The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3

***The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3*** is an American animated television series, produced by DiC Animation City in collaboration with Italian studio Reteitalia S.P.A. and in association with Nintendo, and ran for 26 episodes during 1990, from 8 September to December 1. It is the second animated series to be based on the Mario video game, following on from *The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!* and preceeding *Super Mario World*, and is loosely based upon the video game *Super Mario Bros. 3*.

Unlike its predecessor, the series dropped the use of live-action segments, involved a brand new cast with the exceptions of John Stocker and Harvey Atkin, who reprised their respective roles as Toad and King Koopa, established a level of continuity in stories, and featured the introduction of a set of characters called the Koopalings, based upon the same characters from the Mario games but with different names to their official counterparts. Also, this successor appears to be more suspenseful than the previous cartoon. Episodes were divided into two segments of around 11 minutes each, always opened by a title card featuring world-map footage taken from *Super Mario Bros. 3*, and often featured the use of power-ups and other elements from the game.

## Trivia

* This show was aired by NBC as part of a programming block titled "*Captain N & The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3*", combining the series with that of the animated series *Captain N: The Game Master*. The *Captain N* segments are completely separated from *Mario 3* for syndication and home media releases due to time constrictions and syndicators wanted *Mario 3* to be a fully separate 30-minute program. Even the teaser promos are completely omitted after the separation, which are considered lost.
* Notably while replacing the licensed music with the generic "Mega Move" in some episodes, sound effects that were based off from the *Super Mario Bros. 3* game are strangely muted out, as the reasons for this are unknown.
* This is the only American *Mario* cartoon Bowser Koopa is often addressed by his in-game name. Due to legal reasons, this concept is rarely used in the next series, reverting back to just "King Koopa" (this could explain why the neon sign hanging by the front of his castle reads "Koopa" in the next series).

## Alternate version to the Milli Vanilli episode

One segment, "Kootie Pie Rocks", was aired just before it was revealed that Milli Vanilli only lip-synched their songs while taking credit for other people's singing. As a result, the songs were cut from reruns of the episode, replaced with the "Mega Move" instrumental that also replaced other licensed songs in *The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3* due to copyright restrictions. Several other changes were made as well, such as any mention of or reference to Milli Vanilli's songs (such as the first half of Koopa's line "Blame on the rain? Blame it on King Koopa!", a reference to Milli Vanilli's Blame It on the Rain) and Mario's line about starting their own band at the end of the episode. However, the original scenes and music remain uncut in the German, Latin Spanish, Italian, and Brazilian Portuguese dubs (the Brazilian version even has the songs translated). The uncut version can also be found on video sharing websites, such as YouTube. The edited version of "Kootie Pie Rocks" is universally panned by those that watched the episode back before it was syndicated, as the use of "Mega Move" made the episode more choppier to the plot.