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Rumour [RUMOR] Nintendo's brand mandates prevented Universal Studios from using classic DKC designs (incl. K Rool) in Theme Park

Razgriz said:
Donkey Kong the arcade game has that cultural icon status with it's version of DK, Donkey Kong Country the decently successful platformer franchise made by Rareware and Retro Studios really uh, does not?

Even Wikipedia lists DKC as a reboot. That's why the loss of the Kremlings doesn't matter; they're not significant to Donkey Kong's brand identity at all simply because nothing DKC ever did managed to change the perception of DK to the average customer. To most people, Donkey Kong is a clone of King Kong who kidnaps a girl and throws oil barrels at the player character.

(Which gets into the overall rather strange relationship modern gaming has with arcades, where some IPs are so overly defined by their arcade era, that anything done since will just never register in the eyes of the masses.)
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We kinda sorta agree on all this! The only thing I'd add to it is that because Donkey Kong has been such a fixture within Mario canon in his own singular right, he endures a level of contemporary popularity that bolsters his recognition as a character. I genuinely believe DK himself is a widely beloved character among all generations and that he has a certain cool factor to him. That's something the Country games only further contextualize in their broad strokes, the two best selling ones were very successful games but of two different flavors of DK platforming through jungle environments, and neither of them featuring the same group of adverseries.
 
Whenever DK gets referenced in pop culture, it's always because of the classic arcade game.

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So yeah, modern DK definitely benefits from his arcade association, at least in terms of mindshare.
 
Razgriz said:
Donkey Kong the arcade game has that cultural icon status with it's version of DK, Donkey Kong Country the decently successful platformer franchise made by Rareware and Retro Studios really uh, does not?

Even Wikipedia lists DKC as a reboot. That's why the loss of the Kremlings doesn't matter; they're not significant to Donkey Kong's brand identity at all simply because nothing DKC ever did managed to change the perception of DK to the average customer. To most people, Donkey Kong is a clone of King Kong who kidnaps a girl and throws oil barrels at the player character.

(Which gets into the overall rather strange relationship modern gaming has with arcades, where some IPs are so overly defined by their arcade era, that anything done since will just never register in the eyes of the masses.)
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Kremlings don't matter to the arcade series because they were never a part of it. But they do matter to modern DK. You don't see a Tiki or Snowmad in Smash, it's K Rool.
As for brand Identity for DK in general, DKC absolutely challenged perception of DK (though keep in mind that both classic and modern perception can co-exist). The DK franchise struggled after the 90s until Nintendo brought back the DKC branding and many of it's elements. There's a reason we'll be riding mine carts and blasting from barrels instead of climbing ladders and jumping barrels at Universal.
 
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KCannon said:
Whenever DK gets referenced in pop culture, it's always because of the classic arcade game.

Z3X.gif

giphy.webp


So yeah, modern DK definitely benefits from his arcade association, at least in terms of mindshare.
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Not that Inside Job was remotely a huge hit (I liked it well enough though) but it's the last time I can think of an adult animated cartoon with a budget behind it that referenced DK and it was specifically about K. Rool lol:
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Look at that, in all his slightly off-model/they're-using-the-wrong-smash-bros-logo glory!
 
There are multiple incredibly obvious reasons why K. Rool is not in the theme park:

-The only modern iteration of his design is in a spinoff fighting game
-By extension, there are no modern iterations of Kremlings or Kremling-themed environments to reference, without literally having external theme park designers creating a bunch of interpretations of the 90s games from scratch. This would not only be risky (for any company), the park would then be completely at odds with the content of the modern games and the aesthetic of the movie, which is the modern frame of reference for the mass market
-You cover about 90% of "potential donkey kong theme park attendees" demographic by sticking to a combination of the character's historic pop-culture relevance from the original DK, the modern games, and the Mario movie, all of which still have a bunch of other elements of DKC included that, again, the vast majority of people will intuitively understand without storming out of the park due to lack of Kremlings/K.Rool/Ellie

If you're Nintendo, why would you pick a theme park and park designers as the medium and creators for reintroducing all this stuff not seen by the mass market in decades, and not an actual videogame? Frankly the situation with Kremlings would be even worse if the only modern DK media referencing them was a theme park.

Until we see if Nintendo are indeed about to release a new DK game, we don't know enough about the intended direction of a series that is stuck in an unfortunate limbo since the studio associated with modern DKC has had to shift to Metroid. I'm sympathetic with DK fans who are annoyed at this situation, but a theme park ride that is Tiki themed is more preferable to me than some potentially botched rehash of Kremlings done by 3rd parties who have no modern frame of reference for the characters.
 
After pondering this and reading the thread for the last few days, I feel like the Tiki's inclusion is most likely due to the circumstance of the timing of the Park's creation rather than straight up Nintendo trying to erase Kremlings and K.Rool. There have been 2 mainline DK games in the last decade, none with Kremlings, and before K.Rool's appearance in smash he was last seen in Mario Super Sluggers in 2008. So yeah including the Kremlings would require the park to be more referential to the entire series rather than more modern DK. Snowmads are much cooler than the Tiki's but again, don't really fit the base jungle theme as well. So the way they see it, it was either put some Tiki's in there or no enemies at all.

I think Nintendo realized how unpopular the Tikis are too, which is the reason why I feel like they are more of a convenient choice rather than one based on them being the new MAIN villains or a permanent staple of the series. Heck, they aren't in the DK lego set even tho Luigi's Mansion ghosts appear in Luigi's sets. And not the ones from LM3, the ones from the first game, which have made much less crossovers into the mainline Mario games as the Kremlings have. However those ghosts have the benefit of having appeared in a 3DS remake 5 years prior. I think if Nintendo did a DKC1 remake for example and created current versions of the Kremlings then we'd see them show up in merch and such.

With that said, I don't like this whole situation. I feel like Nintendo's handling of the DK franchise as a whole is so strange. Even as far back as the 90's. The gap between DK3(Arcade) and Donkey Kong 94/DKC was like 8 years. After DK64 and Rare left Nintendo did weird spinoffs and re-imaginings with him with seemingly no consistent vision, DK Jungle Beat being a more traditional platformer with a weird twist and no other DK Characters other than the main Kong, the DK Konga rhythm games which paired re-used DKC assets with popular 00's songs, Mario Vs DK brought him back to his arcade roots then morphed into a weird puzzle series, two "Climber" spinoffs with DKC characters along with it's racing game on the Wii and then after that two back to back excellent DKC games but with few returning DKC characters and nothing else but ports/re-makes for the next decade. It's just kinda strange.

I think as a whole I'd prefer if the parks were celebrations of the entire series it represents as a whole rather than being mostly based on most current (At the time) depictions of the standard world design. Even the Mario side of things for me is less exciting than it could be because it mostly is based on 3D World and Mario Kart.
 
APileofBananas said:
Do you think when Shigeru Miyamoto created Donkey Kong, he envisioned that in 40+ years people would be arguing if anthropomorphic crocodiles are key to the franchise's identify?
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To be fair, he also probably didn’t envision the majority of the key elements that made DKC a smash hit on the SNES 30 years ago, when DK and his supporting cast were hugely rounded out beyond throwing barrels at Mario on a construction site.
 
I find Lord Fredrik to be alright. People say he cribs K. Rool's style but outside of being rotund I don't think they bear any similarities, K. Rool is a kooky cartoon character who sometimes larps as a pirate or evil scientist, Lord Fredrik is like more of a boisterous wrestling heel who means business. That final battle was fucking metal, like a showdown between titans.
 
PixelKnight said:
To be fair, he also probably didn’t envision the majority of the key elements that made DKC a smash hit on the SNES 30 years ago, when DK and his supporting cast were hugely rounded out beyond throwing barrels at Mario on a construction site.
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Yeah basically the DKC games work because they ditched the original game design in favor of the Super Mario model

The original Donkey Kong just isn’t a very good game in my opinion!
 
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Yeah that makes sense tbh,

King k rool isn’t important to the series iconography really,

If you think so and you’re over thirty. That just proves my point, nice that he was in smash but until he’s in a new dk game eh
 
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