Mommies Curse

"Mommies Curse" is the twentieth live-action segment of The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!. Its corresponding animated episode is "Kiss'n Tell" from The Legend of Zelda.

Plot Synopsis

Luigi is making Mama Mario's meatball and zucchini recipe, but is uncertain of the exact ingredients and asks Mario to look up the recipe in their mother's recipe book. Mario agrees, but is distracted watching Elvira on television and accidentally grabs an evil-looking book titled The Book of Curses instead. Mario lists a number of unconventional ingredients like "hair from a witch's wart" and "a couple of bats' tongues". Luigi tastes the resulting concoction just as Mario declares it to actually be a recipe for "The Curse of Celero", which turns anyone who tastes it into a mindless zombie. Luigi starts mumbling senselessly and wandering around the kitchen. Just as Mario is wondering what to do, Elvira announces that she is currently in Brooklyn and accepting live callers, and Mario calls in asking for help.

The scene then cuts to Elvira and Mario at Mario Brothers Plumbing, regarding the zombiefied Luigi. Elvira admits that she's "a little rusty" but agrees to attempt a spell to turn Luigi back to normal. However, instead of fixing Luigi, her attempts turn him into a mummy and a werewolf. Elvira gives up, but Mario decides to try reciting "the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain" on the basis that "it works in movies". Though Elvira expresses disbelief at this, the incantation does appear to have some effect, and the three start to dance around the room singing the lyric. Eventually, Luigi starts to sing the song in his normal voice, revealing him to be cured. Mario, in his excitement, absent-mindedly drinks from the pot with the curse in it and turns into a zombie himself.

Trivia

• Before starting to cast her spells, Elvira spins in a circle while chanting "There's no place like home". She then claims to feel "a little bit like Dorothy". This is in reference to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The actress who portrays Elvira, Cassandra Peterson, was born in Kansas, as was the character Dorothy.
• Mario's claim that chanting "the rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain" works in movies may be a reference to the 1938 film version of Pygmalion, in which the character Eliza Doolittle has a speech impediment cured by continually reciting this phrase.
• When the company Shout Factory released the complete The Legend of Zelda series on DVD, they only included five of the 13 original live-action segments that corresponded to the Zelda episodes. The episodes "Magic's Magic", "Mommies Curse", "Tutti Frutti, Oh Mario", "The Magic Love", "Treasure of the Sierra Brooklyn" and "The Ghoul of My Dreams" were only released as bonus episodes on a PAL DVD set in Germany, where they are presented with only German language dubs. "Magic's Magic" and "The Ghoul of My Dreams" were released in English, but only on Kids Klassics VHS tapes in the US. "Slime Busters" only DVD release in the US was on a single disc called Mario Mania. The live-action episode "Tutti Frutti Mario" did not make it onto any DVD or VHS release.