The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!
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 "Ey, paisanos! It's the Supah Mario Brothas Super Show!"
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The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! (also known on some DVD releases as Super Mario Bros.) is an American live-action/animated television series based upon Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 2, the latter of which was originally released for the Famicom Disk System in Japan as Yume Koujou: Doki Doki Panic. It is the first of three TV shows based on the video game series, with the other being The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World. It was originally broadcast via first-run syndication from September 4, 1989 to December 1, 1989, with reruns continuing until September 6, 1991.
Why You'll Get Hooked On The Brothers
- Great voice acting for the characters. (except for Toad, with the exception of the few times where his voice is passable).
- Lovable characters, most notably Mario and Luigi.
- Good grasp of the source material, even if it mixes other fictional stories with the Mario characters.
- Princess Toadstool is actually an active character who actually fights back instead of being a "damsel in distress who has to be to saved all the time". She still gets kidnapped but she does manage to fight back sometimes.
- King Koopa is a goofy yet tyrannical and cunning villain with countless entertaining moments, like his comedic insults for example.
- They decided to merge the mid-bosses from Mario 2 with Bowser (aka King Koopa) from Mario 1, which makes surprisingly good results.
- The live-action segments with the late Captain Lou Albano and Danny Wells can be fun to watch such as "Neatness Counts" (sometimes funny for how corny it was).
- The animation is fantastic for 1989 and has aged very well since.
- There were also a lot of good episodes, like:
- "Brooklyn Bound"
- "Count Koopula"
- "The Adventures of Sherlock Mario"
- "Do You Princess Toadstool Take this Koopa...?"
- "Mario of the Apes"
- And the show's very first episode, "The Bird! The Bird!".
- Amazing music. "Do the Mario" is very fun to listen to and is catchy.
- The theme song is memorable for its cheesy nature.
- It's sequel series, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, is considered even better and one of the best video game cartoons yet.
- Great character designs.
- The fact that they tried to make the characters and enemies as accurate as they were at the time(even using the sprites of the characters for reference) is impressive.
Bad Qualities
- A few of the characters can be annoying.
- Mario and Luigi act too much like Italian stereotypes often, especially providing those Italian food puns. At times, the viewer can find Mario's Italian food obsession to be annoying.
- At times, Princess Toadstool can be a bit annoying and naive.
- Toad is often the most irritating and least likable character.
- Speaking of Toad, he has an annoying voice, as mentioned above, but there are a few episodes where his voice is passable.
- Many episodes are just cheap spoofs of popular films (Toad Warriors, Star Koopa, Raiders of the Lost Mushroom, Princess, I Shrunk the Mario Brothers).
- This was justified by the writers as the Mario games had little to no plot elements to base episodes on.
- The writing is sometimes confused by the characters' settings and locations instead of the Mario series relation, so they just relied on other fictional stories to fill the show's plots.
- Wordplay jokes can be overly corny.
- Most of the episodes' settings are random and make no sense, providing no explanation of how the characters ended up there in the first place.
- Some bad episodes, like "Jungle Fever", "Pirates of Koopa" and "Two Plumbers and a Baby".
- While the animation is decent, but there are some visible animation errors at times. One laughably bad error is a scene where Luigi has Mario's hat but is saying Mario's phrase.
- Most of the music can be pretty annoying and bland, with some of them simply being copyrighted songs. For example, the episode "The Bird! The Bird!" had a scene where "Surfin' Bird" by The Trashmen played and the episode "Count Koopula" had a scene where "Thriller" by Michael Jackson played.
- Though, later releases of the episodes had the songs cut out due to copyright reasons.
- There were scenes throughout the series that don't really add up. Like when Princess Toadstool throws a bomb at one of King Koopa's minions, the minion jumps off the truck while still holding onto the bomb instead of throwing it.
- In the Summer of 1990, the original live-action segments with Mario and Luigi during their days as plumbers in Brooklyn were infamously replaced by new, uninteresting segments about Mario-obsessed teenagers who goof around.
- Some of the episodes, or segments are currently lost, meaning that some Mario fans are likely never going to see them unless someone were to look for them and preserve them.
Episodes with their own pages
- The Bird! The Bird!
- Brooklyn Bound
- Count Koopula
- The Adventures of Sherlock Mario
- Do You Princess Toadstool Take this Koopa...?
- Mario of the Apes
Reception
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show has a 6.3/10 rating on the IMDb, a 8.2/10 on TV.com, and has a Google Users rating of "91% liked this TV show. Mark Bozon of IGN referred the series as "the biggest offender among Nintendo's many embarrassing moments" but thought that the animated shorts were "interesting to look back on". Common Sense Media rated the show 1 out of 5 stars, stating that the "frenetic '80s cult fave with stereotypes hasn't aged well." Mike Hughes of USA Today described the series as a "surprising disappointment", opening that the series has "little of the wit and spark" and relies too heavily on slapstick.
Videos
Trivia
- Many moments spawned internet memes, these include "Pizza" and the whole "Do the Mario" dance.
- Due to a contractual obligation, Bowser was only referred to as "King Koopa" in this series. By the time of The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, the restriction was relaxed somewhat; he could now be referred to as "Bowser Koopa", but still not "Bowser" alone.
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