The Super Mario Bros. cartoon is back, but looks really weird and AI might be to blame

Adults of a certain age will no doubt remember The Super Mario Bros. Super Show, a cartoon from 1989 that starred our favorite sibling plumbers decades before they would take over multiplexes with an animated film franchise. The broadcast channel MeTV Toons has begun airing old episodes of the show, likely to trade on the buzz emanating from the pending theatrical release of The Super Mario Galaxy Movie. There’s just one problem. The episodes seem to have been sloppified by an AI upscaling algorithm, according to a report by Kotaku.

The original series wasn’t exactly a visual delight. It was a cash grab cartoon from the 1980s. However, it looks even worse now. MeTV seems to have run the footage through a bargain bin AI upscaler and the results are, in a word, weird.

Everything looks smoothed over in an off-putting way, with some characters looking markedly different from the original footage. Many of the episodes are available on YouTube, so it’s easy to do your own comparisons.

The upscaler also seems to have changed the title card to “The Suele Mario Bros. Super Show.” These AI tools have never been great with visual representations of written text, but you’d think someone at the station would have given things a look over. Engadget has reached out to MeTV to ask what happened and we’ll update this post when we find out.

For the uninitiated, The Super Mario Bros. Super Show ran for just a single season. But this was 1989, so a full 65 episodes aired throughout the year. Seasons didn’t mess around back then. It was famous for its live-action segments that starred professional wrestler “Captain” Lou Albano as Mario. It also turned into a Legend of Zelda cartoon every Friday. There’s where the famous “well, excuse me princess” meme comes from.