The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! | |
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Genre | |
Created by |
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Starring | |
Voices of | |
Narrated by | Lou Albano |
Opening theme | "Plumber Rap", performed by Lou Albano and Danny Wells |
Ending theme | "Do the Mario", performed by Lou Albano |
Composer(s) |
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Country of origin | United States |
Original language(s) | English |
No. of seasons | 1 |
No. of episodes | 65 (52 Mario, 13 Zelda) (list of episodes) |
Production | |
Running time | 22 minutes |
Production company(s) | |
Distributor | |
Release | |
Original network | First Run Syndication |
Original release | September 4 | – December 1, 1989
Chronology | |
Followed by | The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990) |
Related shows | The Legend of Zelda (1989) |
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! is an American television series based upon Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 2. 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. The Family Channel picked up the series on September 23, 1991, and aired it until August 26, 1994. The show was produced by DiC Animation and was distributed by Viacom Enterprises in association with Nintendo of America, Inc., DHX Media, the successor company of Cookie Jar Entertainment and DiC, is the current distributor.
The first and last parts of each episode were live segments which showed Mario (professional wrestler and manager Captain Lou Albano) and Luigi (Danny Wells), two Italian-American plumbers living in Brooklyn, where they would often be visited by celebrity guest stars. It appears that the live segments take place before Mario and Luigi went to the Mushroom Kingdom.
Some of the celebrity guest stars were popular television stars, such as Nedra Volz, Norman Fell, Donna Douglas, Eve Plumb, Vanna White, Jim Lange, Danica McKellar, Nicole Eggert, Clare Carey and Brian Bonsall or professional athletes such as Lyle Alzado and Magic Johnson and WWE (then WWF) stars like Roddy Piper and Sgt. Slaughter. In one episode, Ernie Hudson appeared as a Slimebuster, a parody of his Ghostbusters persona Winston Zeddemore and on another occasion Mario and Luigi receive a visit from Inspector Gadget, performed live by Maurice LaMarche who voiced Chief Quimby in the second season of the show and later went on to voice Gadget himself in Inspector Gadget's Last Case and Gadget & the Gadgetinis. There was also another episode with Cassandra Peterson as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, but the episode was not included in the DVDs. In an interview for the first DVD release of the show, Lou Albano talked about filming these live action skits, which mainly involved he and Wells getting a central plot and mostly improvising the dialogue as they went along.