The (hopefully) first of many Street Fighter III and David Lee Roth connections

Life goes on without mE(lena)

As a huge fan of all iterations of Street Fighter III, I’ve spent many hours contemplating the game’s glorious, expertly crafted animation. I knew that some of it had to be rotoscoped (an animation technique that involves drawing over live-action film, frame by frame) but I always figured that the source material for those moves were actors who were specifically hired for the job, not unlike how most AAA games today hire motion capture actors. All of the character movement in the game was too perfect to be anything but custom made for these specific fighters All the movements, except for one.

One of Elena’s win poses always seemed a little out of place. In case you’ve never heard of her, Elena is a Capoeira fighter who is graceful, practical, and shows no signs of being super interested in slowly sticking out her ass in an unwieldy random squat while jiggling with extreme vibrations the entire time. And yet, sometimes she does that, which never quite added up to me. 

But it all makes sense now. Like me, someone on Capcom’s 90’s animation team also grew up with deep fascination with the sexy door-lady from David Lee Roth’s “Just a Gigolo” music video. As great as this historic discovery is on its own, it only makes me hungry for more. You know what they say about David Lee Roth references. Like cockroaches, if you see one, then there are at least a hundred more hiding in the walls. Get cracking, internet Mattlocks! 

[Source]

WTF this just blew my mind, someone apparently found one of the sources for the rotoscoping animation for Elena in Third Strike, and it’s an ’80s David Lee Roth video?? Credit: https://t.co/yWxT7fL276 pic.twitter.com/fZgvbbn2mC

— Aurich (@aurich) September 4, 2018