The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!!!!11

Wave your arms, from side to side...

If that didn't instantly come to your mind upon reading the title of this post, you are either a mom, or a wrist-slitting emo kid who listens to Linkin Park. Just kidding, not all emos slit their wrists.

Super Mario Bros. Super Show! is about the adventures of (who else) Mario and Luigi, after they have saved the Princess in the original game. In this show, they are plumbers from Brooklyn, who were magically sucked into a bathtub drain back into the Mushroom Kingdom. This time around though their job isn't merely rescuing the Princess (who is always in another castle), but to protect the kingdom itself. Kind of like Zelda I guess, but with less sassy talk and more fun.

Apart from Mario and Luigi, all your favorite SMB characters are there--Toad, Princess Pea- er, Toadstool, Bowser/Koopa, those little turtles, those little Goombas, and even Birdo are also there. Each episode basically had the same core premise but with a little twist--they are usually parodies of other things. For instance, the episode "Mario and the Beanstalk" is obviously a parody of some story about a boy who blew all his life savings and property for three measly magical beans. Depending on the story being parodied, Koopa's role would change to fit with the antagonist character of the story.

The real draw of the show however is the live-action segments before the actual cartoon. Live-action Super Mario! Wow! Except the famous plumbers were shown bumming around in their mess of an apartment. Actually it was alright; it was much, much better than that travesty of a movie based on the same videogame. The coolest part of the live-action segment is it features WWF bad boy "Captain" Lou Albano (why was everyone a captain during the 80s?) as Mario. Luigi was played by Danny Wells, who isn't really prominent at all except for this role. The live action segment would often feature guest stars such as Magic Johnson or Nicole Eggert. Sometimes, Lou Albano himself would be the guest star, which is done by forcing Mario out of the screen for a while.

The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! was one of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons. Apart from the obvious reasons (that it is based on a videogame, and "Captain" Lou Albano), it was simply just fun to watch because it is adventure-themed, and we all wanted to be heroic plumbers eating 'shrooms when we were younger. Of course, telling us that magical mushrooms are good is no better than brainwashing us into thinking that all corporations are bad and hugging trees is the way to go. In this show's defense the only mushrooms we were probably aware of when we were younger are those canned button mushrooms. Ha!