No matter how cool and fancy video games get, it’s the old school and semi-old school stuff from the 1980s and early 1990s that will always have a special place in my heart. With their eight-bit block graphics and midi sounds, they were mini works of art that I’d play until my eyes were red and my thumbs ached just to set a personal best.
That being said, off the top of my head I can’t think of one video game that has been successfully transferred into cartoon format. I remember watching Pac-Man, Q-Bert and Donkey Kong but I don’t remember what I actually watched. Later came the Super Mario Brothers Super Show that featured live-action intros. It wasn’t super. I watched it but only because there was nothing else on while I ate my Frosted Flakes. Even as a part of the target demographic, I never admitted at school to watching it. Around the same time there was a Saturday morning cartoon called Captain N: Game Master that centered around several Nintendo games. Since I was into sleeping in on weekends at that point, I skipped over it. Both Mario Brothers and Captain N later merged into Captain N and the New Super Mario World. Two forgettable shows don’t make a good one, but retrospectively speaking, they’re good for a laugh and a little gamer nostalgia.
Each episode is divided into two parts that exist in separate continuums. The first half on most episodes is ruled by Mario, Luigi, Yoshi and friends as they take on the Koopas. It’s standard hero versus villain stuff with the good guys seemingly always getting the best of their enemies. The Captain N portion mashes together several games. The show centers on a gamer named Kevin who is sucked into the very games he plays. There he befriends Simon from “Castlevania”, Kid Icarus and others. Those names might not mean a lot to today’s “Halo”-loving gamers, but back then they were coolest in all the land. It’s fun to see all the different games that are squeezed into Captain N (particularly when “Tetris”, a puzzle game of spinning blocks, is given its own episode), but the show is ultimately drab. Although video games are fun to play, even some of the best fall victim to neglecting to create multidimensional characters that you care about. This is a TV show but it’s no different. They’re all just as two-dimensional as their Nintendo counterparts.
A little touch that I did appreciate was integrating the games’ cheesy midi soundtracks into the show. It’s an added piece of nostalgia to help distract from the lameness of most everything else. There’s also a couple of cameos from sports stars Larry Bird and Bo Jackson that are fun. The Jackson appearance was a reminder back to his Pro Stars show with Michael Jordan and Wayne Gretzky.
Captain N and the New Super Mario World is a comfortable-feeling time capsule back to a time when video games were simpler but still just as addicting. Yet for all the classic games the show alludes to, this cartoon is no replacement for the real thing.
Captain N and the New Super Mario World DVD Review
Captain N and the New Super Mario World includes all 10 of the show’s original episodes. Seven episodes each contain a Captain N portion and a Super Mario portion. The final three episodes are just Super Mario Brothers. Sadly, the presentation of the show isn’t that great. It’s as though the show was simply transferred from the original source tapes and saved in DVD format. The result is a very soft picture that is drab and dull and sound that is okay but not great – kind of like AM radio in our Dolby Digital world.
There are two small features that are decent for archival reasons, but totally disposable. Disc one contains the opening credits as a storyboard. Disc two includes some concept are for Mario’s pet dinosaur Yoshi.
