The Super Mario Bros. cartoon is back, but looks really weird thanks to AI

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 AI, according to a report by Kotaku. The Super Mario Super Show has started airing on MEtv using some kind of AI upscaling ,and the results are as good as you'd expect pic.twitter.com/WrdFbOe2iW— Super Mario Wiki (@SMWikiOfficial) March 31, 2026 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