the symptom of being a popular video game during the 80's to 90's is that you always get a film or TV adaption, and street fighter's no exception. you all know how this starts: 1993. capcom wants to make films for their new baby. they get with the guy who produced the running man and they hook up with hasbro to crossover G.I. joe and street fighter together. they then go onto casting, and what came next was nothing short of arguably the most insane fucking production process in the history of man. just watch the first hour of this before it comes around the 1 hour 38 min mark and come back to me.
after that, watch the film yourself.
https://flixhd.cc/watch-movie/watch-street-fighter-full-16961.5353324...you're back? you good now? alright! now we can continue.
alongside this peice of art came the animated street fighter film-released just a few months before.
shown above: ryu about to kill his friends.
the one candle this holds to the previous film i've shown off is the fact that fei-long's voiced by bryan cranston in the english dub [walter white in breaking bad to jog your memory], but none of this is to say that this is bad on it's own. the plot is as expected with it being a SF2 adaption, but the visuals are geniuenely delectable as all 90's anime goes. infact, it was so delicious, that one of the games-street fighter alpha 3 i believe-even goes out of it's way to reference it and take direct things from it like a mode where two players take on bison and a few stages that are ripped from the film itself. give it a watch too! while this is more of a 'bengus is a artist who exxaggerates porportions' thing, the movie is also why bison went from being built like a cat standing on it's hind legs to a human brick wall.
after that, like a game of international hot potato, the topic of animated shows came, and in 1995, japan shot first with street fighter II V [not to be confused with SF2 or SFV or both or neither], or street fighter 2 victory, which was the most liberal they were willing to get with the story of SF2.
set in 1995 rather than 1991, the show follows a clumsy 17 year old ryu and his equally clumsy friend ken, who's also 17 and has the most fucked up bedroom ever-but they go on to befriend a 15 year old chun-li. no tiny age differences or majorly 20 year olds here, it's all kids for some reason. i watched all of this one day, so i can actually tell you more about this than the basic synopsis, but really it's just a cute show about these two-soon-three kids going on a adventure looking for tough oppotents until they get sighted by shadaloo-and by extenstion, M. bison himself. i don't remember anything from this other than the final fight having bison basically spamming his psycho crusher move until he dies and him being apparently a pedophile in this with him flirting with chun-li, who, again, is 15 in this. i gotta ask though, the USSR's long dead-why is zangief always casted as a villain in these early media? regardless, about 29 episodes, it's a neat watch.
continuing the hot potato game, the ball was in america's hands, and thus the birth of the two-season street fighter animated series commenced, handled by USA network who really wanted to make cartoons of games for some reason.
shown above: i had no posters to show and couldn't find one.
this is basically simontaniously it's own thing and also the van damme film, and like a insane man i also actually watched all of this the whole way through one day so i can give you a more detailed description of it rather than reading off of wikipedia. this is also a very G.I. joe-y show to the point of being a reskin, because capcom WANTED to make this the most american shit they had ever made in that moment. you also might've seen clips of this show before, maybe on twitter or on ye olde thoutube, maybe some screenshots, but it is far, far more than bison gawking at his videophone or sagat wielding a fucking gun or dhalsim somehow still being a scientist because the writers for the van damme film never concieved the thought of a pacifist fighter or balrog smashing his boxing gloves at a keyboard. it is far, far more. infact, let's start with the source of that ''YES! YES!'' meme-because the entire crux of that episode where that meme came from is that bison decided to create basically mutated goblin fighters to sic on the world warriors during a tournament-and how the mutants were delivered was through a capcom branded arcade cabinet. this episode is also where that gif of guile posing while having garbage thrown at him came from, if i recall correctly. there was also a episode where a orb from a another world ended up being in the world of street fighter and bison wanted to use it but some OC fucking isekai'd himself into this world willingly so he can get that orb back? and there was also a episode where cammy, whose been hit on by one of her MI6 workers throughout the series, reveals herself to him that she's been working with shadaloo all this time as bison comes in on a helicopter and takes her in as they kiss and the copter flies away as that MI6 agent struggles to process how hard he has been cucked in that moment. and guile was there to to share his suffering. and speaking of guile, there was a episode where he gets brainwashed by bison for a moment, but it's the most homoerotic shit in return. ''i had never known bison would make me...feel that way.'', that specific shot of bison taking guile to a imaginary home during the brainwashing sequence only for the next thing you see being guile waking up groggily while bison's besides him...and it don't help that when guile and bison unite against akuma in one episode, that is still kept up. shit gets fucking wild in this cartoon, okay? one thing i'll give this cartoon is that they gave blanka a girlfriend, which is nice.
the ball is now back in japan's hands as they keep it for a few years! go! go! go! starting with the street fighter alpha films, which i had never seen!
shown above: the most hardest shit ever and akuma summoning a tiny ryu from his back to kill you because he doesn't think you're worthy of his hands.
these from what i hear are more just ryu battling with the satsui no hado than anything alpha-related, though there are some alpha folks here and there. this also has a kid claiming to be ryu's little brother and akuma being implied to be ryu's father which makes no sense because ryu's adopted. it also has a character going around finding new fighters to exploit through a tournament, and his name is NOT M. bison! how inventive. there also comes alpha generations which is a whole lot of the same stuff without the not-bison running around, but sakura gets to appear so it's instantly something neat. what makes this stand out though is that this was released far, far long after SF3. this means that capcom geniuenely did not want to look back at a commercial failure, not that they hate the game. fun fact though: while street fighter stuff in japan up to this point was animated by group TAC, alpha generations was animated by A.P.P.P., the same dudes who did the jojo OVAs and the phantom blood film.
continuing their streak, capcom made another film-this time, a very unique one...they put one in a game's case.
shown above: i forgot how ugly everyone that wasn't a woman looked in SF4.
street fighter 4's the ties that bind, a giant middling romp whose part of it iirc explains juri's entire deal. it's a neat watch but like...idk. what's even more interesting actually is that with SF4 coming out, some webshorts were released afterwards-street fighter aftermath. they basically are little shorts that detail what happend after the events of SF2 and before SF4, my favorite one being the one where crimson viper goes to a thai village for interviews and it's basically straight up told to us that shadaloo literally is stationed in thailand and has started in thailand but the fact it was here kinda implies that bison on top of being once a young orphaned kid who wanted to be the strongest was probably thai too which is basically the most confirmed unconfirmed thing about street fighter listen this series is fucking weird about characters with no confirmed nationalities or ones whose nationalities are supposed to be shrouded in mystery, but the short also shows us the opinions of the remaining four kings [basically vega and balrog and then a bison jumpscare at the end] on shadaloo's downfall. it's cool as shit you should watch these shorts, but one outdated thing with them is how they depict bison's death because the firm canon now is that he got fragged by akuma but here he basically attempted to suicide bomb while in a fight with cammy ryu chun-li and ken [i think it was these four], but regardless, it's awesome.
the ball is back in america's hands ladies and gentlemen! the ball is back in america's hands! oh my god! oh my god! AND THEY CAME OUT WITH HORSESHIT! AND THEY CAME OUT WITH HORSESHIT! NEVER BEFORE HAS THIS BEEN SEEN IN HISTORY! HISTORY'S IN THE MAK
street fighter: the legend of chun-li is a 2009 american film directed by andrzej bartkowiak and starring kristin kreuk, neal mcdonough, jaime luis gomez, chris klein, korrina moon bloodgood, robin shou, and michael clarke duncan. produced by adlab films and hyde park, it was released on feburary 27th and it made 12.8 chunillion with a budget of 50 lillion. it is 96 minutes long. it is a film. it also has M. bison's origin story being him being born to irish missionaries only to be thrown into thailand as a baby then he grew up and met a woman and then he fucked that woman and then he brought that woman to a cave only to give her the most deadly c-section in order to get a child and remove the good of his soul which became rose which is a actual thing that's still believed to this day. rose being bison's good side i mean. she isn't. she just has a part of his soul in her. she's someone else entirely otherwise. this marked the final street fighter film that was made by any non-indie studio for a while up until now.
i say non-indie, because the ball's been thrown to britain! the ball's been thrown to britain! holy gee where did they come from!?
shown above: gouken closing his eyes to ignore that he left the stove on for too long and has set their house on fire including the gate, and realistically how the fuck are any of these completely unrelated people gonna unite to take down bison.
somewhere in the distant past of the 2010's, two filmmakers decided to make a little street fighter short to show capcom what they could actually do with street fighter, and capcom's response was to greenlight what they're doing and make a show with them-thus leading to the world's first official fanseries. street fighter: the assassin's fist! it's about ryu and ken living with gouken, seems to be a neat little show, but that's not all-as capcom also got them to make a promotional webseries that's a sequel to this for SFV-street fighter: ressurrection. this is also something i watched the entirety of one day and all i remember is charlie nash sounding like corpse husband and him showing up out of fucking nowhere while ken was sparring with laura and it apparently being on the most hyperspecific thing ever: a ISP [verizion is a ISP right]'s short-lived mobile TV show app.
one thing i forgot while writing this article is that there's another street fighter film that predates the two 1994 street fighter movies...and it's a unauthorized korean one. is it a good morning shadaloo city article without the most random shit? no subtitles, you're on your own. except if you understand korean. apparently it's based on a parody manhwa [the 'w' there is important] named 'street fighter III', not to be confused with the actual SF3 released much later.
there also exists a live action korean street fighter series, where the only thing you need to know that it had a korean man in brownface protraying dhalsim. oh, and it also adapts the hong kong take on the game, 'king of street fighter' (18+ article)
there also exists future cops, a another street fighter parody-this time from hong kong. it's also a fucking feast.
the general main takeaway from all of this really is not capcom's track record of films for this series or how we may be coming up to a great non-indie film in the next few years, but rather that M. bison is objectively the most funniest character in street fighter.