Here, Toad appears to be extracting pins from the back of Mario's all-too-hastily tailored pants. Toad explains that everyone is going to a concert, and as a member of the upper eschelon of fungal society, he's assumed that it's a formal affair. What kind of concert will it REALLY be? Sorry, no points awarded.

Oh, and brace yourself.



....

HA HA HA HA HA HAH!!!!

Seriously. There it is. Right there. The Milli Vanilli shirt. The horrible artifact whose existance I have sworn to, mostly while drunk or fatigued enough to qualify as drunk. The princess wore a freakin' Milli Vanilli shirt.

There are some other points of interest, excluding her choosing to wear her presumably solid gold crown to a crowded music event in New York City; she is a princess after all, and one could reasonably assume that if  the crown fell off or she removed it in the shower, anybody could grab it and rule the kingdom. She has no shape, which is on par for her - I gather she's about eleven years old in this cartoon. What is curious is that she's just nasty. That is the face of an annoyed fugu. That is the posture of one of those right-angled implements used to unscrew lugnuts. She has chopped off the hind feet of a triceratops and hot-glued squareish green sour apple gummy candies to them and stuffed her own limbs into the skins. She has also decided to have the best of both decades by ripping the knees out of pink Spandex pants.



Peach announces that her posse will be going to the real world - insert your own joke here - and specifically New York, where every single Warp Zone exits, to catch Milli Vanilli in concert.



Sliding down the banister, she's suddenly put on 60 years. Betty Boop with tonsillitis.



One of Koopa's generic kids is spying on his psycho sister's behalf; I won't attempt to identify him. Normally I'd make an educated guess, but if anything would annoy a bona fide fan of the cartoon (more than this entire page) it would be me misidentifying a character. I know this because 90% of the world's population thinks that Chip is the one with the red nose.



Sometimes I just sit back and think about lip gloss and collagen!



Everybody knows that tradesmen loathe formalwear, so brothers Mario immediately turn on Toad, threatening to break his squeaker for good. Really, though, I think it's just an instinctive fight-or-flight reaction to Peach.



Mario's expression says: mamma mia, it's-a got me!



By now it's obvious that the princess is a glazed-eyed maniac, and if her entourage doesn't fancy sleeping in the dungeon or dusting Peach's entire Nintendo Power collection (again) they'll have to go see the damned concert.



Meanwhile, on Snake Mountain...



...Kootie Pie is throwing random objects through her window because her father won't let her...



...grow hair.



For the sake of consistency, Koopa shakes the son who dutifully reported back with hot Milli Vanilli-related espionage and tells him that he'd better lose the growth on top. He then sets out to abduct Milli Vanilli from the human plane. Oh, if only he'd succeeded.



Preset to 375 degrees.



WHEE! It's Milli Vanilli! As with most of Koopa's offspring, I won't try to guess who is who.

I should warn you, this is where the cartoon starts to turn creepy...



This is a little unsettling. Yes, this is New York, but surely the entire population of the Five Boroughs can't be genetically disadvantaged white people with their mouths jacked open to receive up to 60% of a Boston Market chicken. All right, you may well say, it's just a typically piss-poor animated crowd.



One of M.V. throws a rose into the crowd; mustering all her powers of contrivance, the princess catches the flower with a "coin" sound effect. Some sort of enclave of half-undead swoops up behind her, nondescript features and black hair fading into chalk-white skin, opening wide their maws to suck out her delicious soul. ...nah, she's just imagining things.



Nicely stacked for an Asian male.

Londo appears to be enjoying himself too.



Princess Toadstool holds the rose at arm's length and stares straight at it. The music pulses and swirls. So pretty, so very very...



Mario and Luigi start to succumb to the melting, stretching faces all around them.



Peach does something resembling the Monkey, only she manages to do it in a completely disturbing manner by moonwalking and wearing an expression like that of a goldfish while she sort of moves her arms. It's best if it's not animated. The brothers are still well enough to grasp that something is wrong with this.

Toad, being a hallucinogen himself, is having a blast.



...is there... something... in this rose?



Milli Vanilli starts a series of physically impossible deep knee bends, because it's cheaper to animate than actual dance. That's a sad coincidence, really; dancing was ultimately all they could do. It's like blindfolding a deaf person.



Horrible swamp-girl-beast in love with man with Playmobil-face-osis. Film at eleven.



Koopa has begun to make off with the musicians, so somebody is stepping on Mario to get a closer look. Never mind that Mario's stomach is a highly nonrigid surface, it's the mid-nineties, and this man you're toeing in the gut is unspeakably rich, not to mention he's the spokesman for a company with hundred-year-old ties to the yakuza. Hope you've got somewhere safe to hide your thumbs.

All that said, judging by the outfit, that might be Link. That would explain things.



Make up any cool sound effect you want. Go crazy!



The backup singers, up to one of whom is male, look on in horror.



It IS Link! Pumps and all!



"I wonder... could my soon-to-be [more] ridiculous shirt be somehow symbolic, perhaps warning me of my own imminent fall from the peak of popular culture? ...nah."



Koopa delivers the gift to his waiting spawn. She compliments the guy in red on his hair and proceeds to force unwanted sexual attentions on him. He in turn insults her tail and "scaly lips." It's hard to tell who's a bigger jerk.



If you'll excuse a horribly telegraphed joke? The royal brat is an overprivileged, whiny-voiced, obsessive, manipulative, nasty, fanged quasi-femimine abomination, but Kootie Pie's just reptilian. (rim shot) Given Peach's appearance and general level of sanity in this episode, Milli Vanilli might do just as well to stay with Kootie Pie. She's not an accomplished, seasoned princess yet, and might forget about them long enough for them to escape one day completely unnoticed. She could forseeably even feed them. Peach, in contrast, is royalty of Japanese design and would have them chained in the basement for her amusement within five minutes if she didn't constantly surround herself with witnesses under United States jurisdiction.



Kootie Pie threatens to turn the reticent band into accountants if they don't acquiesce. Another bit of current irony for ya there. "Play for me or I'll turn you into an Arthur Anderson account manager! Get singing or I'll make you another assistant to Martha Stewart's broker!" Well, as we all know now, this isn't a reasonable demand, so she does the fiendish thing.



The quote: "No!" "We're nerds!" "We're dweebs!" "This is terrible!"

Screw you, Milli Vanilli. This is the most attractive you've been the entire episode.

All right, so I'm biased. The guy on the left looks like he has a forehead growth of some kind- this is nerd hair, I guess, or the result of style tips from the Captain N 'rendition' of Simon "Gee, Mega Man Looks Kinda Hot In Green" Belmont. He's a non-issue. The guy on the right, however, looks like my husband's personal Anime-style character in a yummy jacket. As a terrible nerdy dweeb, I'll state that nicely dressed vaguely Asian guys with spiky hair have got it all over poser nineties groups. Don't like your new outfit? The solution is obvious, sir. Rrrowr.

So what are the flagrantly anti-geek doing in a cartoon based off a video game? Not to mention a cartoon so horrible that only the very young, drooling fans, or ostracised loners afraid to leave the house (I'll take option three) would watch it? Gaming was forgetting its place, man.



Um... never mind.

Because they can't stay on model and ran out of black hair paint, he turned into a constipated Leonard Nimoy/Mr. Rogers conglomerate. I think I just dropped my hundred-pound libido onto my own toes.

Would it be rude of me to point out that, with just this cartoon to go on, I can't tell what ethnicity Milli Vanilli is at all?



"You'll be doomed to a masculine chin for eternity if my demands aren't met!"



Count your blessings, M.V. Those guards behind you used to be Roxette.



Gabe from Penny Arcade (see above) would like to know "what the fuck is going on."



Peach, humanitarian, good soul, saviour of the oppressed: "If we don't change those two accountants back to Milli Vanilli, I'll never hear my favorite music again!"

There, who says she's a selfish royal bitch?



No, Toad. Just... no. NO. Squirtle can look badass in glasses. You, however, are some type of marshmallow construct and can never rock to that extent. Personally, I can't wait 'til Pokemon comes along and dwarfs you for three solid years.



Luigi actually thinly resembles Weird Al here. For that, he's the only one who looks cool.



Milli Vanilli stall by telling their captor they need a backup band. She initiates the official resource request protocol: screaming like a VIC-20 tape drive.



GAH!

This is illegal outside Florida!



"Oh my gawd! You're from Florida! Finally someone nastier than me!"



Anything you have heard about inbreeding among royalty is completely validated by this single screenshot.



Kootie Pie changes the si... the artists back and Mario and company do a ha-ha-funny bad job of playing backup. Milli Vanilli suddenly remembers that they have an emergency tape of "Girl You Know It's True" on them. They request the song by name. Here's the kicker: we don't even see Milli Vanilli sing the song. Nope, at first Rob and Fab are holding their ears and gnashing their teeth in pain from Mario's awful playing; they could be singing, but they don't look like they are. Bad animation hides all. But we don't see them for the rest of the song while other things happen in the castle! Guilty conscience?

This brings up an interesting thought. Obviously M.V. had to appear at a studio to record the spoken lines, but the music was obviously just submitted as a premade recording. I wonder if it struck the production facility as odd that they didn't sing at all on the set. Not even a musical lilt in the middle of a line.



"Hey. Check ze talentless man with the strange accent." "Ja."



Out of the clutches of an obsessed fan and in the safe hands of an obsessed fan!



Mario and company escape. Kootie appeals to her pop to pursue them.



But Koopa finally puts his foot down, threatening to not let the princess play in the dungeon with that Hyrulean they abducted from the concert last night if she doesn't let them go. She gives in. This is actually a point they needed to make, because concert security is so bad she could foreseeably kidnap the band fifteen more times before somebody thought to bring a gun.



Aren't those guys preheated YET?



Christopher Reeve gets a weave. I'm a poet and I wasn't aware of it.



Milli Vanilli returns in full splendor to their concert, which remarkably has lulled for hours without escalating into a riot. They thank the "real princess" who saved them and, in her honor, sing the same two lines of "Girl You Know It's True" AGAIN.



Oh, she's entranced! It's so nostalgic, as if she's heard the same line before... twice today!

And so ends our horrible adventure with fake singers, plumbers and princesses.

I'm sorry. Any girl this vapid deserves to be immortalized in Weezer lyrics. But animation is a strange medium; sometimes scenes midway through an action look a little strange. Am I just picking on Toadstool for no reason? I'm sorry. I'll leave you with her endscene.



"Dur... ME CLAP!"

Good night, everybody.