You'd think it'd be rather easy to come up with a cartoon show based on Mario and Luigi and turn it into an epic quest, having each season take them through a story like in the games. The goal is to rescue the Princess, and each episode (or every two, if you want them to be regular two-parters like how Justice League did it for a while) you could introduce a new world, new monsters, and a new "boss" for them to overcome. Have a two-parter where they explore a haunted house, throw in a little joke where Luigi manages to capture a Boo in a vacuum cleaner. Another episode or two takes place in the desert and they have to figure out how to fight an angry dive-bombing sun. One more underwater where they have to deal with giant fish that can swallow them in a single gulp or a giant octopus creature.
But make it fresh and new, have us explore the world with the brothers, so when they're seeing something for the first time, people in the audience can hug their game cartridges to themselves and think "I know what that is, that's Wiggler!" or "That's Birdo!" or "Holy- they put in that evil piano from Super Mario 64? Those sick people!"
But no, instead we get pasta jokes, made up worlds that make no sense, and a complete lack of logic to anybody's actions.
So let's look at another one.
Okay, so I got pretty upset at one point when I realized they were just ripping off pop culture when they were coming up with story ideas. "Hey, Star Wars was popular, let's rip that off." "Kids watch this, right? Let's give them something familiar with some fairy tales." "Michael Jackson's popular, let's base an episode off the sword and the stone myths and just throw in Bad."
I'm not making that last episode up.
Fortunately, that's also not the episode we're watching. Instead, we got to see that someone at the production company apparently wanted to introduce a little class into their cartoon, so we get this title:
This offends me on so many levels.
"Hey, why don't we take some Shakespeare and turn that into an episode? We can replace a name with Mario."
"Don't the main characters die in a lot of those stories?"
"Pft, whatever, like the kids would know."
Apparently this land is the "land of romance" which isn't just horribly made up, but isn't even named correctly. And just because the people making the show figure kids don't know literary history or actual history, we open with Snifits shooting bullets around what appears to be the ruins of a bombed out Italian city circa late World War 2.
That's actually pretty terrifying.
Oh, and for the record, that picture has a mistake. The main characters describe there as being a "feud" going on, but until they show the two groups again a minute later, you can't tell that it's guys colored red shooting at guys colored blue.
Our heroes navigate the war-shaken city, dodging dive-bombing enemies, jumping into foxholes, and hiding behind crumbling ruins of what were undoubtedly peoples homes. They manage to escape into the sewers, where they meet up with Princess Toadstool's friend Joliet and her boyfriend Romano.
...sorry, I must have grabbed the wrong screen shot. That can't be two teenagers passionately in love with each other, letting hormones and emotions control their lives and bringing their two families to war. That must be Joliet's parents.
...what's that? That's them? You're kidding me.
...seriously?
...well, based on Romero's eye direction, I think we know what drew him to Joliet and kept him from seeing she has the face and hair of a woman six times her actual age.
The Princess decides to try to bring a halt to the feud (which apparently was sparked by King Koopa because of course it was) by being tossed up out of the sewers right between two lines of bad guys shooting bullets at each other from their mouths.
Remember, we already established before that the Princess is the WORST NEGOTIATOR WHO EVER LIVED.
She calls out the two lovers' fathers (demanding to see them after they, and only they, have already shown up), She tries to reason with them, but when both fathers refuse to even consider the idea, the Princess issues an official royal edict declaring the feud to be over and that Romano and Joliet will be married.
This, um, apparently does the job, as she's even able to issue a royal command to make the two fathers shake on it.
...well, that was a short episode. I think we're only about three minutes in.
Oh wait, Koopa's still running around. He watches the whole thing from a magic mirror which, once he pulls a lever to bring it back to his own reflection, starts talking to him and demanding he stop the wedding. Koopa is, in essence, talking to his own reflection, which gives him a plan to kidnap Joliet and blame it on Romano's family.
This talking reflection deal is never addressed again.
Toad peeks in on Joliet right before the wedding to find her holding a few flowers that resemble weeds more than a bouquet and wearing a red dress (huh, not white? Interesting.) However, a large bird creature swoops in, grabs her, and takes off again.
Meanwhile, back in the church- wait a minute.
I'm sorry, did I just turn on another show? This is the program that can't keep track of how much time is left on a timer or what color Luigi's hat is, and that's a random throw away background?
I think the show's now just mocking me.
Joliet's father immediately blames Romano's father for the kidnapping which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, since you'd think that Romano's father would have Romano kidnapped to keep him away from Joliet. Send him off to Abu Dhabi or something.
The world's sissiest slap fight breaks out between the two men while everybody stands around watching, and then the two declare the feud is back on, calling their individual snifits to start shooting at each other inside the church.
These fathers don't shiv, man. They'z hardcore.
Romano leads the good guys back to the sewers, and the heroes realize that Koopa must have been behind the kidnapping because he's the only real bad guy the show has.
Getting to his castle is simply a matter of a quick jump moment (because of course they know how to get there, they just kept going right to scroll the screen), but their rescue attempt takes an almost
You're a jerk, Mario.
The good guys are immediately captured, and I don't know what's dumber. When the large net that nobody saw sweeps everybody up and Toad cries out "It's a net!" or when Luigi responds with "Annette Funicello? Where?"
Bowser tosses them into the same cell as Joliet (apparently it's his only cell) and I swear to God I think one of the Battletoads put on a cheap turtle costume to try to get a cameo.
Now, again, Koopa doesn't have a bad plan here. Now that he has both kids, both fathers will keep blaming the other and keep buying weapons from Koopa. Of course, I hope the snifits Koopa sells to them realize "hey, you guys aren't really going to come back from this sale" ... which might explain why every time we see them, they're firing up instead of at the enemy.
Toad comes up with a plan to get everybody out of the cell, and it involves playing off
Mario is quick to point out after the fact that the goon had the keys on him and they still can't get out. And he does it in a rather pretentious way, too, as if he knew all along the plan wouldn't work but wanted to humiliate Toad in the process.
I'm starting to hate you, Mario.
But fortunately it turns out that Joliet has her bouquet with her, and her entire bouquet is made up of fire flowers! No, really! That's a plot twist!
So we can get a whole group of people lobbing fireballs around and demolishing Koopa's forces...or Mario can simply grab the whole bouquet, transform to "super" Mario and run off to upstage everybody. That works, too.
Unfortunately, they meet Koopa and some of his troops on the stairs, and the others run back up to come up with a new plan while Mario throws fireballs at turtles, something you do every time you play the game, and yet they don't hurt anybody because the turtles pull their shells off and use them as shields. Then Mario's fire flower wears off for some reason. Man, if only they had more than one flower so they could recharge his powers or something, or have two people throwing fireballs.
Fortunately, the others come up with a much better plan, which is to ride a door attached to large dumbbells down the stairs, which terrifies the troops more than death by fire, and they leap out of the way. Koopa tries to pull up his drawbridge, but it apparently stops moving at a 45 degree angle (I'm not kidding) and simply acts like a ramp for everybody to jump off of. Koopa waves his fists in rage, everybody stands on the cart looking back at him and waving, and amazingly enough they don't crash into anything and die with the sounds of Last Kiss playing in the background.
Back at the church, the Princess weds Joliet and Romero together, everybody celebrates, and the feud starts again in an argument over which father the kids are living with, and it turns into a huge food fight.
For never was there a story that brought me more woe
Than this of Joliet and her Romero.
Cue Dancing Lou.
The Good:
What's going to bother me the most about this episode is all the stuff they wasted. But I'll get to that.
There were so many things here that were great. We saw snifits firing bullets, we saw a romantic down reduced to ruins, we saw fire flowers finally being incorporated. We saw some absolutely beautiful backgrounds created for a few scenes as well, which threw me when a wall was blown down and we saw the usual shoddy animation behind. There were even some gorgeously drawn classical painting style people in the final scene, even if they just turned out to be cardboard cutouts.
It was also great to see Princess Toadstool remember she's a princess! Issuing royal decrees, bossing people around, marrying whoever she darn well pleases, it was great! It's too bad she never uses that power anywhere else.
But now I'm getting to the bad.
The Bad:
This episode had the most blatant use of wasting potential I've ever seen. All that good stuff up above is only good until you realize that you aren't going to see most of it ever again. The rest of the backgrounds will be shoddily made stock images that are one step better than the backgrounds of Ren and Stimpy, the Princess will once again be useless, and six episodes in and this is only the second time we've gotten to see "super" Mario of any kind.
Plus, Mario comes across the whole time as not really caring about what happens to anybody, he just wants to be a smug jerk. He swipes all of the fire flowers instead of sharing with Luigi, he's completely ineffectual against anything that isn't a door, and acts like a jerk to his friends. I'm almost starting to think that while Mario has his "plumber's log," everybody else writes in their diary "Day 433: Still can't shake Mario. He just does not get the hint that we don't want him or need him. We wasted our fire flowers today, we could have used those to permanently put Koopa down, but instead we had to escape on a door. A DOOR."
Overall:
There's only three episodes left. Let's just leave it at that.
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