsters” on the show, led by what appears to be a human called “Mezmaron” — are after this one Pac person over the rest.

In the second season, a couple of new characters are introduced: Super Pac, and Pac-Man’s nephew, P.J.. Super Pac makes a little sense, since there was later a Super Pac-Man arcade game created, but I don’t get P.J..

The sad truth of the matter is that, while this show was clearly popular enough in the early-’80s to warrant a second season, it does not at all hold up today. I’ve got a seven-year-old son, and I’m almost certain he’d have no interest at all in this series, nor would he understand at all what the heck is going on. Power pellets? What? Y’know, it’s not all bad that I didn’t get a copy of this show’s entire series. Now I know that I just don’t care to have any of it.

If you’re simply a child of the ’80s and up for a trip down nostalgia lane, you can pick up both seasons of Pac-Man now. You’ll likely want to keep it to yourself, though.