The success of Legend of Zelda from its beginnings in Nintendo needed to be transferred to television, and for this he was entrusted to Bob Forward be a main writer. But the ideas were short and he turned to two people who were not very experienced at the time, but very creative: her 16-year-old sister Eve and her mother Marsha.
The 1989 series had only 13 episodes, but he left his mark on the franchise.
Bob and Eve are the children of a renowned American physicist, Dr. Robert L. Forward, creator of the antenna for the detection of gravitational radiation, as well as promoter of other works for the Department of Defense and NASA.
But, away from numbers and experiments, Bob and Eve devoted themselves to writing scripts for television. While Bob worked with He-Man, She-Ra, Rambo, COPS and Captain Planet, among other series, Eve did it with GI Joe, Hammerman and the Mars Motorathons.
Two true heroes, without a doubt.
This is how a teenage Dungeons & Dragons fan came to Zelda
For 1989, Nintendo commissioned Bob Forward to write scripts for the animated series The Legend of Zelda. The issue is that the story of Link, Zelda and their companions had barely been developed in the video game, and to become a television production it needed much more.
So Bob went to Eve, who was then 16 years old and a Dungeons & Dragons fan. “My brother somehow ended up suggesting that I try to write an episode, and I was able to produce a couple of scripts that, with his editing, ended up being used,” Eve said in an interview with Polygon.
“The only address that had the basic line of the show, that described the characters and the kind of stories they were looking for. I didn’t have a Nintendo console, so I rented one, and I tried to play the video game, but I didn’t get very far.”
But Eve was a fan of Dungeons & Dragons, and based on that game, she worked on an episode of Zelda called Doppelganger. “In D&D you’re always fighting monsters and imagining how cool your character looks doing it, so a lot of the swashbuckling stuff that I liked to include was based on things that had happened in our D&D games.”
Bob acknowledges that he also had help from his mother, Marsha. “Eve and I were writing the stories alone. We even had our mom decide on one. She wrote something we had to work on a lot, but it wasn’t a bad initial concept.”
The Story of The Legend of Zelda (1989)
The Legend of Zelda (1989) was directed by John Grusd, with 13 15-minute episodes released between September 8 and December 1, 1989 on the show The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, from Nintendo of America and Viacom.
had the music of Shuki Levy, Haim Saban and Koji Kondo, and the art department was headed by Kazumi Fukushima.
Link and Zelda’s characters were moved to the Saturday show Captain N: The Game Master, with the original voices of Jonathan Potts and Cynthia Preston.
Currently, the Zelda franchise It is one of the most successful on Nintendo.
