This is a quite different History in Animation article. That’s because it’s not the usual ‘History in Animation’ article, but it’s instead ‘History in Nintendo Animation’. This is because the previous articles have been about certain Nintendo character’s (and maybe in future third party characters animation appearances in Nintendo shows.) animated history (excluding game cut scenes, adverts and parodies.) whereas this isn’t Xmas’s ‘History in Animation.’ as that would take, well an eternity to do, and would have very little to do with NAS. So instead, as the title says, this is about how Xmas appears in Nintendo animation.
Firstly, we’ll look at Xmas in the Mario series animation. The SMB Super Show had two Christmas themed ‘episodes’. One however was the live action sequence, so I won’t cover that. The other episode is ‘Koopa Klaus’ which was actually a fairly typical plotline that appeared in two other DIC shows after, (Inspector Gadget and AOSTH). In this episode, we get the picture above, King Koopa takes on one of his various guises from the show, but this one actually serves a useful purpose, since he kidnaps Santa (the one pictured above in the middle) and takes over his workshop to stop all presents etc. It was the cliché usual Xmas cartoon plot, however, like most of the Super show, it was made better due to Mario’s humour. The only other Mario Xmas cartoon was ‘Cave Christmas’ which was without a doubt probably one of the worst SMW episodes. It’s pretty stupid, even by this shows standards. Basically Mario invents Xmas, not because it’s the time, or there’s even any snow. Instead, Mario starts it in order to make the retarded (again, no offence, it’s seriously the only way to describe them) Cave people stop trying to kill each other for one day of the year. ‘Hilarity’ ensues when Bully tells his Dad he wants Xmas too, so Koopa steals all the presents Mario planned. There’s some dumb subplot with Oogtar, and at the end Mario delivers all the presents in that “Don’t try wearing that in Brooklyn ‘Wheeze’” Santa outfit up above. Oh, and Yoshi pulls the sleigh.
Next up we have Saturday Supercade’s DKJR Xmas episode. This is a typical episode of the show and at some points I forgot it was a Xmas episode due to the cliché cold Snowmen and other things. The typical Xmas plot of some villain stealing something that ruins Xmas is in full effect here. Of course the DKJR show had no real ‘Villain’ so we get cliché Hobos (actually called Hobos by every character). The only good point is that they act decently at the end, which is better than the usual cliché villains going to jail in this show. Very little to say on this one.
Surprisingly, the only other Xmas episode in Nintendo Animation is from the Pokemon anime. There are two episodes where he appears, one however is a cameo in a Pikachu short, and the other is a full episode dedicated to him. The full episode is actually one of the infamously banned ones to feature Jynx, although it has been aired, I remember seeing it when I was younger. As this is Pokemon, and set in the Pokemon world Santa has Pokemon to help him. Originally he had Ponyta’s instead of Reindeer pulling his sleigh. He also had Jynx who were like his Elves and a powerful Lapras, the only one in the series to talk using telepathy (something that made Lapras seem so awesome back when I first watched the show, making me think it was one of the superpowers of the original 151) In his cameo appearance, he has a Delibird (the protagonist of the short) and his Ponyta are replaced by Stantlers (maybe they’re his reserves?) The plot of the episode is Team Rocket trying to stop Xmas, mainly because Jessie actually had a gift stolen by the Jynx that Santa has when she was younger, but it turns out it was actually so Santa could repair it, but since she stopped believing after that, well you can guess right? Anyway, definitely the best of these, I mean it’s still Cliché but it’s better than any of the others on this list, apart from maybe ‘Koopa Klaus’ on the humour front.
So at the end of the day, that is that. I thought I’d do a festive article so here it is, if you’re expecting anything else then tough. Anyway, I noticed I used the word Cliché for every part of this article… still it’s all good fun (well except the SMW and DKJR so really only half the whole list’s all good fun, ah well…)
MERRY CHRISTMAS
