Long before Chris Pratt and Charlie Day donned their respective red and green overalls for 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and even before Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo crossed plungers for 1993’s Super Mario Bros., there was 1989’s The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!.
Starring WWE legend Lou Albano as Mario and Canadian actor Danny Wells as Luigi, The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! was a syndicated kids series that featured live-action, sitcom-like segments of Mario and Luigi in a Brooklyn apartment and animated adventures in which the duo battled King Koopa, rescued Princess Toadstool and did all the other heroic stuff they typically accomplished via game console.
https://youtu.be/BkWYP95WbbY?si=CjxGlQtkZO0i1bkL
It’s still beloved today by Nintendo fans, which is why, to commemorate its 35th anniversary, we plunged these 35 trivia tidbits about the show out of Mario’s toilet, and delivered them straight to you.
Mario’s Makers
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! was born out of a deal between Nintendo of America and the animation company DIC, known for cartoons like The Real Ghostbusters, Inspector Gadget and Heathcliff.
The Would-Be ‘Super Mario Bros. Power Hour’
According to Polygon, the original proposal for the series was the Super Mario Bros. Power Hour, which, in addition to the Mario bits, would have featured segments drawn from other Nintendo properties like Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, Double Dragon and California Games.
Nintendo Was Reluctant
In a 1989 interview with The Chicago Tribune, DIC executive producer Andy Heyward said, “(Nintendo’s) first answer was, ‘No, we don’t want to do it. We can’t meet our demand right now. We don’t need you, and we don’t need any television show.’ We begged and pleaded, and we brought together a creative team (that) they were very impressed with, and we said we felt we could produce good entertainment that would be viewed independently of the game. They finally agreed, but we have to pay them a very healthy royalty, which is unheard of in the kid business. It’s always the other way around.”
Mario Acted Alongside ‘SNL’ Alum Joe Piscopo
Before playing Mario, Albano appeared in the 1980s cartoon Hulk Hogan’s Rock ‘n’ Wrestling as his wrestling persona “Captain” Lou Albano. He also did some non-wrestling related acting in the Danny DeVito/Joe Piscopo movie Wise Guys.
Mario Couldn’t Have a Beard
In an interview for the DVD release of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, Albano said his wife talked him into playing Mario. He was still struggling with the requirement to shave his beard, though, which was a trademark of his wrestling persona. Regis Philbin of all people helped him overcome that concern.
Albano on Mario
“Mario was a great guy. He was like a guy off the street, the big slob that did everything wrong, but still Super Mario,” Albano explained in the interview for the DVD release.
Just Say No!
Like many children’s stars at the time, Albano starred in an anti-drug PSA that aired during The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!. In it, Albano, while wearing the Mario hat, ominously warned, “Drugs can kill, and if you do drugs, you go to hell before you die.”
The PSAs Didn’t Stop There, Though
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! also ended with Albano as Mario giving advice to his young audience about not accepting stolen property or rides from strangers.
Albano Offered to Change His Name
Per The Ringer, Albano offered to legally change his name to Mario for the part. He later decided against it, though.
Mario’s Family
In the series, Albano also played the roles of Mama Mario and Mario and Luigi’s cousin Marianne. Danny Wells also played Marianne’s sister, Luigeena.
Danny Wells’ Other Roles
Wells appeared as a guest star in many TV shows like Sanford & Son, Rhoda and Columbo. But his most notable live-action role was as Charlie the bartender in The Jeffersons.
Luigi Loved Cartoons
Wells also did extensive work voicing cartoon characters. Besides The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, he voiced characters in Heathcliff, The Real Ghostbusters, Batman: The Animated Series and Johnny Bravo.
Danny and Lou
In a 2013 interview with Slam Wrestling, Wells said, “I did not know Lou. Lou lived on the East Coast; I lived on the West Coast. But Lou looked like Mario, Lou looked like the icon. I was tall and skinny. Neither of us had mustaches, but the characters did. That was part of making them look like the character. The difference in size between Lou and I worked. With the icons, Mario was bigger than Luigi. On the show, I’m taller than Lou.”
Hard-Working Plumbers
In the same interview, Wells said, “(Albano) was a gentle soul. He was not an actor. He had never done anything like this before, but he was willing to learn. He had never done voiceovers before, because not only did we do the live show, but we did all the voices for the cartoons that were on the show. It was very intense. The schedule was just brutal. We did six days a week, and we shot in the studio until we were ready to fall down, and then we had to go to another studio to do the voiceovers for the cartoons.”
Nintendo Had Little Input
Nintendo had basically no part in the production of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!. For the DVD release of the show, Heyward explained in an interview, “The series was produced autonomously in the United States. Of course, we tried to be respectful of everything in the video game. I probably lost 10 years of life working on that series because we really just wanted it to be spot-on in every way. The music came from the video game, the character designs were very much based on the video game — the sound effects, the art direction, we wanted it to be faithful to the video game.”
All of the Live-Action Stuff Was Shot at One Time
According to Heyward, “We did approximately 52 episodes of live-action wraparounds that were shot in about a two-week period, and then they were later edited into the cartoons. The cartoons each take about a year to make.”
Albano Was the First (and Only) Choice for Mario
“When I looked at the character Super Mario, I saw Captain Lou Albano,” Heyward maintained.
Looked Who Stopped By for a Visit
The show’s eclectic array of guest stars included Danica McKellar, Magic Johnson, Vanna White, Ernie Hudson, Patrick Dempsey and Cyndi Lauper, along with Albano’s fellow wrestlers Sgt. Slaughter and “Rowdy” Roddy Piper.
Mario and Luigi Were ‘Baywatch’ Fans
On an episode featuring Nicole Eggert, Luigi told Eggert that he and Mario watched her show all the time and that they were her biggest fans.
‘Everyone in Hollywood Wanted to Be on That Show’
“All those guest stars asked to be on the show,” Wells told Slam Wrestling. “We never went after anybody. They all asked to be on the show because all of them had kids, and the kids were crazy about the Mario Brothers. This was a change for them — to be on something that their kids could see them on.”
The Mario Rap
The co-creators of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, Haim Saban and Shuki Levy, wrote “The Mario Brothers Rap,” which Albano and Wells performed.
The Mario Rap Remix
A rewritten version of “The Mario Brothers Rap” appears in The Super Mario Bros. Movie as part of a commercial for Mario and Luigi’s plumbing business.
Do the Mario
“The Mario Brothers Rap” wasn’t the show’s only notable song; Albano also performed “Do the Mario” for the closing credits. Both songs used music from the video games.
Mario and Luigi Were Based on Bing Crosby and Bob Hope Respectively
Series writer Perry Martin told Vantage Point Interviews, “The (series) bible was written by Bruce and Reed Shelly. Reading it, you could tell that they were still struggling to get a handle on the show. I mean, the core problem was obvious: There are no real characters or stories in a Nintendo game, so how do you turn one into a TV series? The bible indicated that Mario and Luigi would have a jokey rivalry like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby from the old Road pictures, with Mario being the fun-loving adventurous type, and Luigi being timid and cowardly.”
Mario’s Parodies
Many of the episodes of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! were movie parodies, like “Two Plumbers and a Baby” and “9001: A Mario Odyssey.” In that same Vantage Point interview, Martin explained, “It may not have been the most original answer to the question of what kind of stories we would tell, but it was a very practical one. At least it gave us a handle on the show. It was certainly better than spinning our wheels. All the game-related elements became incidental. Perhaps we should have made more effort to incorporate those things, but you can’t build 52 stories around guys chasing after magic coins. Anyway, the first story they gave me was a reworking of the King Arthur legend, which became ‘King Mario of Cramalot.’ That was the first of the parodies.”
Getting to Know Mario
To do research for the show, writer and developer Phil Harnage told Eurogamer, “I have never been very good at video games, but I did play Mario because the in-house producer was a fanatic and had a Nintendo in his office. Mostly, I would sit and watch him because he was so good, and he would say there’s that creature and this other creature you’ve got to watch out for. He taught me about the world.”
Nintendo Was ‘Liberal’ with the Scripts
Harnage also told Eurogamer, “It was going to be different (from the games), yet it had to have all the familiar touchstones, like the Goombas, the fire plants. If we ever excused something from the game, we heard about it, but Nintendo reviewed the scripts and they made sure that everything was good. They were also kind of liberal in letting us do things that had never been in the game, and there was no pushback. I think they liked it when we put Mario in the wild west, in the future and underwater. We would take a familiar fairy tale, legend or something the kids already knew, and we would build up an episode around that and make it as fun as possible.”
Albano v. Hoskins
In that same interview, Harnage admitted that the creatives behind The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! relished the failure of the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, saying, “We were all very happy because everybody hated it!”
Mario Dunked on Disney
According to an ad placed by DIC and Viacom in video game magazines at the time, The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! beat out popular cartoons like DuckTales and Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers in the ratings.
They Got Bags and Bags and Bags of Fan Mail
In his Slam Wrestling interview, Wells said, “We went on the air, three o’clock in the afternoon, with no publicity or PR at all. There was no pre-build-up to this show, nothing. They just threw us out there. In three weeks, we became number one. We beat Disney, we beat everybody. Without any publicity, without any help from anybody, this show went to the number one daytime cartoon show. They put us up against Mickey Mouse, it didn’t matter, we beat them. It was amazing. We got bags of fan mail every day, literally. We were shown all across the country. It was a syndicated show, but we literally went on the air coast to coast, and we became the number one afternoon cartoon show, five days a week.”
It (Kinda) Had a Spin-Off About King Koopa
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! briefly had a spin-off show where a live-action King Koopa played old cartoons like Popeye and Betty Boop for a live audience of kids. But King Koopa’s Kool Kartoons was a local show that only aired on KTTV in Los Angeles for two months in late 1989. While segments survive on YouTube, much of the show is considered lost.
Nintendo Pulled the Plug
As for why no more episodes were produced, Wells told Slam Wrestling, “The show didn’t last because the show didn’t mean anything to Nintendo. After the first run, Nintendo said, ‘Pull the plug.’ They didn’t care if we were number one. It didn’t mean anything, because we were chump change to them. They were a multi-billion dollar company, and we were just chump change. They weren’t in it for the money. DIC sold them a bill of goods, put us on the air, we became number one, and then Nintendo pulled the plug. That was it. If this was a Disney show, we’d still be on the air because it was a money-making machine. The show was canceled, not because the numbers weren’t good — we were number one — just Nintendo said, ‘Okay, we’re done. Thank you.’ That was the end of it. Lou and I looked at each other, we couldn’t believe it, we just couldn’t believe it.”
The Somewhat Less Super Follow-Ups
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! was followed up by The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 in 1990, which dropped the live-action segments and recast Albano and Wells for the animation. While The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! was based on the first two games, this one was more directly based on the third game (hence the awkward title). The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 lasted 13 episodes and was followed by 13 episodes of Super Mario World, which was used to sell the Super Nintendo game of the same name.
RIP Captain Lou
Albano died in 2009 at the age of 76. Meanwhile, Wells died four years later in 2013 at the age of 72.
Giving Mario and Luigi Non-Pixelated Life
In his Slam Wrestling interview, Wells said, “Remember that the Super Mario Brothers didn’t exist. The Super Mario Bros. was a video game. They didn’t talk, they didn’t have a second name, they didn’t have a job. They were just little icons in a video game. It was up to the people involved, me being one of them, to create these characters, to give them a life, to give them a job, where they lived, and their relationship with each other. We took a nothing — just little icons from a video game — and turned them into living, breathing characters.”