Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle - PC DOS / Macintosh (1994)
American Cover
Day of the Tentacle
Day of the Tentacle
The animated intro begins with Green and Purple Tentacle outside the mansion, pondering a stream of sludge created by one of Dr. Fred's crazy inventions. On a whim, Purple Tentacle takes a gulp and somehow sprouts opposing limbs, opening up the potential for crazy plans of world domination. Dr. Fred manages to capture both tentacles, but not before Green sends out a cry for help via Weird Ed's hamster. It reaches the dorm of Bernard, now living up the college life with his roommates, a burnt out roadie named Hoagie and a vaguely psychotic med student named Laverne. The trio infiltrate the mansion and quickly free the tentacles, only to have Purple escape and resume his schemes to enslave humanity. Dr. Fred comes to the (rather extreme) conclusion that the only way to stop him is to travel through time, precisely one day in the past, and prevent Purple Tentacle from drinking the sludge in the first place. The three are quickly enlisted into service and shoved into three Chron-o-Johns, portable toilets that can travel through the ages.
Something goes wrong, of course, as each of them are sent through the expanses of time - Hoagie lands 200 years in the past, during the time of the American Revolution, and Laverne ends up 200 years in the future, where tentacles run the planet and humans are mere pets. On the other hand, Bernard ends up right back where he started in the present day. Each has their own quest to return back to the proper time and foil Purple Tentacle's scheme - Hoagie must find and charge a super battery, a difficult task given that electricity had yet to be properly discovered, Laverne must find a way to blend in amongst the tentacles to recharge her own Chron-o-John, and Bernard must somehow obtain the funds to buy a replacement jewel for the time machine. Like The Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle is clearly aware of the absurdities it presents - surely there are much easier ways to stop a hopping tentacle that bending space and time - but the game gleefully rolls with it, for the simple fact that it's a lot of fun.
Once past the intro section, Day of the Tentacle greatly opens up, almost to intimidating proportions. In the present day, the mansion has been converted into a hotel, which is holding a practical joke convention. In the past, it's housing the forefathers of America, with the Declaration of Independence ready to be signed in its very living room. In the future, it's Purple Tentacle's headquarters. While Laverne is stuck to a few areas since she's a prisoner of the tentacles, both Bernard and Hoagie have free run of the mansion in both time periods. Unlike the first game, the characters don't possess any special talents, although each starts with their own personal inventory. It's also structured a bit more like a typical adventure game, in that it no longer runs in real time, although there are still occasional humorous cutscenes that pop up from time to time - these include musings from the forefathers in Hoagie's time, newspaper clippings of Purple Tentacle's rise to power in the present era, and hate-fueled rants by an aged Purple Tentacle in the future.
Even though it removes the alternate puzzle solutions, it's still a lot more freeform and non-linear than most adventure games.The Monkey Island games usually gave you several quests to tackle at once, under the assumption that if you get stuck at one, you can always move on to another. Day of the Tentacle takes that to a further extreme - you have to play around, find every item that you can, and identify the puzzles to be solved. Most of these aren't readily apparent, but nearly all of the major ones have to deal with time travel in some capacity, or finding ways to bend the rules. For instance, the three characters can teleport items to each other through the Chrono-o-John (which is thankfully abstracted simply by dragging an item to their portrait) but it doesn't work on anything living. Keeping in line with the first Maniac Mansion game, you'll need to capture Ed's hamster again, but you need to figure out some way to get it to Laverne without directly sending it through the time machine.
Some of them are pretty ridiculous, right from the outset. In order to Laverne to wander around freely, she needs a costume. One of the only items she has access to is a medical diagram of the tentacles. Meanwhile, Hoagie runs into Betsy Ross, who is in the process of designing the American flag. You need to have Laverne send the tentacle diagram to Hoagie, who gives it to Ms. Ross, thereby altering history and turning the American flag into the shape of a tentacle. Then Bernard can climb the flag pole, send it to Laverne, and voila! (No matter, of course, that Laverne looks ridiculous in it, but the dimwit tentacles in the future somehow find her incredibly attractive in her obviously fake get-up.) It's something of an absurd puzzle, and at least a few of them involve screwing up American history for your own personal gains. They're all hilarious to muse about despite their obtusity, but most of them offer some kind of clues. There's a reason why Thomas Jefferson has a time capsule, and while Laverne can find that same time capsule 400 years later. There's also a very specific reason why the laundry room is completely identical in the present and future eras. Some of them are even silly without relying on the time travel stuff. Right at the beginning, once Bernard frees the tentacles and Dr. Fred sends you on a task to find the plans for his time machine, implying your first great quest...only to find them a couple feet away from you, in the same room, tacked to a cork board.
Outside of the gleefully deranged puzzles, Day of the Tentacle is amazing to look at. In the six years between games, technology had moved from oddly gangling teenagers to a fully fleshed out cartoon. While Monkey Island 2 (and most Sierra games at the time) elected to use scanned backgrounds, Day of the Tentacle takes a page from classic cartoons and sticks with more solidly colored backgrounds, which removes the graininess of the 256-color limit while making the world much brighter. The backgrounds are all drawn in odd proportions with even odder angles - nothing is quite straight on, which perfectly matches the deranged nature of its inhabitants. Even more beauty lies in the character sprites and their animation - Bernard marches, pants hiked up far too high arms at his side, chugging along like his old Maniac Mansion sprite. Hoagie lumbers, hands in pockets, hair that always covers his eyes, and an unfortunately visible plumber's crack. Laverne has a weird bulging eye and doesn't so much walk as prance gleefully from place to place, a widely moronic grin as she skips and a blank expression of perpetual bewilderment when idle.
The rest of the characters beyond the three protagonists shine just as brightly. As one can see, the relationship between the heroes and the Edisons have changed quite a bit from the original Maniac Mansion - Dr. Fred and his clan are no longer enemies (and the Meteor is gone completely) and their personalities have changed too. Nurse Edna is more of an insane cackling witch than a sexual deviant, and Weird Ed is more of a restrained weirdo who obsesses over stamps than a militant nutjob. (Apparently the microwaving of the hamster from the previous game was canon, because Weird Ed hasn't quite gotten over it.) Dead Cousin Ted is still around as a mummy in all three time periods (and needs to be dressed up by Laverne to win a "Best Human" contest.) Various other Edison ancestors and descendants are found in each period, although the most amusing are the caricatures of American's founders - as it turns out George Washington and Ben Franklin were kinda jerks! It's a bit of a shame none of the rest of the Maniac Mansion crew is mentioned at all, although Razor was initially meant to return before getting cut in the planning stages.
Day of the Tentacle also offers full speech in the CD-ROM version, and the exceptional dialogue mixed with the brilliant casting and acting is impeccable. Bernard is a typical weenie, Hoagie goes on irrelevant tangents and seems to be the least flummoxed by the situation they're in, and Laverne is prone to mad giggles between her lines. In taking another page from classic American cartoons, a good number of the voices are plays off famous actors and characters - a vandal randomly sounds like Jack Nicholson, Thomas Jefferson is reminiscent of Dudley Do-Right, and both John Hancock and his lousy great-great-great-great-grandson salesman both sound like Woody Allen. In the past, there is also a talking horse, for some reason or another, sounding a bit like Mr. Ed. (It really doesn't seem that out of place considering the sentient megalomanical tentacles and whatnot.)
Although Day of the Tentacle can possibly be criticized for its obtuse puzzles, and it lacks the replay value of its predecessor, it's otherwise one of the few nearly perfect adventure games - gorgeous visuals, an incredibly innovative setup, memorable characters and hilarious dialogue. If there's any true "canon of adventure gaming", this one deserves to be on the top.
The entirety of the original Maniac Mansion is included as a bonus in Day of the Tentacle, accessed by using the computer in Weird Ed's room. Unfortunately, it's the initial release with the really blocky graphics instead of the enhanced version. This function also doesn't quite work with SCUMMVM - you just have to look at the resource files and add Maniac Mansion separately on the main menu, and launch it from there.
Day of the Tentacle
Day of the Tentacle
Day of the Tentacle
Day of the Tentacle
Day of the Tentacle
Day of the Tentacle
Day of the Tentacle
Day of the Tentacle
Day of the Tentacle
Day of the Tentacle
Day of the Tentacle
Maniac Mansion - The TV Show
Maniac Mansion is only very, very loosely based on the Lucasarts game. It ditches the whole bit with the teenagers and just focuses on the Edisons, except the Edisons are nothing like they are in the game. Sure, the head of the household is named Fred, he's a mad scientist, and there's a meteor in his basement (which isn't sentient like the games), but that's about all they have in common. The rest of the family is completely different, albeit with some quirks due to his experiments - his four year old son was turned into a hulking, halfway mentally handicapped giant with an annoying falsetto voice, and his brother-in-law was turned into a fly. None of their names rhyme with "ed", as they should. The developers of the game had little hand in the TV show's production, naturally.
The quote on the cover of the sole VHS tape release, "The Love Collection" says that New York Post claims it's "The '90s equivalent of the Addams Family". It isn't. It has none of the same horror-fueled charm as the Addams, nor even the schlocky atmosphere of the game. The house isn't even so much a mansion as just kinda large, and the family certainly isn't crazy enough to be considered maniacs. Anyway, it's a pretty standard sitcom, so the family face dilemmas which they handle in humorous ways, then everything's happy at the end. Some consider it a spiritual successor to the Canadian sketch show SCTV, since some of the same people worked on it. It stars Joe Flaherty (best known recently for his role as the crazy dad in the excellent Freaks and Geeks) as Fred and was created by Eugene Levy (Jim's dad from the American Pie movies.) Despite its comedy roots, the show really isn't very funny outside of its slightly offbeat premise.
Maniac Mansion (TV Show)
Maniac Mansion (TV Show)
Cameos
Zombies Ate My Neighbors! (SNES)
Maniac Mansion A shrine to the original game.
Day of the Tentacle
Maniac Mansion was, of course, a decent success and began a steady stream of adventure games from Lucasfilm, including Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, Loom, two Indiana Jones games, and two Monkey Island games. By this point, Ron Gilbert left the company to join Humongous Entertainment, while his previous collaborators on the Monkey Island games, Tim Schafer and David Grossman, went on to direct the only Manic Mansion sequel: Day of the Tentacle. Due to the change in direction, it shows a marked shift in both humor and tone, leaving behind the faux horror vibe in favor of Looney Tunes-style wackiness. That is in no way meant in the pejorative sense, because it also might be one of the funniest, well designed adventure games ever created.
Maniac Mansion was somehow translated into sitcom, produced in Canada in 1990. There were 66 episodes in total for the Family Channel, a cable network that, at the time, had pretty low penetration. It was largely known for the religious show The 700 Club and has since morphed into ABC Family.
There have been numerous references to Maniac Mansion in other games. Razor's band, Razor and the Scummettes, in mentioned in other games, and her design inspired one of the members of the Vultures in Full Throttle. The Purple Tentacle also shows up as an idol in The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, replacing a visage of Max from the original game. The most interesting shows up in Zombies Ate My Neighbors!, a cheeky action game developed by Lucasarts for the Genesis and SNES. One of the secret levels is called "Day of the Tentacle" and features an army of Purple Tentacles as enemies.
Links
The Maniac Mansion Fansite An older, but still informative, fan site of the original game.
The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion A detailed write-up of all the stuff removed from the NES version.
Maniac Mansion Deluxe Download the fan remake here.
The Unofficial Maniac Mansion Fan Site Devoted to the TV series.
Adventure Gamers - Day of the Tentacle An excellent review. This site devoted DotT as the best adventure game of all time.
