Miscellany Vol. II: Juri OVA, Robodeka-Q, Rare Stickers, Pinball
This page covers background gags, a collector-edition anime, character design notes and hard-to-find merchandise.
The SonSon store
The SonSon shop is best known from the backgrounds of Ryu’s and Guy’s Alpha stages and from Sakura’s stage in Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. It turns up again at the far left of the Kyokugenryu Dojo stage in Capcom Vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000. Kyokugenryu karate belongs to SNK’s Sakazaki family (Takuma, Ryo and Yuri, from Art of Fighting and The King of Fighters), and Ryo’s Italian friend Robert Garcia was its first foreign student.
The Juri OVA
Street Fighter IV came with a short film, The Ties That Bind, introducing newcomer C. Viper. When Super IV launched in Asia, buyers of collector’s editions got a thirty-five-minute anime about Juri, known as the Juri OVA. Its plot concentrates on the destructive power she gets from the Feng Shui Engine. Chun-Li is hospitalised in it, for the second time in a Street Fighter movie, and the film brings back Bison’s dolls, rarely seen since the Alpha games. Juri defeats the bodyguards and ends the encounter by pushing Juni out of a VTOL, which explains why Juni is recovering in hospital in Cammy’s Super IV prologue and ending, apparently free of mind control. Juli(a) appears in T. Hawk’s Super IV ending but remains catatonic, and the other dolls’ fate is unknown.
Abel and Rufus, as first imagined
Early design art released on the development blog shows that Street Fighter IV’s Abel was first conceived as a woman, a karate fighter in geta sandals rather than an MMA practitioner. The blog also showed that Rufus’s slot was meant for a black karateka in a fur-trimmed gi and trainers, a design many players prefer. The outfit eventually appeared as an alternate costume for Ken, but the character was dropped.
Q’s full name
Q’s Third Strike ending reveals his full codename. A newspaper in the background carries the headline “ROBODEKA-Q” over a picture of the RMS Titanic, which suggests, along with “13 bizarre cases in the last 10 days”, that Q was somehow involved in the 1912 disaster. Robodeka is a wink at his visual inspiration, Robot Detective (Robot Keiji), the lead character of Shotaro Ishinomori’s 1973 Japanese television series and comic. Both have an iron face, yellow eyes, trench coat, shirt and tie. “Deka” means detective in Japanese, so Q is effectively Robot Detective Q.
How Cammy got her name
A Gamest issue on Super Street Fighter II says Colonel Wolfman named her. When she woke at Fraser Bala Castle she clutched a pendant inscribed “CAMM 740106”. Whether this still counts as canon is debated: in Udon’s comic it is Rose who gives her the name after freeing her from Bison’s mental hold, and in Masahiko Nakahira’s Sakura Ganbaru! Sakura is the first to call her Cammy, after a cat she once owned.
Rare sticker sets
Far scarcer than the Merlin (now Topps) Street Fighter sticker albums are the Kuroczik Susswaren stickers that were given away with Vidal Golosinas bubblegum. There are three known sets, promoting Turbo, Super and Warriors’ Dreams. Thanks to a blog by Michael Wayne, more is known about the Alpha set: it came out in 1996 and had thirty-three stickers, with number 18 very common and number 33 almost impossible to find, plus an official album. Most drawings are by CRMK (alias Bengus). Even pictures of stickers from these sets are scarce. Vidal Golosinas also issued Street Fighter pogs, apparently from the World Warrior era and more common, and probably temporary tattoos, which may be rarer still.
The pinball machine
Given the pachislo and pachinko machines, it is not surprising that Gottlieb made a Street Fighter II pinball game in 1993. Ray Tanzer and Jon Norris designed it, with artwork by David Moore and Constantino and Jeanine Mitchell. It was sold with the slogan “No location is complete without this pair” and carries the Champion Edition subtitle, matching the arcade game of the year before. The flyer shows a notoriously ugly Chun-Li, who also appears on the backbox with Ryu, Ken, Blanka and Bison, but the machine itself was well received.
