Hangin' with the plumbers, you'll be hooked on the Brothers

In this post, I have a few things to say about The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, to which I was recently reacquainted via the first DVD set. I'm sure most of you remember this series. It started out with a live-action Mario and Luigi (played respectively by Captain Lou Albano and a guy named Danny Wells, whose acting career also included such noteable roles as "Street Person," "Guard," and "Additional Voices") in their Brooklyn basement apartment/plumbing shop, which was apparently built on a budget considerably less than that for most grade school plays. They were usually visited by some obscure celebrity (often one of Captain Lou's fellow WWF veterans, although they also managed to get Magic Johnson to make two appearances), a bad celebrity impersonator, or one or both of the main actors (and I use that term loosely) in drag. Seriously, there were at least two episodes where the two of them played female relatives of the Mario Brothers. After the setup for the live action bit, the cartoon would begin. These were much less of a train wreck than the live action segments, but still suffered from the animation errors that plagued a lot of cartoons from the era (coloration mistakes, the wrong charcters' mouths moving, characters and objects moving at different speeds when seen from different angles), as well as repetitive plots (not that we don't see those in the Mario games as well) and endings that had everyone laughing uproariously at a really stupid joke. Then after the cartoon, there would be some kind of resolution to the live action segment, and Captain Lou would tell everybody to do the Mario.

Despite all the flaws in the series (and there were many), I think many of us enjoyed it simply because we were seeing beloved video game characters on screen, and they usually actually acted in ways that were true to their game counterparts. Sure, there were plenty of oddities. Fire Flowers and Starmen were often used interchangeably, and one episode even had a Fire Flower allowing Mario to fly. Um...okay. One episode not included in this set had an infamous scene showing Mario and Luigi running away from a Goomba and walking on top of Piranha Plants. And while Mouser's pseudo-German accent worked all right, Triclyde's voice was obnoxious. As you might be able to guess from my icon, I'm somewhat disappointed that Wart never showed up at all. Still, I think they did some things right. The Mario Brothers' personalities were somewhat simple (Mario is a glutton, and Luigi a coward), but at least they HAD some consistent characterization. That Luigi is the less brave of the two seems to have been accepted into the games themselves, what with his being afraid of ghosts in Luigi's Mansion. And I think King Koopa is well-characterized as far as villains in children's cartoon series go. He's sarcastic, scheming, egomaniacal, and prone to temper tantrums. In the Super Show cartoons, he also has a habit of dressing in costumes appropriate to the setting he's visiting.

There aren't very many extras on the set. There's a brief interview with Captain Lou (who's presumably the only person involved with the show who isn't embarrassed to admit it) and some concept art. I also noticed that they took out the songs that were originally played in the action sequences. I guess they had trouble getting the rights, but since the songs were included on the VHS releases, I'm not sure why that would have been a problem for the DVD's. Oh, well.

I'm not going to do an episode-by-episode review of this set. If you're interested in that kind of thing, there are some summaries and reviews of individual episodes available here (which include plenty of documentation of King Koopa's foot fetish). I do have a few things I'd like to point out, however.

( Patty-cake, patty-cake, pasta man! Give me pasta power as fast as you can! )

From what I hear, a Captain N DVD set, including all of the first two seasons, will be out next year. I think it would make sense to throw on the third season as well. I mean, yeah, it sucked (this was the season where the episodes were cut down the half the length they'd been in the first two seasons, and the already spotty animation quality went way down), but I'd like to satisfy my completist tendencies, you know?

Okay, that's all for now. Until next time, everybody, do the Mario! :P