The Legend of Zelda Cartoon Had Episode Based Off of Obscure Dungeons & Dragons Magic Item

The Legend of Zelda cartoon was partially inspired by a teenage girl’s Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Today, Polygon released an oral history of The Legend of Zelda cartoon, which was part of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! that aired back in 1989. The Legend of Zelda cartoon featured a radically different version of Link and Zelda than what most fans of the Nintendo franchise thought of, and Polygon had extensive interviews explaining why the show had such a…unique vibe. 

One fun tidbit coming out of the oral history was that several episodes were written by Eve Forward, an author and screenwriter who later wrote for GI Joe: A Real American Hero and Biker Mice from Mars. Forward told Polygon that she was only “16-17” at the time she started writing for The Legend of Zelda and actually didn’t have much experience with the franchise. “The only direction I had was the show bible, which outlined the basic characters and sorts of stories they were looking for. I didn’t have a Nintendo, so I rented one, and the game, and tried to play it, but I didn’t get very far,” Forward told Polygon. 

However, Forward did have experience with a different magical franchise – Dungeons & Dragons. “I did play Dungeons & Dragons though, at the time, and some of that feel made it into the show. [The seventh episode] “Doppelganger” was based on a cursed mirror in D&D,” Forward noted. “Well, the monsters in Zelda were all based on things from the Nintendo game; same with the weapons, like Link’s boomerang. 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. I always thought of Link as more of a rogue than a fighter.”

The cursed mirror is most likely the Mirror of Opposition, a magic mirror that creates magical doppelgangers that try to kill the person it was duplicated from. “Doppelganger” features a similar mirror created by Ganon that creates an evil clone of Zelda who tries to kidnap Zelda and take her piece of the Triforce. Link is only able to tell the difference between the two Zeldas because the evil Zelda has the hots for Link, while the real Zelda reacts in disgust at the prospect of kissing him. 

The Mirror of Opposition is an early Dungeons & Dragons magic item, having first appeared in the original Dungeon Master’s Guide and then appearing in the classic Unearthed Arcana rulebook. It’s a relatively obscure magic item and hasn’t since appeared in any D&D rulebook since 2nd Edition. 

While Dungeons & Dragons and The Legend of Zelda are both fantasy franchises, they don’t have much in common. However, it’s pretty interesting to see at least one time the two franchises crossed over.