Retro's Blog: Is Johnny Turbo the Worst Superhero Ever?

It's been a while, but a new Retro's Blog is up and I wanted to talk about Johnny Turbo. I actually went over this in October last year in an article titled TurboGrafx 16: A Lost and Forgotten Console. I mentioned in that article about how this character was truly NEC last attempts to promote the brand. From 1989 to 1994 saw the TurboGrafx feature some of the worst marketing in the industry. It didn't matter if it was the magazine and TV ads or their promotional video tapes, it was overall terrible. As I mentioned in the earlier article, NEC and Turbo Technologies were going in too many directions. The constant releases of console models would obviously confuse consumers. They even came out with the Turbo Express to compete with Nintendo's Game Boy and Sega's Game Gear. The problem for the portable is it played Turbo Cards only with no exclusive games and was quite expensive.

Its evident NEC learned nothing from Atari's terrible business plans from the 80s. Atari did the same thing with releasing too many consoles between the 2600, 5200 and 7800. They also made the Lynx in 1989 which was a more powerful system that had color compared to the Game Boy. However, it would find itself in those bargain bins in places like KB Toys, FuncoLand and Toys R Us. You could tell I'm old especially if you kiddies don't know that FuncoLand was once GameStop :p. That's where Johnny Turbo comes in, and he would get sent through a sea of mascots that eventually become forgotten. His character as already mentioned was to promote the console by releasing three short comics. Unlike the other mascots, he was a gaming superhero instead of the usual cartoonish anthropomorphic being like Sonic. After witnessing the terrible marketing, it should make you wonder how bad this company could mess this up.


Is Johnny Turbo the Worst Superhero Ever?