Nintendo was “kind of liberal” with the Super Mario cartoons, writer says
Mario had a series of different cartoons way back in the day. The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, and Super Mario World all ran on television in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Phil Harnage was directly involved with the different cartoons. As a writer, he played a prominent role in determining how the different episodes would play out.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Harnage spoke about Nintendo’s involvement. Though everything pretty much required approval, they were apparently “kind of liberal” with allowing new stuff that hadn’t appeared in-game “and there was no pushback.”
According to Harnage:
“It was going to be different [from the games] yet it had to have all the familiar touchstones, like the Goombas, the fire plants…if we ever excused something from the game we heard about it, but Nintendo reviewed the scripts and they made sure that everything was good.”
“They were also kind of liberal in letting us do things that had never been in the game and there was no pushback. I think they liked it when we put Mario in the wild west, in the future and underwater. We would take a familiar fairy tale, legend or something the kids already knew and we would build up an episode around that and make it as fun as possible.”
