Is Princess Lana Based on Palutena from Kid Icarus?
Captain N: The Game Master was a Saturday morning cartoon that celebrated the video games of the 8-bit era while also making the basest commercial pitch of “Hey, kids, buy this thing!” In fact, what I’m writing about in this post represents Captain N doing both of these things simultaneously, even if the link between Princess Lana and the game she’s referencing got disconnected in the final version of the show.
If you are reading this website, I probably don’t have to explain the show to you, but for the sake of the one person who hasn’t heard of Captain: The Game Master, just know that it was, essentially, a means to promote Nintendo games in the way that the G.I. Joe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons promoted their respective toy lines. The show focused on Kevin Keene, a real Billy Everyteen from Northridge, California, who gets zapped into his TV set and transported to Videoland, where all the NES games are connected. Every episode had Kevin venturing to a new world that represented a different NES title that you could and should go out and buy from your local toy store.
Here’s the intro sequence, in case you’re confused (and you probably should be).
This is actually a great idea for a kids’ show, I have to say, as far as making a thing that could trick kids into wanting games they otherwise might not know about. Where this show erred in its execution, however, was in its transformation of the NES’s biggest stars into versions that were less heroic than they were in their games, mostly because the series had to sell viewers on Kevin Keene being the real hero.
Simon Belmont, the moody whip-flinger from the Castlevania series, became a vain himbo, for example. Mega Man — green here, rather than his iconic blue — is toddler-sized, and saddled with both a gravelly voice and the odd speech impediment that makes him insert the prefix “mega-” into his speech. And then there’s Kid Icarus — which is to say not Pit, as his name is stated in his actual series, but a similar character who is just called the name of the video game, so kids know what to ask for at the toy store. He is also toddler-sized, is also afflicted with a strange speech impediment (of adding the suffix “-icus” to words for no real reason), and is also given a very annoying voice.
Given the target demographic, it should not surprise anyone that female characters were scarce on this show. The one female hero is Princess Lana, who rules over Videoland justly and benevolently while also looking like a sexy teen girl from that late ’80s/early ’90s overlap. She dresses in a way that suggests Kelly Kapowski by way of ancient Greece.
Like Zelda and Peach, she is ostensibly the main monarch in charge, but she is still given the title of princess. And because she’s a love interest for Kevin, who was created specifically for the series and who doesn’t have a counterpart in any video game, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Lana is also this. She is, to an extent, but when you look at her design, she also looks a hell of a lot like Palutena, the main female character from Kid Icarus.
Left to right: Princess Lana, Palutena as seen in the instruction manual for Kid Icarus and the revamped Palutena from Kid Icarus: Uprising.
In fact, she looks specifically like Palutena if someone tweaked that original design to be a little cuter, a little sexier, and a little pinker so that she reads as a little girlier. (Palutena, in her plain white, ankle-length robes skews matronly, at least before she gets that thigh-high slit.)
Although she is the damsel awaiting rescue at the end of the first Kid Icarus game, Palutena, it should be said, is not a princess like Zelda or Peach or Lana; she’s the goddess of light and the antithesis of Medusa, who in this series is the goddess of darkness. In design and function, Palutena seems to be inspired largely by the Greek goddess Athena, who also has an adversarial relationship with Medusa. Palutena’s name, rendered in Japanese as パルテナ or Parutena, would seem to be a nod to Athena, a virgin goddess, in that parthénos (παρθένος) is ancient Greek for “virgin,” hence the Parthenon being a temple dedicated to Athena. For what it’s worth, the name of the Parthenon would be rendered in katakana as パルテノン神殿, or Parutenon Shinden.
There is a second theory about Palutena’s name that seems less plausible, but I’ll mention it anyway. Athena is sometimes given the epithet Pallas, so she is sometimes referred to as Pallas Athena or just as Pallas. (When the narrator in Poe’s “The Raven” talks about the bird landing “on the pallid bust of Pallas,” he’s talking about a bust of Athena he used to decorate his library because he’s both a fancypants *and* a smartypants.) I suppose it’s possible that Pallas Athena could be collapsed into Parutena, but the parthénos etymology just seems more likely. Pallas would be rendered in katakana as パラス, Parasu.
Whichever etymology is correct, I think you can easily imagine a path from Athena to Palutena, and then looking at Palutena and Lana’s designs, you can see how that path continues. Their gowns, their scepters, their headdresses — Lana’s look a lot like Palutena’s, just with more pink. Way back in the day, the website Flying Omelette pointed out that this “original” character seemed closer to the game model than most characters officially adapted in Captain N.
Well, in a fun change from the past few posts of “I’m pretty sure this thing is as I say, but I can’t prove it,” I have some proof that there is actually a connection here.
Australian artist Fil Barlow did concept art for Captain N. You can see some of it on here, and it’s interesting what made the transition to Saturday morning — this big-headed version of Kid Icarus, for one — and what didn’t — the lead character was the paperboy from Paperboy, which I suppose happened because he was the most Billy Everyteen on the NES back in the day, what with Mike Jones from StarTropics not debuting until 1990. Barlow also did the designs for ALF: The Animated Series, and now that I think about it, I can see a similar style between that show and Captain N that I’m not sure I noticed back when I was a kid.
Notably absent in that art? Princess Lana. But Barlow referred me to Marcello Vignali, who designed all subsequent characters for the show, including Lana. When I asked him, he did not specifically remember looking at art of Palutena from Nintendo back in the day, but he also the parallels were striking to the point that Palutena had to be the starting point for Lana.
When we were working on the Captain N, the Nintendo corporation gave us a bunch of 8-bit images of their characters. In some other cases they sent us some drawings or packaging art. I can’t remember for sure if that was the case with Palutena, but from the look of her design that certainly was where her design came from. The similarity is too close to be a coincidence.
For what it’s worth, if you squint and tilt your head just right, you can also imagine how someone taking Palutena and trying to jazz her up for a Saturday morning audience might end up getting deciding that “Lana” is kinda-sorta close enough to the original name but also “posh, fancy girl” appropriate for an audience that also watched Jem and the Holograms or Beverly Hills Teens.
In terms of the legacy of Palutena, what’s interesting to me is that for a long period of time Princess Lana is the only aspect of Palutena in any media where she ever gets to do a damn thing. Palutena only shows up at the end of Kid Icarus, in true NES-era damsel-in-distress style, and only with 2012’s Kid Icarus: Uprising did Nintendo decide to let her become a fully formed character that’s more interested than many versions of more popular female leads like Zelda and Peach. She has a personality. She makes fun of Pit. She’s a bit of a know-it-all. And, weirdly, she has a particular fondness for exotic cuisine.
It remains to be seen whether Nintendo ever makes a new Kid Icarus game, but Palutena has been playable in the past two installments of the Smash Bros. games. In both, one of her alternate colors is pink, so I suppose if you really want to, you can pretend this one is Lana — and even beat up the rest of the Captain N crew, since they’re all playable too.
The person who put this Captain N staging together didn’t get the memo about Palutena, however.
Miscellaneous Notes
Given that Kid Icarus was released for the Famicom in December 1986, I’d bet good money that Palutena being inspired by Athena had something to do with the popularity of Saint Seiya. Though the anime debuted in October 1986, the manga premiered in January 1986, which is *just* about enough time for Nintendo to create Palutena in the image of Seiya’s main female protagonist, Saori Kido, who in the series is the reincarnation of the goddess Athena.
Saori and Palutena share some design elements, and it’s possible that Saori’s purple hair could have prompted Nintendo to give Palutena green hair, perhaps to demonstrate that Palutena wasn’t fully a copy of the Saint Seiya character. (“See? Green hair? Purple hair? They’re totally different!”) However, in the manga, Saori has brown hair, not purple, so the hair color might just be a coincidence. It should be said that Palutena also looks a bit like Sailor Moon’s Sailor Pluto, though Pluto first debuted in 1993, so it’s probably not a cause-end-effect thing happening here. I have to admit that all of these goddess-like women wielding holy staffs might share a common inspiration going further back that I just don’t know about. If so, please let me know.
As far as Captain N is concerned, the series, the series big bad is the Mother Brain from the Metroid games, given a lot more life and personality for the cartoon show, and voiced by Levi Stubbs, who voiced Audrey II in the movie version of Little Shop of Horrors and who is to an extent doing a drag performance here.
In speaking with Vignali about designing Captain N, he also recalled Mother Brain being hard to design for a very specific reason.
When we were designing Mother Brain, the Nintendo corporation didn’t give us any art for it. Instead, they gave us a video game. Unfortunately, none of us were good enough to get to the Mother Brain level — and the DIC animation studio didn't want to pay us artists to sit around playing a video game. So one of the secretaries brought in her son and he got us to the Mother Brain level. We grabbed some screen shots and were able to complete the design.
Conspicuously, Samus Aran, the heroine from Metroid does not appear; she’s arguably the biggest Nintendo icon from this era not to appear in cartoon form. She only appears in the Captain N comics. However, a version of Princess Zelda from the Super Mario Bros. Super Show tie-in series does appear in four episodes. Medusa, the big bad from Kid Icarus appears in one episode. And one episode introduces Mega Girl, a female version of Mega Man who kinda sorta seems like she might be based on Roll, Mega Man’s counterpart in the games.
Lana’s father, King Charles, is technically still alive, though exiled to the Mirror Zone by Mother Brain. He’s voiced by Long John Baldry, who also voiced Dr. Robotnik in Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and did a lot of voice acting, but who’s most famous for being a blues singer who came out back when singers weren’t publicly declaring their homosexuality. He was friends with Elton John, and the song “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” is about Baldry (along with Bernie Taupin) helping prevent Elton John from killing himself. It’s a wild story — and as always one I am surprised to be mentioning on this site.
The first collection of Greek myths I ever had explained that the name Pallas Athena came about because Athena accidentally killed her friend Pallas during a friendly athletic competition and took on her name as a symbol of her grief. That always seems straightforward enough to me, but in researching this piece, I found that that itself may be a sort of folk etymology popularized in ancient Greece. People disagree on the meaning of Pallas. It literally means “little maiden,” but could also come from the ancient Greek verb meaning “to brandish.” Athena being a maiden goddess who brandishes a spear and shield, it could be both, yet the Greeks ended up coming with the “dead best friend” story anyway, and, in fact, there are two other characters named Pallas whom Athena kills in other versions of the story.
Hey, remember Wombat Man? Also a creation of Marcelo Vignali’s.