Blanka

"You'll never survive in a jungle!"

- Blanka

James "Jimmy" Blanka (ブランカ, Buranka) is a video game character from the Street Fighter series of fighting games. Blanka has green skin and long orange hair. He is a native and believed to be a monster by many.

Blanka's first appearance in the Street Fighter series was in Street Fighter II. His prototypical name was "Big Dean Caves." Blanka was originally going to look more like a caveman and there are rumors that the design for King Rasta Mon from Saturday Night Slam Masters was one of the early Blanka character models. In Street Fighter Alpha 3, his character design was again changed to make him less ferocious-looking.

Blanka has also made appearances in several spin-off titles. Blanka is available as a playable character in the later games of the Street Fighter EX series, Street Fighter EX 2 and Street Fighter EX 3. He also made appearances as a playable character in Capcom vs. SNK and Capcom vs. SNK 2. According to his ending in Capcom vs. SNK 2, he thought he was flown home, but when he got off the plane, he ends up in a zoo instead.

Story
A feral man from the Brazilian jungle with green skin and the ability to generate electricity, not much is known about Blanka at first.

Street Fighter Alpha 3
His in-game story, just like the in-game stories of the other characters in the series, serves as a precursor to the events of Street Fighter II. The game tells a tale of how Blanka ate a melon on a poacher's truck and unwittingly traveled to civilization for the first time. Playing the game as Blanka, the player eventually faces Dan Hibiki as one of Blanka's mid-bosses. It is then revealed through in-game dialogue that the two know each other and that Blanka had once saved Dan's life. Dan addresses Blanka as "Jimmy" (ジミー, Jimii), and tells him that if ever he needs help, he can ask Dan. Blanka faces Zangief as his second mid-boss and unwittingly prevents Zangief from helping to destroy the Shadaloo criminal organization. He then faces Shadaloo member Balrog before facing M. Bison. After Bison is defeated, Blanka, Dan, and Sakura work together and destroy Bison's Psycho Drive. It should be noted, however, that since many characters' endings in Alpha 3 each depict a different destruction of the Psycho Drive, Blanka's ending might not be canon.

Street Fighter II
In Street Fighter II, Blanka has apparently developed a taste for street fighting. and he competes in the second World Warrior tournament. In his ending, he reunites with his mother who recognizes him on televised broadcasts of his matches by the anklets he wears. She addresses him by his birth name, Jimmy, and reveals that she gave him the anklets before he was in a plane crash as a little boy. This crash caused him to grow up in the wild, although he has connections to a local village. Ever since the crash, Blanka/Jimmy had been separated from his mother.

Super Street Fighter IV
Blanka leaves his mother because people stare at him, and goes to Hong-Kong with Dan. Dan quizzes him on what the second World Warrior tournament was like. He, Dan and Sakura then decide to enter the S.I.N. tournament, each for their own reasons, with Blanka himself wanting to win and earn people's respect. After he loses in the final stages, he is wandering through S.I.N.'s HQ. There he bumps into Dan only to see flames heading towards them. The flames die before they can reach them, however, as they are extinguished by Sakura's and Ryu's Hadokens. It is revealed that his mother went looking for him and they are reunited, with Blanka resolving not to be concerned by the staring faces, since everything will be okay as long as he's with his "mama". He goes home, but isn't there long before he finds out that local visitors have arrived at his home to meet him and that he now has many new friends in town.

Street Fighter motion picture
The 1994 live-action Street Fighter film combined Charlie and Blanka into a single character. Robert Mammone plays the role of Blanka. At the beginning of the film, Guile's close friend Carlos Blanka (Charlie) is taken captive by Bison (Raúl Juliá), perhaps the best performance any human being has done in a film, who subjects him to genetic testing to create the perfect soldier. The film was made prior to Charlie's introduction as a playable character in the Street Fighter Alpha games.

Street Fighter II cartoon series
He was voiced by Scott McNeil. In the cartoon, Blanka was portrayed as the protector of a small Brazilian village who eventually "rejoined" the Street Fighter team. Blanka appears as one of the more recurrent characters in the U.S. cartoon, acting as a scout gathering information for Guile and his friends on various missions.

Characteristics
Blanka's most apparent characteristic is his green color. His in-game storyline states that he was once extremely pale and was once known locally as the "hombre blanco" (white man) and adapted the blanco into his name Blanka. This is a strange storyline point because the language spoken in Brazil is not Spanish but Portuguese in which that expression would be "homem branco". On the other hand, Japanese are known to mispronounce letter r as l. Taken this in consideration, storyline checks out (after all, Blanka is pronounced Buranka in Japan). His green skin color in the games is attributed to his constant use of chlorophyll from plants to better blend in with the jungle environment, a color change that eventually became permanent. His coloring changed in later games, making him bright green with vivid orange hair as opposed to the yellowish green skin he had in Street Fighter II. Blanka's style of fighting in the games is a self-taught savage fighting style; however, Capcom's USA division depicted it as a Capoeira technique.

In the non-canon Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, Blanka appears in the ending of another green-skinned powerhouse, The Incredible Hulk. In the ending, Bruce Banner theorizes that gamma radiation caused Blanka's mutations, as they did his. He is also seen in the background of one stage, sitting in front of a campfire, in a crouch and face affixed in a snarl, across from The Beast, who mirrors his expression.

Stage Theme
   

Trivia

 * Blanka is Yoshinori Ono's farvorite character
 * Blanka shares a birthday with the Naturalist Charles Darwin who postulated evolution by natural selection. Many of Darwin's facts were collected during his expedition of South America. Darwin has been depicted as a monkey-man (like Blanka) due to the implications of his theory on man's evolution.
 * Blanka is one of the 19 characters in Street Fighter 4 to not have second rivals in Super Street Fighter 4, despite having a ultra combo video to include his second rival (Dan).
 * Early art of Blanka showed him having pure green skin, despite in-game renders showing him yellowish skin color. However his Street Fighter Alpha 3 design is much closer to this design.
 * His 10th alternate colour bears a striking resemblance to his original colour scheme in Street Fighter II: The World Warrior.
 * Blanka and Adon share some similarities with each other: they have orange hair, they are both voiced by the same person in English (Taliesen Jaffe) and their 10th alternate colours represent their former colour schemes from when they first debuted (Adon first appeared in Street Fighter, and Blanka first appeared in Street Fighter II).

Sprites

 * For more sprites, see Blanka/Sprites.