Banned ‘Nintendo/ Wu-Tang Clan’ TV Commercial (1993)

Like many things nowadays, gaming culture was way different in the 20th century compared to what it is now. Before the CD revolution in gaming that came with the first PlayStation in 1994, Nintendo was the main guy in the industry for many years to come.

With the huge success of the original Game Boy that was released in 1989, despite the growing competition, Nintendo managed to gain dominance in the market with its affordability, battery life, and large video game library with iconic releases like “Super Mario Bros.” and “Donkey Kong”. In the efforts to further improve one of their best-selling products, Nintendo started working on a new model to introduce colour displays instead of standard monochrome-based screens, which eventually led to the creation of Game Boy Color in 1998.
However, four years before that, Nintendo introduced a new peripheral called “Super Game Boy”, which gave players the opportunity to put a Game Boy cartridge in the Super Nintendo console and by doing so those four shades of green would be mapped to various colours on-screen, further enhancing the gaming experience. Today that doesn’t sound like much, but back then the option to play your favorite Game Boy games in full colour on a big screen was a major goddamn thing. Even though gaming was pretty much on the rise through the 90s, that particular industry wasn’t THAT popular as it is today so developers and publishers had to come with various marketing solutions to sell their consoles and video games. And that’s where the Wu-Tang Clan came in, at least in this story.

In a similar way Hip-Hop started to wield its influence in the music industry, Wu-Tang took the Hip-Hop scene by storm with their debut album in ’93 and made completely new standards within the rap game. Many heads outside recognized hip-hop as a rising force in the music world and figured out it would be smart to use it for their own benefit. Nintendo was obviously one of those companies and they teamed up with the Staten Island rap group to promote their upcoming new product – the aforementioned Super Game Boy.
The promotion came in a form of a TV commercial that features the legendary Bronx-based crew COD painting a building wall with Nintendo character murals and the brand new product. With short flashes of in-game footage from games like “Metroid” and “Donkey Kong”, RZA and the late ODB, accompanied by an unknown female person, almost comically throw lines about how the thing is “amazing” and “incredible”, as well as what it offers. Interestingly enough, the beat that’s rolling in the background wasn’t produced by RZA but Prince Paul, who at the time was forming the Gravediggaz group along with The RZArector and others.

The 40-seconds-long commercial, which was filmed in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC, didn’t get its time to shine as it eventually was dropped. Since the ad was giving praise to the graffiti culture and as New York at the time had a strong anti-graffiti policy after the 1989 Clean Train Movement, the odds are the thing got banned because of that. As the the COD member WEN1 said when posting the whole film on Vimeo for the first time in 2011, the ad was “banned from the networks for being too ill”, which kinda confirms my statement. After all, despite its overall success and growing popularity, hip-hop and its elements weren’t really loved by city officials and any kind of officials for that matter, so banning something that promotes what they considered a threat to society seems pretty logical to me.

However, thanks to some great people out there, the mentioned ad was reshared on YouTube before it got taken down from Vimeo. The video may not be much, for sure, but it’s an interesting piece of hip-hop history when businesses started taking notice of our culture and opportunities it offered in its early commercial days. Also, when you factor in that the ad was filmed in the same year when Wu dropped “36 Chambers”, you gotta give props to Nintendo‘s marketing team as they knew whassup early on.

Considering how fast the anti-graffiti officials were, I’m wondering for how long the 5-story-high Nintendo mural was decorating that one special street in Brooklyn.