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Captain N And The New Super Mario World (TV)
R0 - America - Shout! Factory Review written by and copyright: James Teitelbaum (19th November 2007). |
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The Show
 A common marketing device among producers of Saturday morning kids cartoons is to take two properties that have pretty much run their course, and to squeeze a little more life out of them by combining the two shows into a single program. Having grown up in the 1970's, I can recall the "Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show" (1978), "The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour" (1976), and even the "The Krofft Superstar Hour" (1976) (which combined Wonderbug, Bigfoot and Wildboy, Electra Woman and Dina-Girl and a Kiss-meets Bay City Rollers by-way-of-Fonzie pop band called Kaptain Kool and the Kongs). By the following decade, video games had emerged and taken over, and the inevitable cartoons based on these games came to dominate Saturday morning television. When some of these cartoons finally ran out of steam, they were teamed up for milking in the tried and true method of the "Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show". Hence we have "Captain N and the New Super Mario World", an anthology show that comprised the third seasons of two former stand-alone shows in this case "Captain N: The Game Master" (1989), and "Super Mario World" (1990). NBC was responsible for thirteen episodes of the series that aired for four months in the autumn of 1991. It should come as no surprise that "Captain N and the New Super Mario World" has a bit of a cult following among people born in the 1980's, particularly among kids who spent their childhoods playing Nintendo. Coming into play during a time when Atari was old news but the Sega Genesis was still on the horizon, the Nintendo and its associated characters reigned supreme. It seems clear that Nintendo's flagship characters - their Bugs or Mickey, if you will - have the lion's share of the cult following. Mario and Luigi had several cartoon series devoted to them before this one, and there are a whole slew of video games featuring the pair of Italian plumbers that are still coming at us after twenty-some years. Their adventures in this cartoon are rather simplistic and infantile, almost free of real plot or story; each episode plays out like a more elaborately animated session of video game play. Mario and his brother Luigi (voiced by Walker Boon and Tony Rosato, summoning the holy spirits of Ralph Cramden and Ed Norton) jump, leap, and run around their animated fantasyland, joined by the perpetually hungry Yoshi the dinosaur (Andrew Sabiston), Princess Toadstool (Tracey Moore), and the evil King Koopa (Harvey Atkin). Music is seemingly lifted straight from the video games, except for a quick and simplistic song that peps up each of the thirteen episodes. The animation is bare-bones, as was the case with so many other quickie Saturday morning cartoons of the era. The seven "Captain N" segments are perhaps aimed at slightly (I said slightly) older kids, and feature the titular captain and a host of guest characters (many of them pulled from sundry Nintendo games) fighting the bad guy du jour - including that big ape Donkey Kong. The premise is Tron-like, in that the kid gets pulled into his Nintendo, which then becomes his reality. The animation is even worse than on the Mario 'toons. "Captain N" completists will need this set however, since the seven episodes seen here were not included on the previously released "complete" Captain N DVD set. Technically speaking, this show is a different series from the stand-alone "Captain N" series, and therefore could not be licensed for inclusion on the DVD's of the original series.
Video
Video is presented in the original full-screen (1.33:1) ratio. It doesn't look like Shout did much work on these; the colors don't exactly pop, and there is grain and dust on a lot of the prints. I guess they look better than the versions doubtlessly available on YouTube, for whatever that's worth.
Audio
Audio is English-only Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo. I suppose that in 1991, a lot of people still had mono televisions, and the sound mix reflects this consideration. The disc does not feature any optional subtitles.
Extras
Shout! Factory has released a super bare-bones disc in the extras department. Disc 1 has storyboards for the title sequences of both cartoons and Disc 2 contains a few pages of concept art for the Yoshi character. That's it!
Overall
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