Sprite Comics – Season 5 Sprite Comics – Season 5
Captain Lou Albano, born on July 29th, 1933, a former wrestler and wrestling manager, died on October 14th, 2009 at the age of 76. Nintendo fans might know him as the actor of Mario in the live-action segments and his voice actor in the cartoon segments of “The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!”. To me, his voice is the definite voice of Mario and if my comics were professional animations with sound effects, Mario would have Captain Lou’s voice, done by a voice imitator.
About the comic itself: I know that the joke is not really funny per se. One needs to know the allusion: The dialog is from the first scene of the first episode of “The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!”. Mario says something like: “Time for a new day” or “Time for today” (I can’t make out if it’s one or the other.), which became “Time for a new phase” in the comic because “phase” is the word for a level in the game “Mario Bros.”, so after hitting the last Shellcreeper, here he says that it’s time for the next level. The following dialog is identical to the scene in the show with Mario adding: “And you have a little bit of spaghetti sauce on your shirt, as usual” after saying “Oh, fuck you, Luigi!” Although Mario probably says “Oh, thank you, Luigi”, but it really sounds like and has become famous as “fuck you”.
I used the game “Mario Bros.” because, although the show is based on “Super Mario Bros. 1” and “2”, the live-action scenes take place in Brooklyn at a time before Mario and Luigi entered the Mushroom Kingdom. So, “Mario Bros.” is the game that comes closest to the time and situation of those scenes.
The first panel is a picture from the show. That picture is always shown at the beginning, after the opening credits.
The “Mario Bros.” scenes are taken from the original arcade version, not from the NES version because I only accept the arcade game as the canonical one since the NES version is inferior. But since this is an NES comic, I manually recolored all the objects with the corresponding NES colors. If there is no equivalent in the NES version since it uses more primitive sprites, I used the color that comes closest to the colors of the NES palette. One exception are Mario’s and Luigi’s clothes: Here, I didn’t care at all what they wear in the arcade or NES game. I used the colors from the NES palette that come closest to their clothes in the live-action segments of “The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!”.
It’s not the first time that I included photos into the comic. (I did it in episode 2–4 and episode 4–7.) But this time I decided not to calculate them down so you can see Captain Lou more clearly. After all, it’s a special episode, so special rules may apply.