Web Animation / The Light of Courage

This is a ti-THIS IS A TIME, for which a hero must succeed. Failure, is not a choice...^note In clockwise order: Ganon (holding the Triforce of Wisdom), Tingle, Prince Facade, Ruto, Princess Zelda, the Triforce of Power, Link, the Triforce of Courage, Eian, King Hofane and Majora's Mask

The Legend of Zelda: The Light of Courage is an alleged script of an animated movie based on The Legend of Zelda (specifically envisioned as The Movie to the DiC animated series) by IGN forum user Joe_Cracker. Joe_Cracker's attempts to pitch his script, which was itself of dubious quality, are a saga unto themselves, but several denizens of the forum got together, made some animations based directly on the script, and posted them on the Internet. These shorts lift dialogue directly from the script, complete with syntactical and grammatical errors. The characters were rendered in a blocky, polygonal style with several animation errors kept in for humorous effect. This resulted in shorts that are pretty funny to watch on their own, but absolutely hilarious if one knows the saga behind them.

Watch the three shorts alongside additional content here, read about the author's three-year-long odyssey to get his movie made here or here, and finally, the original script that started it all has been mirrored here.

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The Light of Courage provides examples of:

• Added Alliterative Appeal: "I'm not impressed. I've seen better battles with beetles in a bottle. *Rimshot*"
• Ambiguously Gay: In contrast to his portrayal as a regally-dressed white knight in the cartoon, Prince Facade, who most notably features in the second short, is shown as an effeminate cross-dresser who also has one of his hands resting on his hips and a flamboyant accent. However, while Facade was straight in the cartoon as seen with his (failed) relationship with Zelda and was in a romantic relationship with Princess Ruto in the original script, his sexual orientation in the animations isn't as clear since some lines from the original script^note most relevantly Ruto saying "Ohhh, my prince." when he first appears and Eian asking "And prince, what’s with the fish fry?" were left out in Part 2.
• Anachronism Stew: Played for Laughs and most notably seen in Part 3. A marquee sign, binoculars, a wrist watch, road blocks and traffic cones and even a bicycle are all seen within the otherwise medieval fantasy kingdom of Hyrule.
• Animation Bump: The third video has the most amount of effort put into it, and it shows. The backgrounds and other settings are given more detail, there is a stop-motion sequence for the dungeon crawl scene and Ganon's model is complex, emotive and animates fluidly, to give a few examples.
• Art Shift: The third video has a short dungeon crawl sequence done entirety with a mix of Claymation and action figures.
• Author Avatar: Eian in both the original script and the video trilogy is a likely self-insert of Joe_Cracker, the author of the original script. Joe_Cracker even voices him in Part 2.
• Beam Spam: During the Say My Name sequence below, Link starts shooting sword beams wildly, even hitting Eian with one.
• Bloodless Carnage:
  • Ganon's hand gets severed with nary a drop of blood.
  • Averted with Eian, whose blood and guts shoot onto the tent from Part 2 after he's hit by one of Link's sword beams.
• Broken Record: The Triforce of Courage occasionally speaks like this. "A true hero-TRUE HERO seeks neither fame nor fortune..." This is because the audio for the Triforce of Courage, at least in Part 3's case, was pulled from Joe_Cracker's trailer for the movie, which had audio-skipping issues.
• Butt-Monkey: Eian is shown repeatedly dying in various ways in Part 3, a Take That! to how he was a blatant self-insert in the original script.
• Canon Foreigner: Among the script's original characters include Author Avatar and Sheikah coachman Eian, Arcadia's ruler and Facade's father King Hoffane, Link's parents Luke, Margaret, and his unnamed grandmother, and General Glomos.
• Claymation: The "dungeon sequence" in the third short is animated in stop-motion that was shot with a digital camera by sexualburgerking, with clay models and a diorama ^note both of which were made by Orquiox and given to sexualburgerking as a gift along with a plastic lizard toy being utilized in the sequence.
• Clothing Damage: Ganon's robe seems prone to this, accidentally ripping and partially falling off during his frenzied ranting at Majora's Mask before it's outright destroyed by being burned up by Link's sword beam.
• Color-Coded Characters: The Triforces. Courage is gold, Power is red, and Wisdom is blue.
• Creator In-Joke:
  • The creators of the animations released a version of the third short with annotations explaining all of them. The annotations no longer exist after YouTube removed annotations from all videos on January 15, 2019. However, someone managed to upload a copy of the video with the annotations preserved, and the annotations on the original video can still be viewed with certain extensions.
  • One not seen in the animation itself, but development pictures reveal that the brand of underwear Ganon wears is "Joe Cracker".
• Colony Drop: As with The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Majora's Mask manages to take control of the moon and intends to send it crashing into the world to destroy it.
  Majora's Mask: "I cased over the moon. It will fall on Hyrule Castle within a few hours destroying this world."
• Department of Redundancy Department:
  • "My son keeps getting stronger and more braver every day."
  • "Haha, now give me the Triforces NOW."
• Different in Every Episode: Exaggerated with Eian's shirt and jacket and Ganon's robe, which change every shot.

• Enemy Mine: Ganon and Link against Majora's Mask... for literally the length of time it takes Ganon to mention it during the third film. By then, Majora's Mask has bailed on him, leaving Link and Zelda as his only enemies.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: The reason for the above trope.
• Eyes Always Shut: Eian's model has his eyes perpetually shut.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Many in the third video, such as the text on Ganon's robes.
• Funny Background Event: Many, such as Zelda walking into place for when she "dies" as Link begins to fight Ganon, and Ganon's painting of himself inexplicably losing his robe after Ganon himself loses his robe.
• Hairstyle Malfunction: When Zelda tosses the chest containing the Master Sword to Link, her hair goes with it.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: One of Ganon's many robes is a leather and chainmail shirt and skirt combo...featuring nipple windows.
• Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: Lampshaded. When Zelda unlocks the chest before throwing it to Link, she uses three keys that disappear as soon as they are used to unlock it.
  Link: The keys disappear when you turn them!
• Large Ham:
  • Ganon, quite literally.
  • Majora's Mask in the first short. His first line is a loud "I am MORE than just a mask, boy! Much, MUCH more!"
• Magnet Hands: Zig-zagged. Link and Zelda are shown to wield and hold objects like Link’s sword and shield, the Triforce of Power and, in Link’s case in “The Bitcrusher” series, even an Xbox 360 controller and rotary phone, just by having them attached to the top or bottom sides of their simplistic, mitten-like hands. Meanwhile, Ganon has fully-modeled fingers on his hands that actually can grasp onto objects.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Ganon's reaction to having his hand blown off sounds more annoyed than anything.
• Mind Screwdriver: For those that can't find the script or didn't read the forum threads that birthed the animations, the bonus version of the third animation with annotations explains many of the elements. The ghost that tells Link to catch the chest, for example, is supposed to be Rauru.
• Monster Modesty: Ganon wears a pair of white "Joe Cracker" briefs underneath his robes, which ends up being his only article of clothing by the end of the third film.
• Nerd Glasses: The Triforce of Wisdom has a pair of geeky glasses on.
• Non-Standard Character Design:
  • Ganon's model is more polished and emotive than most everyone else's, which highlights how bad the other characters are animated.
  • The Triforces look like 3D-renderings of something that came out of an old cartoon, White Gloves and everything. There's also the fact that they are walking, giant triangles with faces on them.
  • Eian uses a picture of Joe_Cracker's brother's face for his face, which makes him stand out from everyone else having their own textured-faces. Similarly, Tingle uses Joe_Cracker's face for his face, and Rauru is modeled after Joe_Cracker's dad according to the annotated version of Part 3.
• No Flow in CGI: Played straight with everyone except Ganon, whose robes flow, sway and swish to the point of falling off when he moves too quickly.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Majora's Mask intends to kill everyone and destroy the world by crashing the moon into Hyrule. When Ganon says that will include himself, Majora's Mask insists he's powerful enough to survive.
• Rimshot: Whenever Eian tells a joke, the sound of a rimshot followed by a laugh track plays. Just so you know it's supposed to be funny.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: The script is filled to the brim with them, which comes out quite obviously in the voice acting of the animations.
  Zelda: Where just going to have to go down fighting.
• Say My Name: Link pulls one off after Zelda is crushed by rocks, yelling Zelda's name for thirteen seconds straight in the third short as he wildly shoots sword beams.
• Sensory Abuse: The audio mixing is deliberately atrocious, with music, sound effects and dialogue layered so sloppily on top of one another that the dialogue is more often than not inaudible.
• Stealth Parody: One could watch it without reading the story behind it and think it's just a series of incompetent fan-films. In fact, for a long time, many believed that this was actually a pilot episode made by DiC (the company behind the Zelda cartoon) to test the waters for a 3D-animated Zelda series. This is partly because even Cracker HIMSELF believed this, hence his voice appearing in the first and second shorts as Majora's Mask, Eian and Tingle. The three co-conspirators posed as the director of the Legend of Zelda cartoon, John Grusd, in order to con Cracker into believing that his wish for TLOC to become a movie was being brought to fruition. Hilarity ensues.
• Stylistic Suck: The majority of the characters are rendered in a polygonal style with crudely-made textures and are also animated rather roughly, all of which is on purpose. Similarly, the environments in Parts 1 and 2 are also intentionally crudely-made, as well. If Ganon and the environments in Part 3 and the trailer for Part 4 are anything to go by, it's obvious that the creators could animate competently if they wanted to, but it's just funnier this way.
• Suddenly Voiced: In the true Legend of Zelda canon, the Triforces are powerful magical artifacts representing the balance of the entire universe with no degree of sapience, but they do speak in the 1989 cartoon, and Joe_Cracker made sure to include this in his script. Here, the sapience of the Triforces is taken to comedic extremes by making them full-on anthropomorphic characters with faces, arms, and legs.
• Sword Beam: This is both Link and Ganon's primary means of attack and, in Link's case, is carried over from the original script and the cartoon it was based on. Here, the beams are depicted as streams of goo, with Link's being green and Ganon's being orange.
• Take That!:
  • "This guy's got more mouth than Robert McGee!" ^note Robert McGee is apparently Joe_Cracker's real name. The original script said "Julia Roberts", but according to a comment made by sexualburgerking on Part 2, Joe_Cracker had changed it to his own name when he e-mailed his lines.
  • Joe_Cracker's TLOC script is abused a couple of times near the start of the third video, first stepped on by the heroes, then used as a torch.
  • Joe_Cracker's name in the credits uses white text overlaid on a white sword beam to make it impossible to read.
  • Eian is frequently put into scenes in the third video just to get killed repeatedly. He's struck by Link's sword and eaten by a giant lizard in the dungeon sequence, cut in half by a sword motion Link made, part of the pileup of rocks and shot in the groin with one of Link's sword beams.
• Talking to Themself: Played literally for a Visual Pun in the third short. Where the script called for Link to say something to himself, the animators put in a second Link for him to talk to instead.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: When our protagonists confront Ganon and Majora's Mask in Part 3, Majora escapes Ganon's throne room by crashing through the wall and flying out as Ganon talks. He's later seen riding away on a bicycle during Link's freakout and even reappears still riding it in the background when Link literally talks to himself.
• Visual Pun: Most of the jokes are like this, because the shorts follow Joe_Cracker's script word-for-word.
• Vocal Dissonance: Played for laughs and most notably demonstrated with Link, especially in Part 3 where each one of his spoken lines are a different take on his lines from the original script done in various different voices.
• The Watson: When he isn't cracking wise or getting repeatedly killed, Eian serves as this so Prince Facade can explain who Tingle is.
• White Gloves: The Triforces have white gloves in their designs.

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