WildBrain’s ‘The Suele Mario Bros. Super Show!’ Replaces Nostalgic Charm With Sloppy AI Updates

The return of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! to broadcast TV via MeTV Toons should have been a legacy brand PR slam dunk with this week’s release of the Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Instead, the show’s comeback has drawn intense scrutiny, with widespread allegations that the broadcast relies on AI-driven upscaling. The slopped-up results are hard to argue.

The 1989 fan-favorite hybrid live-action/animated series, never exactly a high-water mark for its craft, has been reintroduced in a form that appears to rely heavily on automated touch-ups, with little thought or care for the final result. Characters are smeared and mutated, linework is inconsistent, and facial proportions drift into wildly uncanny territory. In some cases, even on-screen text appears to have been altered or misinterpreted by the process, seen in the picture at the top of this article.

The original show’s aesthetic limitations are well documented, but basic animation, off-model drawings, and a bargain-bin production pipeline didn’t stop it from becoming a much-loved relic of a bygone era. Those flaws were to be expected within the standards of late-‘80s TV animation. The AI pass replaces that understandable lack in quality with something far more distracting and off-putting that sucks the nostalgic soul right out of the original work.

Maybe in 35 years, people will look back with similar fondness on these machine-learned mutations, wearing the rose-colored glasses through which millennials see the original series. That seems unlikely, though. The charm of the original’s limitations came from a very human place, while this time around, the aesthetic errors are entirely algorithmic.

The timing of the revival suggests a straightforward attempt at synergy, with the aforementioned ‘Galaxy’ movie hitting theaters this week. What’s less clear is why a network built around classic animation would choose to air a reinterpreted version of the source material in a way that so many currently find unpalatable, rather than present it as-is.

Weirder still, lots of early Mario Bros. animation is currently still available on the Super Mario – WildBrain YouTube channel, but without the AI updates. The most recent video on the channel was posted three years ago, long before AI was sophisticated enough to produce even the low-rent versions on MeTV Toons today.

Cartoon Brew has reached out to MeTV Toons and WildBrain, the show’s rightsholder, for confirmation or comment, and neither has yet replied.