Disney’s Bonkers (Genesis/Mega Drive)

Back when I was very young my family rented Disney’s Bonkers for the Sega Genesis and apparently I was quite a fan of it, so much so that my brother had to devise a devious scheme to lure me away from it. Purporting to have a new game he invented called “Bonker’s Bones”, my curiosity lead to me putting the game down to play what was ultimately a fairly straightforward way of playing with dinosaur toys. The anthropomorphic bobcat cop that was the star of the game and television show Bonkers played no role in it, but as time wore on I remembered Bonker’s Bones far better than I did the video game that inspired my brother’s trickery. Finally picking it up again all these years later I could see why a younger me was interested in Disney’s Bonkers on Genesis but I can also see why it faded from my memory over time.

Disney’s Bonkers begins with the titular character learning of an Officer of the Month competition at his precinct, the cartoon bobcat believing he has a chance to impress his human partner Lucky when he returns from his vacation. To try and cinch the honor, Bonkers aims to apprehend four criminals who were still at large in Toontown, a city where normal people coexist with the kind of impossible slapstick characters regularly seen in animation. The player will actually get to pick the order they pursue the four criminals, a choice made more meaningful by the fact each villain’s segment of the game features an entirely unique gameplay type. Essentially, each of the four minigame styles are presented through a multi-stage gauntlet where they get progressively harder and new dangers and considerations are introduced, although to somewhat break up the repeat plays there are periodic bonus rounds where Bonkers might earn extra lives by doing platform jumping challenges, correctly identifying the right crate after they’re shuffled up, or catching all the hearts a helicopter drops while driving in his car.

While the bonus games are deliberately simplistic and meant to be completed swiftly, the iterative designs of the others help them earn their appeal even if they start off looking fairly easy. The game starts with you hovering your hand over the wanted poster of the the living bag Harry the Handbag, and if you do decide to pursue him first you’ll find yourself in a museum defending five Disney-themed items from a slowly approaching group of raccoon thieves. Bonkers is limited to walking back and forth in a row right in front of them, but the raccoons will be passing through a fairly wide room full of pedestals they can hide behind, the player needing to take out every raccoon that approaches by hurling donuts at them. A single donut will make a raccoon disappear, but some raccoons will throw donuts back, meaning you’re not only moving around constantly to try and line up shots but soon you’ll be avoiding them as well. Donut tossing is unfortunately slightly imprecise; there are multiple rows of pedestals for the raccoons to take cover behind and you aren’t really aiming your throws so much as chucking them forward and hoping the game handles the contact between bandit and food properly. Usually it does a fairly decent job of making sure a donut meant for a raccoon hits them but as things get more hectic with each new round speeding things up and adding more thieves to the mix, it does become much more noticeable when your donut toss decides to go to the back row instead of hitting the raccoon that’s practically in front of you.

Some statues eventually enter the mix and one will even come to life if you hit it too much while trying to nail raccoons, and eventually bats will fly in to try and attack you if you don’t deal with them swiftly. Hitting Harry with a donut as he dances past will grant more health, but while most other minigames will rely primarily on the threat of losing life and in turn lives if you fail too often, the museum defense can also lead to failure if the raccoons successfully make off with all five items. Luckily, you can survive with only one remaining, protecting them naturally becoming harder and item losses even persisting for a few rounds before they mysteriously return. However, your defense of precious items like the sorcerer’s hat from Fantasia and Cinderella’s glass slipper is a mostly successful execution of its concept, getting surprisingly difficult in its last few rounds but still a mostly enjoyable way to fight back against a criminal even if the donut hit detection feels like it’s sometimes off.

The Rat, a giant scuzzy imitator of Mickey Mouse, has perhaps the most conceptually unique idea of the four major minigames. At The Rat’s scrapyard a large machine is firing junk at Bonkers to try and wipe him out. The junk can take on many forms the deeper you get in, starting with frisbees you’ll duck under and springs that bounce about and later getting more dangerous like wheels that quickly zoom towards you and chattering teeth that activate on a delay and leap about when they get going. Bonkers is still limited to a single row of purely horizontal movement in this minigame style, but here he isn’t tossing donuts, he’s hurling bricks. A large broken wall sits in front of the junk machine and your job is to quickly rebuild it, the bricks sealing into place once they’ve been stacked as high as they go and the player able to move around and complete different sections of the wall. The junk machine can’t fire through a complete portion of the wall, so denying it space can help give you more room to work while also leading to an inevitable late game segment where it’s sitting right where you need to build the last few brick stacks while it can fire straight towards you. Making a full stack can provide health pick-ups, an item that grants temporary invincibility, or a golden brick you can use to briefly disable the junk machine, but your bricks can also knock junk out of the air to protect you and the minigame ends up being about trying to manage the building work with keeping yourself safe. The Rat runs it at times to smash incomplete walls down with his hammer but can similarly be discouraged, and of the four segments this one perhaps does the gradual evolution of play best with new trash types on top of having a pretty active and compelling design at its heart. While some of the other minigames can feel like they last a bit too long since their new ideas run dry too quickly, The Rat’s junkyard scrap instead feels like it could have probably kept going and not lost its charm.

Perhaps the most average minigame in the bunch is pursuing the ironically small mouse Mr. Big, the rodent leaving a ticking time bomb in a warehouse full of crates that Bonkers can’t defuse alone. Luckily his friend Fall-Apart Rabbit can perform the apparently difficult task of dumping a bucket of water on the fuse, but the rabbit has literally fallen to pieces, his body parts stuffed in containers that jump and hop in place. Unfortunately the warehouses contain many crates and barrels as decoys so Bonkers will need to quickly search for his friend’s pieces, Bonkers now able to walk around the space freely and also capable of smashing open some containers but only pushing others aside. When rats begin showing up to try and stop your work, you are at risk of losing collected body pieces if they touch you and they can shove containers into you as well, but shove a container into them and they’ll disappear. Lining them up isn’t always easy and the danger of them adds a little extra zest to a fairly basic search, but you can easily scoop up any pieces of Fall-Apart Rabbit after they’re knocked out of you and the gameplay style barely changes, the only major iteration seen being the numbers of rats, the introduction of a mildly faster rat, and the containers that sometimes contain health eventually getting jack-in-the-box rats who tease you but won’t hurt you. Disney’s Bonkers is part of the Sega Club line of games that was meant to appeal to younger audiences, so while Harry the Handbag’s game gets surprisingly difficult and The Rat’s feels like it can appeal to all ages, this one’s simplicity is probably better enjoyed by children who might have more trouble navigating the cramped warehouse.

The last of the gameplay types is perhaps the weakest unfortunately, mostly because of a few control and flow issues. In pursuit of the living vehicle Ma Tow Truck, Bonkers now drives his living police car down a stretch of road. Initially you’ll be driving upwards with a bird’s-eye view of your vehicle, but other vehicles on the road will be trying to damage you, the player actually needing to wipe out a certain amount of the enemy cars before Ma Tow Truck will appear. However, there are side roads at intersections, these really not serving any purpose beyond adding confusion to the action. Driving on the vertically scrolling road is easy as you press left and right to veer your car in those directions, but if you end up driving down a horizontal road, left and right are now how you move up and down, merging back onto the vertical road surprisingly tough as your car may resist it and you can end up with the even more confusing driving downwards scenario where your directions are flipped. You do get to control how fast you drive forward on roads that stretch onward infinitely with repeating city scenery, so if you are worried you’ll be bumped into the streets where controls become a concern you can just slow down and let your enemies drive away. There is no timer and therefore not too much pressure to be expedient about it, and since a helicopter will fly in with health, weapons, and even brief invincibility at times, you can sometimes stall until you’ve got more favorable conditions to face the enemy cars.

To fight those cars you’ll start off mostly by ramming them off road, but cars introduced in later rounds can resist this or even hurt you for trying. You do have two “gags” you can use though, the patrol car able to fire bubblegum to tangle up a vehicle and incapacitate it or you can leave a trail of oil behind the car to slip up any vehicle in your wake. You get multiple uses of these per pick-up from the helicopter’s drops and they are far safer than trying to bully other cars physically, but again some vehicle types will prove resistant to the gags, thankfully only ever one or the other though. Once you’ve wiped out the required number of vehicles though Ma Tow Truck appears and she proves weak to both gags and body checking, although she is more capable than the usual vehicles. While monster trucks might be fearsome with their spiked rims, they’re easy enough to control your speed around while Ma Tow Truck often requires you to be close enough to her to strike while she can use the same gag powers against you.  Rounds of this minigame types last a bit too long as the careful approach isn’t really tested too much by the design and aggressive enemies can be allowed to pass if you need time to regroup, although that at least means you might not lose the lives that carry between all minigame types. Passwords let you hop into specific points in each minigame if you’re worried you’ll lose them all in more difficult segments like the late game museum defenses, but Ma Tow Trucks’s game style unfortunately doesn’t really bring the excitement despite it being a more forgiving way to start off if you’re worried about your lives.

THE VERDICT: Disney’s Bonkers on Sega Genesis has a fairly creative approach to its criminal-busting adventure, each of the major baddies having a unique minigame type to complete in a series of rounds that add new elements as they go. However, there are ideas that are handled better than others, The Rat’s junkyard battle for example adding in new fresh dangers on top of a consistent dynamic design while something like driving down the road to catch Ma Tow Truck drags on and encourages slow play to avoid annoying outcomes. The museum defense does get surprisingly challenging with some detection issues that are thankfully not too hard to brush off, but the warehouse search minigame is perhaps too plain to hold your interest for how many rounds it has. Ultimately the full package does average out into something decent, but it might have done Bonkers better to focus on the gameplay styles that clearly had more heart put into them.

And so, I give Disney’s Bonkers for Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

An OKAY rating. Individually, the four major gameplay types would probably hash out to Okay, Good, Okay, and Bad for Harry the Handbag, The Rat, Mr. Big, and Ma Tow Truck respectively. Harry the Handbag’s museum defense perhaps starts too easy and ends too hard, the donut tossing not always feeling as responsive as it should for something that eventually has over fifteen raccoons on screen at once as well as bats, enemy donuts, and the statues to consider on top of it, but the sweet spot where it feels manageable but suitably challenging gives this mode its serviceable status. The Rat’s junkyard game is a cleverly balanced battle where your progress in building the wall starts limiting where the machine can fire from while it also keeps getting new tricks to change how you approach the task, the variation of play within a round and across multiple plays better balanced than anywhere else in the game. The crate search mostly just feels like it never grew out of its basic concept and is rather harmless for it, but Ma Tow Truck’s driving has too many areas it can go awry with the side streets and in general its not too engaging stopping the other cars or trying to make sure you’re topped off on the things you need to do so. The junkyard fight could possibly be an entire game on its own if it just kept building off the premise, but to better clean up the rest of the experience it would have probably helped to make some key changes to the other minigames. Let the player choose how far they are aiming their donuts in the museum to make hit detection easier to figure out, even if it’s just choosing between near and far throws. The crate game needs more dangers or special complications to make it more interesting, but the road battle probably should have scrapped side roads entirely and perhaps reconsidered how you incapacitate other cars so that you wouldn’t be encouraged to hold back so often when things don’t look completely optimal.

This batch of a few different ways to play still ends up overcoming its small faults, but it still doesn’t bring enough entertainment to truly elevate it into an easy recommendation. The effort to make an interesting mix of gameplay types ended up having mixed results with ones that never are so bad they ruin play and others that aren’t great enough to offset its weaker moments. I wish I could ask myself which part of Disney’s Bonkers captivated my younger self, and while it could have been the junkyard game that ended up the best of the bunch, it may have just been something as simple as a well-animated cartoon character in an interactive entertainment. Even at my youngest I was still eager to engage with video games of all types and enjoy what I found even if I knew it had some faults, but Disney’s Bonkers is at least put together well enough that at its worst its never gets too bad. While I could easily put it aside now, Disney’s Bonkers does have enough to grab a kid’s attention, just not to such a degree that other people will likely find themselves concocting deceptive schemes to lure someone away from playing it now.