The Mystery of Captain Falcon’s “Short Sleeves”
So I was browsing around the world wide web recently, looking to see if I could stumble onto some artwork by Takaya Imamura that I hadn’t seen before, especially of the F-Zero variety. While I didn’t find anything in particular that I hadn’t seen before, I did happen to notice something that got me thinking a bit.
Sometime last year an interview was published with the developers behind the original F-Zero for the SNES, and in there some art done by Imamura was shown off. Upon looking at his original illustrations for the F-Zero manual comic about Captain Falcon, I noticed something interesting about Falcon’s early design, his short sleeves.
Why on earth would I find something so mundane to be interesting?
Well it’s because to this day Captain Falcon’s character design from the original to the X era is still one of my favorites in video games, having that straight forward ‘main character’ appeal while still keeping that eccentric nature the rest of the F-Zero character designs have. One particular element of his design that has always had me curious were his odd, double gloved arms from F-Zero X.
I describe them as double gloved due to them having a sort of flap similar to the gloves on his hands. In any case, looking at it now they sort of give him a ‘short sleeved’ look, but not quite. One could even assume it may be a homage by Imamura to his earlier concepts. But that is Falcon from X, we must go back further to really get a clearer picture of this mysterious design choice. However before that, lets look at how Captain Falcon’s design was finalized in the original F-Zero.
It seems the artist they hired to redraw the comic wasn’t down with the short sleeves, or a change was made upon further consideration. (Side note: I really would like to one day know the name of the guy who drew this and the promotional art for the original. ATM I can’t find any info on it)
But now, lets take a deep dive into Captain Falcon’s true original design, the enigmatic Captain Something-or-Other. Then potential mascot for the Super Famicom System, created by a young go-getter trying to make a name for himself at Nintendo.
Notice short sleeves, or rather rolled up ones, which to be honest is a better look in my opinion. So since the very beginning, Imamura was thinking this guy has got to be rocking the exposed arms look. Very interesting stuff. Of course, as we saw with the finalized design and continuing into F-Zero X, this was not to be the case. I have one last bit of reference in regards to this design choice that pushed me over the edge into wanting to spend way too much time rambling on about it. I present evidence E!
Kent Akechi, from F-Zero: Maximum Velocity.
We don’t talk about this game much around these parts, but it was pretty neat. This little shit claims he’s Captain Falcon’s son, but the guy is going around showing off his face all day so maybe he doesn’t quite understand the seriousness of that claim. Does he think Black Shadow didn’t have offspring that want to kill him in front of millions? Samurai Goroh of course didn’t because his “son” is AX trash and should be disowned. But I digress.
As you can see, Kent here is rocking the short sleeve look as well, bringing it all full circle. Now as far as I’m aware, Takaya Imamura isn’t credited in Maximum Velocity so I don’t really think he had anything to do with the design of the characters featured in it, however the underlying theme of this whole mystery is the idea of consistency. When you create characters, you gotta keep them visually consistent for them to become recognizable and iconic, and in the case of Captain Falcon it seems that him having a ‘short sleeve’ look was something Imamura wanted to stick with, perhaps not wanting to betray his original vision of the character.
That or I’m just full of shit and just wanted to go off on a rant about a coincidence I found to be amusing relating to F-Zero’s hero.
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