I think that in discussing the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, it's really important to keep in mind that it established a lot of the mythology of the Marioverse for American audiences. When this show came out, most video game players only had the instruction booklets as a source for any background information on the games Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros. 2 -- almost no other information existed prior to this.
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show was the first step toward expanding the rich worlds of the Mushroom Kingdom, Subcon, and other locales within the "Mushroom World" (as it has come to be known in some circles, such as MarioWiki) of the Mario games.
What the Super Mario Bros. Super Show gave audiences of the time was a uniquely American view of the Mario Bros. -- Mario and Luigi were a pair of plumbers from Brooklyn who got zapped to the Mushroom Kingdom via a warp pipe they discovered in their line of work. This apocryphal origin story was continued into the widely (and justly) maligned Super Mario Bros. Movie. However, this WAS the Mario origin story for most Americans until Yoshi's Island rolled along in the mid-1990s. Until this point, Mario and Luigi were foreigners to the Mushroom Kingdom.
It's interesting to note, too, how this in many ways parallels the same localization given to another video game mascot, namely Sonic the Hedgehog. As many know, the original American version of Sonic ended up being fairly different from his original Japanese incarnation.
Now, localization is a slippery slope -- you can lose things in translation, but you can also gain things in localization. I would argue that the Super Mario Bros. Super Show is one area where Mario gained something in localization. Even though the Brooklyn origin story is now non-canonical, it is the one that has stuck with many American video game players. And really, who is to say in a video game industry increasingly concerned with remakes, reimaginings, and alternate timelines that the Brooklyn Mario Bros. don't have their own place somewhere in all of it? It's a lot more interesting and exciting of an idea than some stork thing. Plus, Lou Albano.
In any event, I know that the Brooklyn Mario Bros. will always have their own place, both in my DVD player and in my heart.
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