The Light of Courage

The Legend of Zelda: The Light of Courage is an alleged script of an animated movie based on The Legend of Zelda video game series by IGN forum user Joe_Cracker. Joe_Cracker's attempts to get his script, which was itself of dubious quality, are a saga unto themselves, but several denizens of the forum got together and made several animations based directly on the script and posted them on YouTube. 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.

View the three shorts here. Read about the author's three-year-long odyssey to get his movie made here.

Tropes used in The Light of Courage include:

• All-Star Cast: Joe_Cracker's ideal vision for the movie would have starred Bruce Willis, Whoopi Goldberg, and Britney Spears.
• Ambiguous Disorder: Mr. Cracker himself.
• Bad Bad Acting: Ganon in the third short.
• Big No: Link pulls one off after Zelda is crushed by rocks for thirty seconds in the third short.
• Bloodless Carnage: Ganon's hand gets severed with nary a drop of blood. The animators had originally tried for High-Pressure Blood, but then decided against it.
• Camp Gay: Prince Phasod in the second short, possibly Tingle.
• Claymation: During the "dungeon sequence" in the third short.
• Creator In-Joke: They later released a version of the third short with annotations explaining all of them.
• Colony Drop: "I cased over the moon. It will fall onto Hyrule Castle in a few hours time destroying this world."
• Department of Redundancy Department: "My son keeps getting stronger and more braver every day."
• Development Hell: The planned fourth short. So far all it has is a trailer after two years. Though, this is Lampshaded on the creators' YouTube page and website. The trailer's tagline is "Coming Eventually," and its official release date in July 26, 2035.
• Funny Background Event: So many.
• Large Ham: Ganon, quite literally.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Ganon could be considered to have the most "normal" model out of all of the characters.
• Off-Model
• Omnicidal Maniac: Majora's Mask.
• Plot Hole: Zelda was apparently crushed by rocks, but later, she's completely fine.
  • Contrary to what the annotations of Dancing Triforce's video may say, the script does explain this with a Chekhov's Gun: Link is given a "Ring of Love" by his grandmother, a magic family heirloom that supposedly protects its bearer from death (albeit not a natural death). Link gives it to Zelda as an engagement ring before they go to fight Ganon, where it rescues her from the pile of rocks with no other explanation.
• Rouge Angles of Satin: The script is filled to the brim with them. This comes out quite obviously in the dialogue.
• 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 group 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 short as Majora's Mask. The three co-conspirators posed as DiC animator "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: It's obvious that the creators could animate competently if they wanted to (Ganon in the third short is almost professional-quality), but it's just funnier this way.
• Talking to Himself: Played literally for a Visual Pun in the third short. The animators put in two Links in a scene where Link was supposed to do this.
• Throw It In: Link's eye tic, Ganon's robe ripping during the battle sequence, numerous other errors that were kept in for laughs.
• Twitchy Eye: Link, although this was just an animation error at first.
• Visual Pun: Most of the jokes are like this, because the shorts follow Joe_Cracker's script word-for-word.