Yeah, this was a thing I stumbled across somehow once upon a time; a 3-DVD set compiling the entire Adventures Of Super Mario Bros. 3 series, which was basically a continuation of sorts of the old Super Mario Bros. Super Show, but without the live action bits and with an almost entirely new voice-cast, save for Harvey Atkin, who still does a solid King Koopa.
Sadly, the ol’ King of the Koopa has been sullied with his annoying, obnoxious kids whose names have been changed from the games to more… weird names that may have been drawn out of a hat. I don’t know why they changed the names; maybe the original names were too “on point.”
(Fun fact: the original Koopa Kids were play on pre-existing people. Morton Koopa Jr, for example, named after shock jock host Morton Downey Jr… which might explain the needless name change.)
The rest of the new voices are alright. I thought the guy who voiced Mario was pretty good, but Lou Albano was the more “iconic” voice. You folks can keep your Charles Martinet for all I care. Captain Lou is mah Mario.
(Fun Fact: The guy who voiced Mario in this and the Mario world cartoon is Walker Boone, whom I later found out had played Leland T. Lynch, one of a billion chief engineers on the Enterprise in the Star Trek: The Next Generation first season episode, “Skin Of Evil.” Yes, the man who voices Mario was the chief engineer on the episode where Denise Crosby’s Lt. Tasha Yar was killed off by a tar monster. The more you know, I guess.)
Of the three Super Mario cartoons back in the day, this was the one I was least familiar with because I missed out on this one completely during my younger years. So this was a chance to finally catch what I was missing out on… which turned out to be not so much. Unlike the previous Super Show but much like the later Mario World cartoon, SMB3 stays true to the game it’s based on and doesn’t try to go for parodies of popular movies and such. The problem is that the show itself isn’t all that interesting otherwise. The episodes are your typical kids fare; there’s a minor problem that needs to be solved, our heroes need to solve it, and there’s a musical number that plays at some point. The songs have aged poorly and some of them seem to have been replaced with some bad generic rock tune of sorts.
The series is contained across two discs, with the third disc reserved for what the box calls the series bible, which has you navigating a bunch of things. It’s a bit of a fluff piece and anyone wanting something deeper is probably not going to find it here, but it’s better than nothing, I suppose, and considering the cheap price, it’s more than I would’ve expected out of a set like this.
For those wanting a piece of their childhood, this is worth it for the nostalgic value. I don’t know if it’s aged particularly well and the DVD set itself isn’t all that impressive, but it was fairly cheap, so I’d say go for it.
dtm666 