Toonstruck is a graphic adventure video game developed by Burst Studios, published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment and released in 1996 for DOS.

Toonstruck was well received by gaming critics, who mostly praised the quality of the animation and the design of the puzzles, but it was a financial disappointment for Virgin.

Toonstruck is a point-and-click adventure game where the player controls Drew Blanc, accompanied by his cartoon sidekick Flux.

[5] The main objective of the game is to locate and collect several items to build a machine that has an opposite effect to that of the antagonist, Count Nefarious.

He befriends Flux Wildly and discovers that this fictional paradise is being ravaged by a ruthless new character named Count Nefarious with a weapon of evil called the Malevolator, a flying saucer which mutates the idyllic landscape and its inhabitants into dark and twisted counterparts.

Drew and Flux go on a scavenger hunt through the lands of Cutopia, Zanydu and the Malevolands to collect the parts needed to complete the Cutifier, a counter-weapon to Nefarious's Malevolator.

As Drew and Flux carry on with their quest, Nefarious continues his attacks on Cutopia, destroying Fluffy Fluffy Bun Bun's meadow; turning the kingdom's Carecrow, a friendly mannequin, into a creepy scarecrow; and turning Polly and Marge, a sheep and a cow who produce butter in a barn, into a dominatrix and a submissive in bondage.

As soon as he hops in the Malevolator, Nefarious appears on the saucer's screen attempting to bargain with Drew and convince him to drop his plans and in return get sent home.

[12] After David Perry and his associates left Virgin in 1993, the company struggled with internal development and hired Yates and Young to lead this division.

Furthermore, the development team spent 18 months debugging the code written for the Kyrandia engine, further delaying the release and adding to the already high production budget.

[18] According to lead designer Richard Hare, Bishop's original concept was titled Trouble in Toonland and had as its protagonist a young boy named Daniel.

[19] However, once Bishop's concept was passed on to co-writer and designer Jennifer McWilliams, it went through several revisions to make it more adult-oriented, with comic violence and touches of parody and cynicism.

[21] McWilliams wrote the second part of the game to be more psychological, with Drew facing his fears, living out his fantasies and eventually restoring his creativity.

Since the entire story arc was carefully thought-out, McWilliams felt Virgin's decision "definitely disrupted that", but nonetheless believed the studio did well under the circumstances.

[19] Creative influences for Toonstruck's characters, locations and animations were the classic cartoons of Warner Bros., Tex Avery, Hanna-Barbera and Walt Disney Studios.

[9] The full-motion footage of the game's live-action actors was shot in Burst's own motion capture studio, with hundreds of hours of performance against a green screen.

[27] According to voice actor Dom DeLuise, the makeup and costume design for Lloyd was purposely done in a way that footage of his could be easily manipulated for the game; for instance, Lloyd's jacket costume had no buttons and his hair was combed right in the middle so that his likeness could be flipped right or left without being noticeable to players.

[17] According to Jennifer McWilliams, most of the writing for the game was completed before the actors were cast, but the character ultimately voiced by Tim Curry was written with him in mind.

Additional vocal performances were given by Jeff Bennett, Corey Burton, Jim Cummings, Tress MacNeille, Rob Paulsen, April Winchell and Frank Welker.

[13] VP of marketing for Virgin Simon Jeffery admitted that the company "would have liked to have seen higher sales for Toonstruck", which by December 1996 had sold over 150,000 units worldwide.

[42] Virgin Interactive CEO Martin Alper said he expected Toonstruck "to do better", and in response to the company's poor performance in the 1996 holiday season, began a plan in 1997 to cancel "weaker" projects, cut down on development budgets and make products that appeal to international markets, citing stronger sales from Europe than the U.S.[43] Nearly twenty years after being first published, Toonstruck was re-released for modern Windows systems by GOG.com on February 10, 2015,[44] and by Steam on November 15, 2016.

[56] Entertainment Weekly's Gary Eng Walk rated the game an A−, praising the level of difficulty and puzzles while noting that the controls "are sometimes clunky".

[4] The Irish Times' Garrett Rowe called Toonstruck a "superb example of how to put together games of this nature", rating its graphics 90%, its sound 84% and the gameplay 93%.

[48] Major Mike of GamePro found the dialogue tedious and unfunny, but praised every other aspect of the game, particularly the puzzle interface, whimsical music, and integration of live action video with fluid cartoon animation.

"[58] Edge described Toonstruck as "the closest any post-Monkey Island effort, with the possible exception of Broken Sword, has come to getting the ingredients right," and gave the game an 8 out of 10.

The review did criticize the integration of digitized live-action footage with the animated scenes, and stated the humor was excessively over-the-top at parts of the game.

Next Generation focused on the script, and assessed that "the dialog, slapstick humor, and relentless 'comedy' situations are tired and mostly ripped off from past and present cartoon creations.

"[52] Dave Nuttycombe of The Washington Post praised Lloyd's performance, but wrote that after it "wears off, you're left with conventional art and a public-domain soundtrack", and described the game as "tedious".

[72][73] In February 2014, Arem posted on Facebook stating that he would need to raise "significant capital and fan interest" to attract investors and bring the re-release project to life.

[74] According to posts from Arem in 2016, there are still unresolved copyright issues preventing him from going forward with the project, but wrote that his team has been "working to consolidate" and negotiate rights.