How to build an oral history of an ‘80s Legend of Zelda cartoon

Leading into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Polygon planned to run a ton of stories about The Legend of Zelda. It was called Zeldathon. Sitewide, the staff wrote about The Legend of Zelda every single week. Often more than once a week. There was one month — the one in which Tears of the Kingdom was released — where each writer probably created dozens of stories about The Legend of Zelda. Mostly Tears of the Kingdom, naturally.

When I got laid off from Polygon earlier this month alongside the majority of my incredible colleagues, Will Borger reached out to ask if I wanted to write about the work I did at Polygon — maybe about the reporting process or a piece I’m really proud of. I immediately thought of my first piece for Zeldathon: an oral history of The Legend of Zelda, the wacky ‘80s cartoon. (The story didn’t always look this way. I promise it was formatted nicer once! A new influx of ads seems to be messing with the layout. I’m sorry.). It’s a piece I’m really proud of because it was a new challenge for me; I do a lot of reporting, but I don’t really do oral histories a ton. I’m used to weaving a narrative using a ton of interviews, but crafting it more into a feature story format. This was different, because the people who created the show are largely speaking for themselves. My role was to ask the questions, then place their quotes into an order that told the story.

But before any of that, I watched the cartoon. (All the episodes are on Amazon Prime.) It really is a truly strange television show. I’d never seen it before. The approach to Link — as obsessed with kissing Zelda — is incredible and dumb. The Triforces talk. Link has a catchphrase: “Excuuuuuuse me, Princess!”

The first thing I did was figure out who to talk to. That was relatively easy: You just watch the credits and make a list from there. The hardest part is finding a way to contact these folks. Some people had personal websites. Others I found on LinkedIn or Twitter (it was still Twitter then). The voice actors have agents to reach out to. If those fail, I move on to other social media sites, like Facebook and Instagram. For people who are particularly hard to reach, I ask other sources for contact information. That usually gets me pretty far! The thing about writing about older media is that people can talk about it. Non-disclosure agreements have run out, and people are generally happy to talk about cool projects they worked on. I remember everyone being pretty eager to talk about their experience, but it was also a couple years ago. My memory could be failing me! I also no longer have access to my Polygon email; we were shut down from access pretty quickly after being laid off, so I can’t fact check myself there. But one blind spot was that art wasn’t represented much in the oral history, just writers, producers, and voice actors. It wasn’t for lack of trying, however! The production company outsourced the animation to Korea, and the language barrier made it hard to find the artists.

I set up each interview separately, with a list of questions I want to ask — these are kind of scene-setting questions. But usually, I prefer to just listen and see where the conversation takes us. If we missed anything, I can fill in the gaps with the prepared questions. I have a couple favorite interviews from this story. Everyone was an absolute delight, but voice actors Cynthia Preston and Jonathan Potts, who played Zelda and Link, were fantastic. The oral history is always text, but if I’m doing an interview with someone who voices an iconic character with a catchphrase, I’m going to ask them to do it. Potts obliged, naturally. (My favorite interview story, unrelated to this oral history, is when I was interviewing the voice of Barbie in the toys and video games. Hearing her say “Hi, I’m Barbie!” was so incredibly nostalgic. She was joking around and saying other fun stuff, too, like, “Hi, I’m Barbie! Welcome to McDonald’s!” I typically conduct interviews in private, but I was visiting my parents and in their living room. I remember my mom and dad asking, “Is your job always this fun?”)

Eve Forward, one of the writers, was great, too. She was 16 or 17 years old when she started writing episodes. Her brother Bob Forward, was the story editor. She hadn’t played the game before, so she rented a Nintendo to give it a try. It didn’t go well — she didn’t make it far into the game, she said. Eve said she took inspiration from her own Dungeons & Dragons games, and she brought that into the cartoon. “But in D&D of course you’re always fighting monsters and imagining how cool your character looks doing it, so a lot of the various swashbuckling stuff I liked to put in was based on things that had happened in our D&D games,” Eve Forward said. “I always thought of Link as more of a rogue than a fighter.”

Bob told me that their mom even wrote a story that was adapted into an episode. Marsha Forward, their mom, is credited on the 11th episode, “Fairies in the Spring,” in which Zelda’s father, King Harkinian, puts the kingdom to work building a water park. It’s almost entirely done, then a bunch of water monsters attack. But the water monsters aren’t Ganon’s beasts, as they typically are. It was the fairies protecting their own water spring that King Harkinian was inadvertently draining. Whoops!

But like I said before, the big challenge for me was figuring out how to put all these interviews together. We covered a lot of ground! I ended up breaking up the interviews into themes — adapting the game from pixels to the small screen, making these characters speak, how they got around TV restrictions on violence, and a bunch of other sections. I looked at a lot of Matt Leone’s oral history work on Polygon for inspiration. (I’m pretty sure that’s where the layout came from, having people’s photos next to their names and quotes. Unfortunately, the formatting of the story has degraded, and it looks kind of weird now. But it once looked fantastic!) It can be pretty unwieldy to approach the transcripts of so many interviews. I’m not sure if I’ve got a perfect process here, but what I did before even approaching a draft is start grouping together quotes by theme, the early stage of how I ended up formatting the oral history. It was very messy; just names and large blocks of quotes, but it’s a start. Once those quotes are grouped together, I can more clearly see the story coming together. I tried to keep things in some sort of timeline, too.

One quote, from Preston, actually ended up being the inspiration for another Zeldathon piece I wrote later; she was talking about the impact the show had on people’s lives, and mentioned Triforce tattoos. That gave me an idea: Write about how the Triforce became such a ubiquitous gamer tattoo.

If there was one thing I could change about the story, it’d be the lack of materials to support it. I had a couple of documents or screenshots to include, like a screenshot of an early script, but I would have loved to see the concept art and in-progress episodes. Alas, that stuff simply wasn’t available. It’s never particularly easy to get those materials, but it adds so much when you can — even if it never makes it into the story. I wrote a story about Zoo Tycoon in 2019 and, serendipitously, lived pretty close to one of the co-founders of developer Blue Fang. I met him at his house for the interview, where he had pulled out all sorts of stuff for us to dig through, including sketches, notes, and a reference book called “The Encyclopedia of Poo.” None of those materials made it into the story, but I found it super helpful.

But back to this particular story, there was so much fantastic insight and memories that had to be cut. I wish I could put together a director’s — or reporter’s — cut. We got really in the weeds about how cartoons were made back then, about residuals for animation writers, and about all these little memories. I was looking back at the transcripts when writing this story, and there’s just so much good stuff. Remember that episode I mentioned that Marsha Forward, Bob Foward’s mother wrote the outline for? One thing that didn’t get into the original piece is that they got in trouble for that one. “That one turned out to be very expensive as far as the show goes,” he laughed. “We got in trouble for it because we had to invent so many new characters for the fairies that it ran into budgetary issues.”

I loved writing this piece because I learned so much about not only the TV show, but about making cartoons in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. The Zeldathon package itself — and the huge task of writing so many Zelda stories — allowed me and my colleagues to really dig into pieces of the franchise that I might not otherwise have the place to research and write about. And I think this piece in particular, the oral history, offered a new perspective on a piece of media that was either beloved or absolutely maligned; it was a peek behind the curtain that humanized the show and its creators.