The Legend of Zubaz
One of the most surprising tidbits I found in researching the prehistory of Street Fighter II has to do with this beefy, whip-wielding bullfighter guy who was sketched into existence but who didn’t make it into the game.
They call him Zubaz. Or at least they did.
Let’s just say some of us were poorer for not having met him way back when. I at least would have figured out some stuff sooner if we had.
The above illustration is how the character appears in the museum section of the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, but if you’re someone who has looked into these things on your own, you probably encountered a slightly different version of his sketch, with the name Zubaz emblazoned across those meaty pecs.
I’d imagine that for an official release, Capcom had to censor the drawing to avoid any copyright conflict with the Zubaz clothing compamy, which registered its trademark in 1989 initially as a line of athletic wear for weightlifters. Back in the day, the brand was synonymous with loose-fitting zebra print workout pants. Among the notable people to be associated with it are The Road Warriors, a pro wrestling duo who also sported Rorschach-looking facepaint and spiked pauldrons that I’m pretty sure are reflected in the Zubas guy’s gauntlets.
The Road Warriors, hailing from a point in history where hot magenta was a man’s color, apparently.
Per the 2015 book Fashion Fads Through American History, the brand name Zubaz comes from the “gym slang” expression of “zooba,” which it says means “in your face” without explaining if it’s an adjective or a command or what. The business went bankrupt in 1996, but the founders bought back the trademark rights and reopened Zubaz in 2007. Today, you can buy the zebra print pants in any number of colors, but the company sells less garish workout clothes, if you do not, as the company’s tagline encourages, “dare to be different.”
Zubaz (the character, not the clothing brand) might have slid into obscurity were it not for Street Fighter fans horny for his design, and counted among those was Fighterpedia, a web show premiering in 2011 with an episode dedicated to rejected Street Fighter character designs. (It was previously a Machinima series but was reposted to YouTube in 2018.) At the 3:30 mark, the guys seize on the indisputable awesomeness of Zubaz’s design.
From that first episode, Zubaz became a running joke on the show and on the affiliated shows that were part of Super Best Friends Zaibatsu, to the point that the character has now appeared in games the Zaibatsu guys have backed on Kickstarter. That’s cool in and of itself, but for me personally, a minor mindhole-blower is the fact that they got him into Shovel Knight. And I played Shovel Knight and was a person who was was enamored with the Zubaz Street Fighter design, yet I didn’t realize that the character The Baz, who looks a hell of a lot like ol’ Zubaz, was the same character — or at least a riff on that original Capcom design.
I am fairly sure that I came across Zubaz during the days of Tumblr, mostly on some gaymer-focused blog, but if there’s a reason online awareness of the Zubaz design was spreading, it was very likely thanks to the Super Best Friends Zaibatsu guys, who were celebrating this character for different reasons. I may be the only person who dug the character and who played through Shovel Knight without putting two and two together, but in case I’m not, I wanted to post this here, because it’s a cool example of how focused video game fandom can, given appropriate circumstances and also $1,000 to give on Kickstarter, actually end up shaping games themselves.
Long live Zubaz, whatever he may be called.