The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!

About

The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! was a sitcom starring Lou Albano and Danny Wells as Mario and Luigi from the Super Mario Brothers Nintendo franchise. After opening live-action segments, the characters would go to the Mushroom Kingdom in animated segments. After a brief run in 1989, the show has survived in online notoriety through a variety of memes.

History and Format

The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! aired from September 4th, 1989-December 1st, 1989, lasting one season.^[1] The series was conceived by Andy Heyward of DiC entertainment. Each episode would open and close with Albano and Wells playing live-action versions of Mario and Luigi as Italian-born plumbers living in Brooklyn, New York. There, they would often be visited by high-profile guest stars such as Cyndi Lauper and Roddy Piper. Then, an animated short featuring Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Princess Peach defending the Mushroom Kingdom from King Koopa would air. These segments were supposed to canonically be series where the live-action Mario and Luigi were sucked through a magic drain pipe. These segments aired Monday through Thursday. On Friday, the animated short was an episode of The Legend of Zelda TV series. The show ran for a total of 65 episodes.

Reception

The show was poorly received. Mike Hughes of USA Today wrote:

"'The Super Mario Brothers Super Show' emerges as a surprising disappointment. This has the same producers as "Captain N" and the same basis – Nintendo video games. Yet it has little of the wit and spark; there are live-action bits surrounding the cartoons, but they merely remind us of why slapstick comedy is no longer an American artform."

Revisionist critics did not receive it much better, despite the show's cult status. IGN^[2] writer Mark Bozon wrote:

"…the Super Mario Bros. television show has simply got to go down as the biggest offender among Nintendo's many embarrassing moments… Looking back, however, the shows are amazingly corny and offer little to no appeal to anyone aside from the masochistic TV obsessives."

Commonsensemedia^[3] wrote it was a "frenetic" cult 80s favorite with "stereotypes that haven't aged well," giving it 1/5 stars.

Online Presence

Though the show does not have a social media presence, it has developed a small cult following. It has a rating of 6.3 on IMDb^[4] from 2,379 voters. There is also a TV Tropes^[5] page devoted to the show and several Wikis.^[6][7]

Related Memes

Captain Lou Albano's "Just Say No" PSA

Captain Lou Albano’s “Just Say No” PSA is a 19-second Public Service Announcement featuring the then-professional wrestler Captain Lou Albano, who implores children not to use drugs. Online, the PSA has been edited and poked fun of for it’s darker tones. In the PSA, Lou Albano, wearing a partial Mario hat (in reference to his portrayal of the Nintendo character in The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!) intently tells kids not to use drugs. At the end of the speech, Albano states that, "…If you do drugs, you'll go to hell before you die," followed by a delayed, unsettling "Please."

Albano's drug PSA had not gained much attention until Twitch streamer and YouTuber Joel of Vinesauce uploaded a small clip of him editing the letters within the PSA, during his "Drug Games" stream. Later on November 30, Youtuber JonTron uploaded a review featuring various drug PSA's from the 1990's, including Lou Albano's PSA.

Oh, Fuck You Luigi

Oh, Fuck You Luigi is a misheard quote from Super Mario Bros. Super Show in which Mario says "Oh, thank you, Luigi," but his inflection makes it sound like he is saying "Oh, fuck you Luigi." The clip has become notable online and has grown into an interesting piece of trivia for fans, particularly the Let's Play community. The episode featuring the quote in question, "Neatness Counts," was the pilot episode of Super Mario Bros. Super Show. The line occurs almost immediately in the episode, after Luigi points out Mario has spaghetti on his overalls (shown below). The clip has been uploaded to YouTube several times; the video shown below, uploaded by Ville Mustonen, has over 226,000 views.

The moment had been mentioned online sparingly. On September 19th, 2009, a post on Fluther.com inquired about the moment. It has also been included in the TV Tropes page about the show as an example of "Memetic Mutation." On January 28th, 2015, Docmock97 of the JonTron subreddit posted the clip, mentioning Jafari had talked about the scene at a recent panel. On September 20th, 2016, Vinesauce Joel tweeted the scene, gaining over 100 retweets and 330 likes (shown below).

On March 2nd, 2017, during an episode of "Oney Plays," the Let's Play channel of OneyNG, Oney, gamer DingDongVG, and Julian Marcel begin talking about the show. DingDongVG attempts to tell the group about the "Oh, fuck you Luigi" quote, to which the group is incredulous (shown below, left). The moment became popular in the Oney fandom and online as more people became aware of the clip. On April 17th, the channel uploaded an animation of the segment from their Let's Play video by SuperProWaffles, gaining over 389,000 views (shown below, right).

"Do The Mario" Parodies

"Do The Mario" Parodies are various edits to the song's closing theme, "Do the Mario," which Albano sings to the tune of the classic Super Mario over world music (shown below).

Remixes of the song have grown somewhat popular on YouTube. One of the most popular edits is a Word Replacement Remix edit by MG2.6K which adjusts the audio of the song to where Albano appears in the clip. The clip has gained over 86,000 views (shown below, left). Another popular clip from Vinesauce Vinny features him improvising lyrics over the clip, which grew popular in the Vinesauce fandom. The clip has over 420,000 views (shown below, right).

Search Interest

External References