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. ), 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.
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