So. Since I can't think of anything else and my website needs updating again, I'ma just go ahead and do another of these cartoon pseudo-reviews. Our victim subject for today is the second episode of the Super Mario World TV show, entitled "The Wheel Thing". Now, having already done the review thing of the previous episode, I've started to catch on to this show's modus operandi (or however you spell that). Which seems to be, mainly, to kind of suck, but not in such a way as to give me all that much material to go on when making fun of it.

Or maybe I should be trying harder to come up with jokes, I dunno. Anyway, I hope this episode'll give me more to work with...

The episode opens with a zooming in shot of a city made of those things from the background of the various Mario games. Those are buildings? I always thought they were hills or something. Hmm. Anyway, in the city, a bunch of cavepeople are hauling some rocks around, I guess to build caves with or something, I dunno. Then Mario tells Luigi that the cavepeople work too hard and that there must be some way to make their lives easier, or something along those lines.

More importantly, two of the cavepeople appear to be rowing a boat across the land. I guess it's supposed to be a car without wheels, but it really just looks like a land boat. And to be honest, if you're going to row a boat across land then it's your fault if you're working too hard. So if I was in charge, those two wouldn't get any wheels. They'd probably just try to use them as oars, or try to surf across the grass on them anyway. So thanks for playing, anonymous cavepersons, but I'm afraid you leave with nothing. The correct answer was "boats go on the freaking water, dumbarse".

So on the subject of something to make the cavepeople's lives easier, Mario says "I can't think of anything. I'm spinning my wheels!". I guess this is a subtle hint towards the possibly nature of the amazing, super awesome, really quite good cave-person-life-easier-making thingamabob they're going to invent. But really, is that the best wheel joke you can come up with? That's wheelly pathetic. Try harder. Unless, of course, you don't wheel like it.

Sorry.

Then Ludwig (who's probably called something like "Stupidface McDumbname" in this cartoon) spies on the Mario Brothers inventing the wheel. Just as an aside, here, I don't remember there being any cavepeople in Super Mario World (the game). Yeah, it's set in Dinosaur Land or something along those lines, but dinosaurs doesn't imply cavemen. This cartoon promotes incorrect history! Or prehistory. Or something.

Well, the cavepeople are probably just there to fill the role of "bunch of generic nameless sort-of-characters who get kidnapped/attacked/ generally menaced by the bad guys so the heroes have someone to save". I thought being saved was Princess Toadstool's job, but I dunno. We'll see.

Luigi: "how many more of these wheels do we have to invent, Mario? I'm tired!". Well, generally, you only have to invent something once, then you make or build or something else a bunch more of them. And you could easily solve this problem if you'd just invent mass production as well.

Then Ludwig leaves. By the way, why is he wearing some kind of mask? Aren't Mario and Luigi still going to be pretty suspicious if they see some guy spying on them, even if they don't know who it is? I guess if they don't know it's him, they can't trace him back to his base of operations, wherever that is, but I think it would've been better if he'd just been camouflaged or disguised as a plant or something. It isn't a problem, I guess, because the Mario Bros. don't even attempt to notice him.

So the Mario Bros. Inc. International Incorporated finish making wheels, and Mario gives two of them to some cavedudes who are carrying a cart thing full of rocks. They take the wheels, throw them in the cart and keep on carrying it around. Well, Mario, maybe you should of friggin' explained what they were for. "Here, take these, they do something useful that I'm expecting you to just figure out somehow even though you've never seen one before".

So then he's all like "use your head!" and they wear them as hats. Then Luigi gives a wheel to Yoshi, who eats it. Another caveguy uses two wheels to kill an extremely large fly. Mario asks Luigi to lend him a fire flower. Luigi just so happens to be carrying a question mark block that has one growing out of it. I was under the impression that when you touched a fire flower it powered you up then disappeared or something. Even if that's not the case, it'd make a lot more sense for him to be carrying just the flower rather than the block with it in.

Anyway. Luigi throws a fireball to Mario, who catches it and throws it into a bunch of wheels, which then develop holes in their centres. Uh. I'm not quite sure any of that is how fire works, even in video games and cartoons. Accepting for the moment that you can throw fire , since they do that in the games (although I guess it could be argued that they shoot it from their hands rather than throwing it), how exactly do you throw it in such a way as to burn a perfectly circular hole through the middle of a bunch of wheels, without damaging any of the wood around the hole? That'd be pretty impressive if it wasn't so blatantly impossible and silly.

Then Mario takes some kind of stick or something off of Yoshi (who was trying to eat it) and uses it to join two wheels together, and Luigi puts a stone block on top of the joined together wheels, then rides around on them. Yoshi then jumps on top of Luigi, causing them both to fall off and the car thing to go flying in the air. Then Yoshi eats it. Sigh. It would be nice if Yoshi had some sort of personality beyond "eats stuff and is scared of water".

Oh, hey, turns out they did invent mass production. Sort of. It's not automated, but it does seem to be some sort of prehistoric car assembly line or something. So that's something, at least. Also the engines of the cars are powered by Goombas. So what if the Goomba fall off of the thing it runs forward on to power the car? Eh? What then?

Well, we never find out the answer to this important question. Bah. Instead, we cut to Mario sleeping, and a bunch of noises that sound like a traffic jam of some sort in the background.

Luigi runs into the room and yells to Mario that they should've invented driver's education first. So yeah, it probably is a traffic jam in the background of this scene. Or a realistic simulation that's just fooled Luigi into thinking there's a traffic jam going on, when really the cavepeople have been jumping off a cliff the whole time because they were sick of being in this cartoon or something. It's not outside the realms of possibility.

We cut to Bowser's castle in Bowserland or wherever he lives. Ludwig "Annoying Voice" Koopa is inventing a silhouette of a dinosaur.

Then we cut back to wherever Mario and Luigi are. Luigi is telling Mario that it's his turn to be the traffic cop and that Yoshi's been eating the stop signs. And that it's a nightmare out there. The cavepeople blame Mario and Luigi for all the trouble, so they banish them to the lava pits.

Another scene change, and we discover that the silhouette that Lud"Voice Still An"Wig Koop"noying"a was inventing was actually a dinosaur on wheels. Which I guess is kind of like Willy on Wheels but it doesn't vandalise Wikipedia. I have to admit, Ludwig has pwned Mario at the whole inventing thing. Mario may have invented the car, but Ludwig invented the giant robot, which is both a mode of transportation and a weapon. Sorry, Mario, you lose. You should've picked door number three.

So now the cavepeople want Mario and Luigi to come back from the lava pits and save them. Real smooth, guys. Sure, you'll banish people and then unbanish them when it's convenient for you. That's blatant manipulation of the whole banishment thing. Banishment is for life, not just for Christmas. Or for until Ludwig and Bowser drive a robot dinosaur over all your cars.

Mario and Luigi are in the lava pits cooking pizza, they get a morse code message from Princess Toadstool, blah blah blah, but more importantly, we learn that Ludwig's name in this cartoon is "Kooky", which is a dumb name. Just like I predicted. So I'm just going to call him "Shoop Da Koop" or "Dumbface". Or Ludwig.

A blargg or something attacks Mario and Luigi, Mario calls for help, Toadstool hears them and throws a spring down the pipe that leads to the lava pits, and Mario jumps on it and hits a bunch of question mark blocks, somehow staying airborne and moving sideways to hit each one in turn. One of the block contains a feather, which he uses to fly over and save Luigi from the blargg. I think that qualifies as "mild peril". So they'd have to put that "contains mild peril" warning on the previews if this was a movie.

So they escape and hatch some sort of odd plan to stop the robot dinosaur on wheels driven by Bowser and Dumbface. Then the cavepeople start singing, which irritates the robot dinosaur so much that it explodes. Well, not really, but that would've been better.

Oh, wait, it does explode. Okay then. So they've saved the day and the cavepeople throw them in the air. W00h00t, the episode's over.