Rock TV

For once, instead of waiting for the Mario brothers to invent something and then plagiarise it and turn it into a work of evil, Bowser decides to cook up a plan himself. In this case, he recalls his time back in the real world, where television was the ultimate thing for rotting peoples' minds. It could easily be used for insidious purposes!

And in no time at all, he's somehow built a giant television, and the residents of Dome City are all naturally intrigued.

Dressed in a shabby costume and calling himself Ronny Rockwell, he tells the cave people about Rock TV and the programs they can watch on it, such as Mr. Koopa's Neighbourhood ("oh-ho-ho, fun-a-bunga!" squeals Yoshi), the World Dinosaur Wrestling Federation, and Rock Rock TV, with such stars as "Vanilla Ice Age!" He then advertises the fact they can buy their very own televisions for an initial price of ten coins, plus a coin a minute. Regardless of that, they sell like hot cakes!

While waiting in line, Mario praises the low price, but Luigi warns him of the minutely fee, and reminds him of the trouble they got into with a speak to Santa hotline back in Brooklyn, where Mario cracks two gags, one about their current lack of occupation, and another that makes no sense. They're given their television with minimal fuss, and they return to do even more slacking off than they usually do, although Peach continues living up to her boring nature and goes for a nature walk with a reluctant Yoshi. "Hey, maybe we'll see you on PBS," adds Mario in another joke that makes no sense to my non-Yankee ears.

They insert a coin, waking a Magikoopa stored inside the TV set, who casts some magic so anyone viewing will take part in Bowser's aerobics show, Koopa Sez. However, just before he can tell the audience the instructions of his very special game, the Marios' television breaks, so they throw it out into the moat in frustration. The cave people, however, hear it all very clearly, and their instructions are as follows.

"Koopa says, everyone go to the Dome Castle, get Mario and Luigi, and bring them to me."

And armed only with clubs, they manage to do that successfully, although since it skips over the whole kidnapping part, we don't actually see if there was any kind of fight or struggle put up by the brothers, so it looks a bit pathetic.

Instead of using this to do the simple thing and eat them or whatever it is he wants with them, he puts them into a tag team wrestling match against the Tyrannosaurus Twins, although it takes about a minute and a half before it actually starts because of Big Mouth's appearance in the episode. When it does start, they get clobbered pretty easily; it just so happens that the Princess and Yoshi arrive at the place during their nature walk, and aim to help out in some way by hitting the blocks used to support everything.

This leads us into this episode's awkward song time, which basically involves miniature Marios distracting the bad guys while the real Mario gets a feather and beats up the wrestlers. I don't know either.

After beating the wrestlers with a cape, Yoshi sets about eating tall the television sets the cave people took with them for no apparent reason (I mean, if they're coming to see the wrestling act live on the big screen, why do they need their smaller sets?) and spitting out the Magikoopas stored inside, he sets about eating the blocks supporting the giant TV, ultimately sending it crashing down on Bowser. Yoshi apologises and starts eating the debris around him, while Bowser complains. And that's it.

This is definitely one of the wackier episodes, simply because of the non-stop joke cracking for the first five minutes, and the utterly incomprehensible awkward song time.

King Koopa says "you can enjoy Rock TV in your very own cave!", even though the cave people live in domes. Then again, I suppose dome people doesn't flow quite as well, and makes them sound like a race of balloon headed folk.

This is the only episode in which we see Oogtar's family.

You can just see the family resemblance.

Although you quite clearly see the Magikoopas escaping and being spit out from the TVs Yoshi eats, you never see what happens to the one inside Mario's set.