Most video game adaptations spend their first trailer insisting they are more than a video game. “Golden Axe” spends its first trailer admitting it is one, out loud, in dialogue, and then ends on an eight-bit GAME OVER screen bleeding across a lava field. Paramount+ put the thing online at a shade under two minutes, and somewhere around the forty-second mark a barbarian explains the plan for the entire season: fight a series of progressively harder enemies until you reach the big one. That is not a writer failing to hide the source material. That is a writer pointing at it.
Here is the shape of it. “Golden Axe” is a ten-episode animated series adapting Sega’s 1989 arcade beat ’em up, co-created by Mike McMahan (“Star Trek: Lower Decks,” “Solar Opposites”) and Joe Chandler (“American Dad”), with Chandler running the show. It premieres Wednesday, September 16, and though Comedy Central ordered it back in April 2024, it now lands exclusively on Paramount+. The voices are Liam McIntyre as Ax Battler, Lisa Gilroy as Tyris Flare, Matthew Rhys as Gilius Thunderhead, Danny Pudi as Hampton Squib and Carl Tart as Chronos “Evil” Lait. We pulled the trailer down and cut it apart frame by frame, so warning beyond this point there are spoilers for every beat, gag and reveal in the first “Golden Axe” trailer, including how it ends.
That is not a writer failing to hide the source material. That is a writer pointing at it.”
It opens straight-faced, which is the setup. A giant bird glides over cloud and mountain, a narrator intones “in a time before history, in a land of might and magic,” and the camera drops into a black forest of enormous trees with three tiny figures at the base. A skeleton hauls itself up out of a heap of skulls. Death Adder fills the frame in close-up, red and horned and caped, and the whole thing is playing like a straight sword-and-sorcery cold open right up to the point where the narration reaches the heroes’ mounts and calls them “their trusty purple mutant thingies.” The next shot is a purple beaked monster in extreme close-up, and then a burnt-out battlefield at sunset with one of them standing over the wreckage of a cart. Eighteen seconds in, the register has already broken.
Then it introduces everybody the way a fighting game would. Hampton Squib, Danny Pudi’s wide-eyed kid in a fur collar, stammers “oh my gods, it’s them, I’m a huge fan” — audience surrogate, first line, no ambiguity about who we are supposed to be. The trio get name cards stamped over freeze-frames: AX over Ax Battler swinging into a chasm, TYRIS over Tyris Flare charging through fire with her sword up and her mouth open mid-scream, GILIUS over the dwarf ankle-deep in an orc horde. A cut to a desert town shows carts of refugees streaming out past a grey-skinned giant walking in the other direction. And then the reveal shot: Death Adder in silhouette on a rampart against a blood-red sky, the enormous golden double-headed axe held out at arm’s length, two soldiers cowering below him. It is genuinely the best-composed image in the trailer, and it is over in about a second.
The tavern scene is where the show tells you what it actually is. The three of them are around a table, and somebody says “to defeat Death Adder, we need an actual plan.” The answer is the thesis statement of the entire series: “We’re going to do what we do best. Face a series of progressively harder enemies until we have a big final battle with Death Adder. And then we kill him for good.” One of them adds “till he’s dead.” Another agrees, “all the way.” Cut to a wall of enormous red slug creatures rearing up over four tiny heroes, then to a purple-and-gold armored boss twirling a double-ended energy blade, then to Gilius standing alone with his fists clenched in front of something red and horned so large it does not fit in frame. That is a boss rush, drawn as a boss rush, described as a boss rush by the characters who have to survive it.
The middle stretch is Hampton’s. Tyris holds a small blue vial up to a gold sky and says “by our magic,” which is about as much spellcasting as the trailer bothers to explain. Hampton asks, hopefully, “I was hoping I could join your quest,” and gets “why don’t you go first?” — and the cut after it is a scream. He turns up moments later on a green mount alongside Gilius on a pink one, both of them riding the purple mutant thingies the narrator warned us about, and announces “found a trap on the first try” with real pride. Then a shot of the Golden Axe itself, huge and gold and lodged in stone with a figure dwarfed beside it, a boot stepping through a field of bones, and a yawning hole in the rock with one small green dwarf standing at the bottom left of it looking up.
And then it gets nasty, which is worth flagging because the art style does not prepare you for it. Tyris runs a skeleton through on a forest path in one clean thrust. Ax cuts a line of armored guards apart and the blood is not stylized, it sprays, and the next frame has bodies on the ground in it. A grey brute in a horned helmet rears up with both fists raised. Somebody yells “stop, for Yuria,” gets ignored, and the reply lands after the kill: “that was for Yuria.” The exhaustion gag arrives right behind it — “you better not be another mini boss, you better be the final one” — and then Chronos “Evil” Lait, Carl Tart’s blue humanoid panther, strolls into frame with sparkles around him after a title reading LEGENDARY KILL and purrs “it’s just what us kitty cats do.”
The last stretch is pure ensemble comedy. A lineup forms in a hall — a skeleton, Ax, Hampton, Tyris and a blue-skinned fighter, all facing camera like a character select screen. Hampton, vibrating, says “I’m so excited I’m going to throw up.” Somebody explains the group as “because we’re us,” and then the best line in the trailer arrives flat and apologetic: “Sorry, we don’t have a group name. We were barely getting along until eight minutes ago.” A card slams up reading CHOP FIRST, which is the show rewriting the oldest action cliché there is into something an axe can actually do. The tag runs “what else would you do with an axe?” — “I don’t know.” — “Golden Axe.” — “Whoa, like the game?” — “Heck yeah, let’s freaking go.” Logo, September 16, a Paramount+ card, a voice saying “thanks, Paramount,” and then the arcade GAME OVER screen, lava and all.
The pedigree explains a lot of that. Mike McMahan built “Lower Decks” on the same trick — take a franchise whose rules everybody already knows, then write characters who know them too and have to live inside them anyway. Joe Chandler came off “American Dad,” which is the longest-running argument in television that a joke can be both stupid and precisely engineered. Between them they have taken a game with roughly one page of story and decided the structure of the game is the story. That is a smarter read of “Golden Axe” than a straight fantasy epic would have been, because there is no epic in there to adapt.
The risk is right there in the same joke, though. A trailer can get away with pointing at its own scaffolding for a hundred seconds; ten episodes of characters remarking that they are in a video game is a much harder trick, and animation is full of shows that ran that gag until it curdled. What buys our optimism is that the fights in this footage are staged straight — the blood is real blood, Death Adder is shot like a genuine threat, and the composition on that rampart reveal belongs to people who like this stuff rather than people sneering at it. Affection and mockery are hard to hold at the same time. On this evidence they are at least trying.
What Do You Think? Is a season built openly as a boss rush a clever structure or a gag with a three-episode shelf life, and does the show need to break its own rule before the finale? Which of the trio is going to carry this — McIntyre’s straight-man barbarian, Gilroy’s Tyris, or Rhys playing a dwarf with, per the official character description, terrible hygiene? And after decades of grim, self-serious game adaptations, is a bloody arcade sitcom actually the most honest one anybody has made?
See you on the next binge!
