The Super Mario Super Show, originally aired on Saturday mornings in 1989, and was produced by DIC, the same company that produced Inspector Gadget (and Gadget actually appears a couple of times in the live-action portion of the show) and C.O.P.S.
I don't recall seeing it on Saturday morning TV back in 1989, although I was farily young at the time, so I may've seen it. But I've had the DVD's of the show (Shout released the show in two 4-disc packages featuring just the Super Mario portion of the show, and then they released The Legend Of Zelda cartoons on their own, as the Zelda cartoons originally aired on Friday's, with live-action Mario wraparounds, while Monday to Thursday featured Mario cartoons with the live-action. Unfortunately Shout only included 5 of the 26? live-action wrap arounds, as there are only 13 Zelda cartoons, and then they reaired them every Friday for the rest of the series, and the series went for 65 episodes) for a little bit and I've been watching it on and off, along with it's sequels The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 & Super Mario World. This is the type of cartoon that I remember seeing on Saturday morning back in the late-80's and early-90's, when cartoons didn't have to adhere to an educational system.
Anyway, it's fun seeing Mario, Luigi, Princess Toadstool and Toad running around trying to defeat Bowser. Plus in SMSS you get a mixture of characters from the NES Super Mario Bros. 1 & North American 2 games. And the first live-action Mario was played by former WWF wrestler Lou Albano, while Luigi was played by "Charlie The Bartender" (from the 1970's The Jeffersons) Danny Wells. While they both did a good job, the live-action stuff is a bit on the cheesy side (how did Mario and Luigi come to have a pizza phone in their apartment?) Of course the show was aimed at kids, so the live-action wasn't meant to be a sitcom like Alf. But you did get to see guest stars like Cyndi Lauper, and in one show, Lou Albano plays both himself and Mario (its the same episode with Cyndi Lauper). The live-action was discontinued for the sequels.
Unfortunately, the video quality of the shows is kind of on the low end. I remember seeing a post from Brian Ward on the Shout site years ago dealing with the problems with the last episode of Super Mario 3, which has digital drop-outs throughout, and even goes to gray screen a few times, and Ward was saying then that the original analog master tapes (I think he mentioned that DIC had told him the shows were originally on U-Matic, although no mention was made about the cartoons original film stock and getting transfers from that, if it existed) no longer exist for any of the Nintendo shows, and all that exists are Digital Betacam copies made in the mid-90's and the original DigiBeta for that episode contained the dropouts. Otherwise, all the shows show issues arising from composite video (and the opening to The Super Mario Super Show really shows it with bleeding pixels on the purple background, and some of the letters of the logo having been drawn by hand, and in some cases they are squeezed together, and the composite dot-crawl is very obvious. Plus the opening and closing credits feature Albano and Wells doing stuff in front of green screen, and they are then composited into the cartoon backgrounds, so some resolution was lost from the original analog editing of the sequences (and it looks like the green screen was done on U-Matic or 1-inch, but I get the feeling that 1-inch might've been out of the budget for the shows), and their insertion into the cartoon.
Another unfortunate thing with the DVD's is that about 6 live-action segments are missing due to clearance issues---so Shout included the cartoons as bonuses. Also, from what I see online, the majority of the licensed music has been replaced due to clearance issues again---although Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun is still in her episode.
Super Mario Bros. 3 & Super Mario World were based on the NES and Super NES games of the same name, although Lou Albano and Danny Wells were replaced as the voice actors for Mario and Luigi in both sequels. Plus there was another series, called The Adventures of Captain N that saw a teenage boy transported to the video game world and he had to fight bad guys along with other Nintendo game characters, like Mega Man (hey, in 1989-90, Mega Man was exclusively on the NES and Game Boy).
Anyway, I wish that cartoons were still made this way today, as The Super Mario Super Show is just about as fun as playing the original NES Super Mario games.
I don't recall seeing it on Saturday morning TV back in 1989, although I was farily young at the time, so I may've seen it. But I've had the DVD's of the show (Shout released the show in two 4-disc packages featuring just the Super Mario portion of the show, and then they released The Legend Of Zelda cartoons on their own, as the Zelda cartoons originally aired on Friday's, with live-action Mario wraparounds, while Monday to Thursday featured Mario cartoons with the live-action. Unfortunately Shout only included 5 of the 26? live-action wrap arounds, as there are only 13 Zelda cartoons, and then they reaired them every Friday for the rest of the series, and the series went for 65 episodes) for a little bit and I've been watching it on and off, along with it's sequels The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 & Super Mario World. This is the type of cartoon that I remember seeing on Saturday morning back in the late-80's and early-90's, when cartoons didn't have to adhere to an educational system.
Anyway, it's fun seeing Mario, Luigi, Princess Toadstool and Toad running around trying to defeat Bowser. Plus in SMSS you get a mixture of characters from the NES Super Mario Bros. 1 & North American 2 games. And the first live-action Mario was played by former WWF wrestler Lou Albano, while Luigi was played by "Charlie The Bartender" (from the 1970's The Jeffersons) Danny Wells. While they both did a good job, the live-action stuff is a bit on the cheesy side (how did Mario and Luigi come to have a pizza phone in their apartment?) Of course the show was aimed at kids, so the live-action wasn't meant to be a sitcom like Alf. But you did get to see guest stars like Cyndi Lauper, and in one show, Lou Albano plays both himself and Mario (its the same episode with Cyndi Lauper). The live-action was discontinued for the sequels.
Unfortunately, the video quality of the shows is kind of on the low end. I remember seeing a post from Brian Ward on the Shout site years ago dealing with the problems with the last episode of Super Mario 3, which has digital drop-outs throughout, and even goes to gray screen a few times, and Ward was saying then that the original analog master tapes (I think he mentioned that DIC had told him the shows were originally on U-Matic, although no mention was made about the cartoons original film stock and getting transfers from that, if it existed) no longer exist for any of the Nintendo shows, and all that exists are Digital Betacam copies made in the mid-90's and the original DigiBeta for that episode contained the dropouts. Otherwise, all the shows show issues arising from composite video (and the opening to The Super Mario Super Show really shows it with bleeding pixels on the purple background, and some of the letters of the logo having been drawn by hand, and in some cases they are squeezed together, and the composite dot-crawl is very obvious. Plus the opening and closing credits feature Albano and Wells doing stuff in front of green screen, and they are then composited into the cartoon backgrounds, so some resolution was lost from the original analog editing of the sequences (and it looks like the green screen was done on U-Matic or 1-inch, but I get the feeling that 1-inch might've been out of the budget for the shows), and their insertion into the cartoon.
Another unfortunate thing with the DVD's is that about 6 live-action segments are missing due to clearance issues---so Shout included the cartoons as bonuses. Also, from what I see online, the majority of the licensed music has been replaced due to clearance issues again---although Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun is still in her episode.
Super Mario Bros. 3 & Super Mario World were based on the NES and Super NES games of the same name, although Lou Albano and Danny Wells were replaced as the voice actors for Mario and Luigi in both sequels. Plus there was another series, called The Adventures of Captain N that saw a teenage boy transported to the video game world and he had to fight bad guys along with other Nintendo game characters, like Mega Man (hey, in 1989-90, Mega Man was exclusively on the NES and Game Boy).
Anyway, I wish that cartoons were still made this way today, as The Super Mario Super Show is just about as fun as playing the original NES Super Mario games.
