When great literature has no more great characters and stories to offer for TV adaptation, producers naturally turn to video games for inspiration. Those were the humble beginnings of  Mega Man, robot and defender of the Earth.

Mega Man was written and animated in Japan and produced by Ruby-Spears, the workhorses of TV animation. The robot hero defended the innocent and tried to thwart Dr. Wily’s evil plans, which also involved a lot of robots. Robots-r-us the show should have been called; evil robots, good robots, robots with conflicting morals.

Plot lines ran the gamut from using a giant super freeze machine to paralyze major cities to a special gem that shrinks Mega Man (not so mega now, are ya?) to some shenanigans involving a genie. Dr. Wily could always be found in the middle of the latest melee, while Dr. Light helped Mega Man in the fight against evil.

The show appealed to pre-teen boys and aired original episodes for two seasons on syndication, making a comeback on Fox Family’s lineup of video game-inspired cartoons.