It’s hard to fathom for those who were too young in the early 90s, but at the time of its release, Street Fighter 2 was a juggernaut. It was a game so popular that it became one of the factors that contributed in giving Super Nintendo the edge over Sega Genesis. It gave dedicated arcade businesses a second life, right before their final decline. It was a cultural phenomenon that transcended the gaming community. Only Super Mario Bros. had🌟 really been tested on the silver screen before, so people had not been burned yet by video games adaptations. It was only a matter of time before Hollywood came calling.
Released during the Holidays in 1994, Street Fighter: The Movie starred Jean-Claude Van Damme, Kylie Minogue, and Raul Julia. As a Van Damme fan, I adore this objectively bad movie with all my heart, and saw it in the theater during its original run. Its release was eagerly anticipated, and Capcom knew it. A toy deal was struck with Hasbro, turning the GI Joe action figures into Street Fighter characters. They eve🍒n completed the circle by making a game about the movie, which was already based on a game.
The movie had all the characters that fans of the series love, but some slight alterations were made to the source material on its way to the final product. Let’s take a look at the most glaring differen𒉰ces between a campy Van Damme classic and the game it was based on.
15 💮 🌼 Guile’s Origins
Let’s start with🦩 the hero of the movie, Colonel William F. Guile. While he is portrayed accurately, at least physically, by the always willing Jean-Claude Van Damme, the character is wrong in many ways. The real Guile is a Major and not a Colonel, a꧟nd his first name has never been confirmed. If those were the only difference between the video games and the movie, I would call that a simple artistic liberty, but there’s one more thing that really sticks when comparing the two medias.
Guile is supposed to be the most American man to have ever lived, and yet, . Van Damme does everything he can to be Guile: He has the tattoo, the tank tܫop, and the split kick, but he can’t do an American acce♒nt to save his life, nor does he seem to try all that much. For the “so bad it’s good” crowd, it makes the movie perversely entertaining, and . If that doesn’t make you want to get in your boat and head for Shadaloo City, you’re lying. As for consistency, however, it’s a pretty big departure from the source material.
But !
14 M. Bison’s Job D🌳escription 🦹
Guile spends most of the movie running after M. Bison, who is the dictator of a small Asian country called Shadaloo. Not being a native of the area (as evidenced by his perfect Shakespearean pronunciation and the fact that he does not look Asian at all), M. Bison somehow took🌊 over the country with his army and is holding the population hostage. In his down time, he likes to torture people and say some really mean () things to those he despises.
The original M. Bison is only the leader of a criminal organization. Sure, he’s a really bad one, specializing in drug trafficking, terrorism, and brainwashing, but he has yet to conquer an entire country. Raul Julia’s masterful interpretation , but his interpretation shows Bison as a charismatic talker who is no match as a fighter without his electromagnetic suit. The real Bison is a psychopath, and a powerful one at that, who enhances his strength with Psycho Power: a spiritual force that feeds off fear, anger, and hatred. Kinda like the Dark Side of The Force, or the mood slime from Ghostbusters 2.
On the plus side.
13 🐭 🧸 The Truth About Shadaloo
While we are talking about M. Bison, let’s talk about Shadaloo. The real Bison uses an organization named Shadaloo as a front to engage in all kinds of evil and diabolical schemes. We are talking about biochemical drugs and weapons, massacres of entire villages, and other assorted villainy. The organization 🃏is powerful enough to operate almost as a small country, amassing weapons and having enough wealth🌺 to employ scientists to work on their various experiments.
The movie takes it one step further, by turning Shadaloo into its own country, with Shadaloo City being the biggest agglomeration. Bison took over as ruler of the country, but a scene in the movie indicates that he does not really care all that much for it, as his objective seems to be transforming the place in his image and renaꩲming it Bisonopolis. The game’s Shadaloo might be a lot scarier, but the movie’s version promises new, modern housing as well as food courts. In the meantime, the place is in the middle of a civil war, which is a cool story line, but which does not real🦹ly set the stage for a whole lot of street fighting.
12 💎 The Allied Nations
The Street Fighter series offers a diverse cast of characters, with the good guys usually having their own motivation for fighting. It can go from simple revenge to single-handedly taking down a criminal organization. Individual motivations are nice for a vide🐈o game where you have time to explore every character, but when you are trying to cram twelve or m𒈔ore of them in a single movie, it becomes difficult to portray accurately. The movie’s solution: The Allied Nations.
What are the Allied Nations, exactly? They are like the United Nations, with less peacekeeping and a more aggressive posturing. Most of the good guys gravitate around the Allied Nations: Guile, Cammy, and T. Hawk are in the chain of command, while Chun-Li, Honda, and Balrog hang out because of their news reporting duties. The organization is portrayed as overly bureaucratic and ineffective. Their Deputy Secretary (who you might know as the bad guy in the second Ace Ventura) is even planning on cancelling their rescue of the hostages, but thankfully Guile is there to convince the troops to🎉 carry on, with the help of an inspiring speech and a good dose of Belgian charm. Good thing he did, because watching military people pack up their tents and go back home isn’t much of a movie climax.
And Jean-Claude Van Damme is all climax.
11 Doctor Dhalsim 🅷
Video game Dhalsim is a peaceful man who also happens to be a fierce fighter. He’s all about yoga and elephants because he’s Indian, and because Punch-Out!! apparently does not have the monopoly on stereotyping cultures. In Street Fighter, yoga also allows you to breat𓂃he fire and stretch your limbs to more than twice their regular size, but those abilities did not translate to the silver screen.
Movie Dhalsim is depicted as a scientist, a doctor who is forced by Bison to experiment on humans, or else. Video game Dhalsim will supposedly never kill an enemy, like a mostly-naked Batman. In the movie, Dhalsim gladly mutates Blanka to save his own skin, but switches the brainwashing program from images of destruction to videos of birds and nature and kids playing in a field. He might be creating an abomination, but it’s gonna be a nice abomination. In the end, the only thing that reminds us that this is supposed to be the true Dhalsim is that he unexpectedly loses all of his hair in an explosion near the end of the movie. It also gets rid of his shir💜t, and tears half of his pants off in a perfect approximation of his SF2 costume. It's one hell of an e🍸xplosion.
10 🎐Speaking Of Abomination…
We all know Blanka as the gruff but lovable green guy who fights like a beast and bites peopleꦉ. Officially, he’s just a guy who grew up in the jungle without parents, but he’s still a regular human being. He’s just a bit feral, that’s all.
Street Fighter: The Movie turned Blanka into a military guy named Carlos Blanka who gets captured by Bison, one of the many hostages with little hope of ever being released since the ransom is a steep twenty billion dollars. He’s injected with toxic stuff to turn him into a super soldier, greatly enhancing his strength, but turning him green in the process. The operation also grew his hair significantly in a few days, and despite keeping him immobile for such a long period, it doubled his muscle mass. It also significantly dumbed him down, as he seems to barely recognize human speech and reacts to information by tilting his head to the side 𝕴like a confused puppy.
So the movie took a Brazilian jungle fighter and turned him into an intellectually-challenged super soldier. And somehow, some of the character🍌s got it even worse.
9 Remember C🔴harlie? ꩲ
Charlie Nash has been talked about for a long time in the Street Fighter series, though his playable appearances have been few and far between. In Street Fighter 2, he was presumed dead, and Guile was fighting to avenge him. The movie took the character and mixed it with Blanka to become a single person. Thus was born Carlos “Charlie” Blanka. The names an♔d origins🎃 might have been mixed up, but the character’s reason to exist remains the same. When he is captured, Guile swears to help his friend.
The movie twists the fꦍormula however by making Guile ultimately responsible for his friend’s own demise. When he is originally captured, Charlie/Blanka is assumed to be a regular Joe among th♑e hostages. It’s only when Guile insults Bison and clumsily mentions his name as one of the hostages on live television that he gets singled out and turned into a dumb green guy. Good job on throwing your friend under the bus there, Guile.
Also, because Movie Guile isᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ ♛kind of a terrible person, he tries to shoot his friend in the head when he realizes what he has been turned into. Only Dhalsim stops him, probably so that they can debate who’s the most responsible for turning Charlie/Blanka into a violent monster.
8 Sagat Falls Short 🉐
I👍 will admit that Sagat is my favourite Street Fighter. He’s a 7’4’’ monster with incredible reach and p꧋ower. The games portray him as a Muay Thai master, one who for most of the franchise is second in command to M. Bison. He’s a force to be reckoned with, so one might assume that the movie gives him a prominent role. Instead, the adaptation changes pretty much everything about Sagat except for the eye patch.
The movie version of Sagat is a retired cage fighter who turned to arms dealing after his career ended. A job description change is not the end of the world; just show him kicking some ass at some point, and we’re still in business. The biggest problem with Sagat’s movie version is that he is changed into a short, 50 years old man. He spends more time in his business suit than he does fighting. Sure, he is played by Wes Studi, an actor with an impressive resume, but you would have expected a bit more physicality in a movie called Street Fighter. This would have been like casting Da🍌nny Devito as E. Honda. You might get a good performance, but it’s a much smaller-scale approximation of the character.
7 🎃 Ryu And ൩Ken: Con Artists
One of the defining features of Street Fighter is the friendly rivalry between Ryu and Ken. Having trained together, the Shotokan fighters are two of the toughest and most well-liked characters in the series. Which is why it’s puzzling that the movie writers decided to turn them into con men who spend most of ♉their time weaseling their way out of a fight🍌.
Ryu and Ken punch a few bystanders in a staged prison escape, but you only really see them do anything noteworthy in a two-minutes fight near the end of the movie. Most of their screen time is spent turning them into 🍌the comedy relief team. Their biggest con ✨is to sell fake weapons to Sagat. The weapons shoot tennis balls instead of grenades. Because it’s one of the stupidest plan ever executed on film, they get caught easily, but it doesn’t stop there. They also betray Chun-Li, who is about to take out all the bad guys at the same time and avenge her father. We are then supposed to cheer them when they have a change of heart and join the good guys. Even then, Ryu is the only one who really changes, as Ken tries to stay behind to steal gold until the very last minute.
6 Chun-Li’s Revenge 𒅌
ꦫThe only thing 🐻that both versions of Chun-Li have in common is the revenge story. They both want to avenge their father who was killed by M. Bison. In the games, she hopes to achieve vengeance by becoming an Interpol agent and tracking Bison down. In the movie, her plan is a lot more convoluted, just like everyone else’s story.
Once she decides to get revenge, Chun-Li learns martial arts so she can defend herself. Then, she tracks down other people who want to get even with Bison (Balrog and Honda, who we will talk about in the next entry), and they become war correspondents for a news channel. That part of the plan alone must have taken a very long time, because I doubt that three people just march into a news station and ask to become reporters. We’re talking about university studies, and being lucky enough to all get hired at the same station. Fi๊nally, they all get voluntarily captured just so Chun-Li can seduce Bison into having some prꦗivate time, which she uses to kick him a whole lot instead of stabbing him when she has the chance. In the end, Guile is the one to kill Bison, and Chun-Li seems all right with that, even though her lifelong quest ended with a few kicks and someone else stealing her thunder. At least she's a good sport about it.