"Prepare to be Crackerized" – joe_cracker

About

The Legend of Zelda: The Light of Courage is a The Legend of Zelda-inspired fanfiction created by IGN board user Robert C. McGee, aka "joe_cracker", who was convinced that his Zelda fanfiction was destined to become an animated movie based on Nintendo's "Legend of Zelda" series. The videos, created by Sexualburgerking, Cellius, Orquiox, parody the story and its creator through use of literal interpretations of the script, purposefully done animation errors, and other visual gags. The main draw of the series has been its "so-bad-it's-funny" sense of humor.

The entire script can be read here^[1]

History

In 2003, McGee began posting threads on IGN's message boards detailing his script and story for "The Legend of Zelda: The Light of Courage".^[2]

McGee attempted to get the rights to The Legend of Zelda through petitiononline.com and even handed out flyers in his home town in an attempt to garner attention for his project. IGN Board user TheSpotlight eventually agreed to help McGee with his script, but eventually, in summer 2004, he left the boards out of frustration, as Joe reportedly had been ordering TheSpotlight around like an employee and was trying to get him to do all the major writing for him.

In late 2004, IGN Board user *Cellius_*18 joked that McGee's script had been stolen by a big name producer and was being made into a feature film. McGee believed the message to be genuine and attempted to give the producer, which he named "The Cheese" or "Cheese Head" (To contrast his name, cracker, as in "Cheese" and "Cracker"), a cease and desist, which failed, seeing as how said producer did not exist.

Board users Sexualburgerking (Who at the time was pretending to be John Grusd, the director of the 80's Zelda cartoons), Cellius, and Orquiox convinced McGee that the only way to stop the movie from being produced was to make the movie themselves. The three then created a "test animation", claiming it to be a WIP video by film and TV production company DiC entertainment, which had previously worked on adaptations of "Sonic the Hedgehog" and "Madeline". The short was made to be intentionally bad so as to convince Robert McGee once and for all that his grand plans for a Zelda movie were in vain. The video was posted on YouTube in 2006. (shown below)

However, McGee was still convinced that the test animation was legitimate. SBK, Cellius, and Orquiox then produced a second short in 2006 to further shake sense into him.

By the production of the third video in late 2006, "joe_cracker" finally realized that the entire thing had been a joke. An updated version of the third short was released in 2008 with annotations explaining the inside jokes and backstory that had led up to this point.

Later in 2008 a teaser for "The Light of Couage 4" was released.

By then, however, the project had been abandoned with all involved feeling the joke had gone on long enough.

several short joke animations called "Bitcrushers" featuring the LOC characters were also created during that time.

Reception

The Light of Courage series developed its own cult fanbase with several fansites such as http://www.lightofcracker.com/ and dancingtriforce.com, both of which are now defunct. A collection of content from the Dancing Triforce website can be downloaded here: http://herbalcell.com/static/tloc/misc-tloc-and-cracker-media.zip^[9]

joe_cracker's film group 963 Productions has their own message board which is not very active anymore^[3]

963 Productions has a Youtube page that is still up and running^[4]

Fan Projects

The Light of Courage has been used in several YouTube Poops and other parody videos.

Search Interest

External References