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Remember When Mario Rescued Milli Vanilli?

Kootie Pie RocksWhen Nintendo licensed the Super Mario Bros. property to kiddie cartoon house DiC, the animation studio took Mario and friends to some strange places and cast the characters in bizarre roles.  Over the course of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show and beyond we saw Mario become Tarzan, King Koopa attack cities Godzilla-style, Luigi raise a baby Yoshi as its mother, and much more, but nothing pegs the Unusual Meter like the Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 episode in which Mario's crew rescues late 1980s pop group Milli Vanilli from King Koopa and his kids.  In what had to be a coup at the time, two Milli Vanilli songs — "Blame It On The Rain" and "Girl You Know It's True" — were included in the "Kootie Pie Rocks" episode as Mario and Luigi escort Princess Toadstool to a Real World concert featuring the pop duo of Rob and Fab (playing themselves).  Unfortunately for our heroes, King Koopa's darling daughter Kootie Pie catches word of the concert and demands that her dear old dad kidnap the group to serve as her own personal musicians.

This episode of the Saturday morning cartoon aired on NBC in the United States in October 1990 just two weeks before the musicians were exposed in the infamous lip syncing scandal that ultimately brought them down, and as a result, reruns and eventual VHS/DVD releases of the episode blanked out any mention of the group's songs, edited out a few specific jokes that hit too close to home following the scandal, and overdubbed all Milli music with a knock-off version of Michael Jackson's "Beat It".  Since the Internet never forgets, now we can compare both versions of the episode to see how DiC censored the original broadcast for reruns.  The original version is up first followed by the edit.  Take note of the deleted sound effects, cut dialog, badly dubbed music, and omitted end song dedication.  My favorite joke from this episode in which King Koopa brags that he should take the blame rather than the rain was, sadly, an editing casualty.

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