You remember the arcade game Dragon’s Lair even if you never played it. The 80s game was revolutionary in its style and technology. You played as Dirk the Daring, a “brave” knight tasked with saving the beautiful Princess Daphne. As you’d expect, Dirk’s journey wasn’t so easy and he had to do battle with various bad guys including dragons (duh), wizards and other treacherous evildoers.
The game sounds pretty basic, I know. But the entire thing was hand-drawn by Don Bluth and had a style unlike anything else in video games at the time. The game was played off of Laser Disc and was truly unique, both in its scope, its difficulty and its style. It was like playing a cartoon.
It’s both exciting and bittersweet to hear that all these years later a movie adaptation of Dragon’s Lair is finally being made. Exciting because Netflix is creating the film and Ryan Reynolds is set to star. Reynolds is really a perfect choice for Dirk, who wasn’t nearly as daring as his name claimed. Dirk will be a humorous, physical and slapstick role: that sounds like Reynolds to me.
But the news about Dragon’s Lair is also somewhat bittersweet because I fear it’ll lose some of its magic once it’s live-action. A lot of the appeal of Lair was the trademark cartoon style from Don Bluth. While the movie may maintain the feel and personality of the game, it won’t maintain the look of it and that’s a damn shame. But there are plenty of YouTube videos of Dragon’s Lair playthroughs if you want to take a stroll down memory lane. I suggest you do and remind yourself just how cool and ahead-of-its-time Dragon’s Lair was.
Here, take a watch: