“It was up to the people involved, me being one of them, to create these characters, to give them a life, to give them a job, where they lived, and their relationship with each other. They were just little icons in a video game,” Wells reminded. was a video game, they didn’t talk, they didn’t have a second name, they didn’t have a job. The process of creating the brothers from scratch was unique. We did six days a week and we shot in the studio until we were ready to fall down, and then we had to go to another studio to do the voiceovers for the cartoons.” “He had never done voiceovers before, because not only did we do the live show, but we did all the voices for the cartoons that were on the show. He had never done anything like this before, but he was willing to learn,” Wells said. The outgoing, boisterous Albano, was a hit on set, said Wells. With the icons, Mario was bigger than Luigi. The difference in size between Lou and I worked. That was part of making them look like the character. Neither of us had mustaches, but the characters did. But Lou looked like Mario, Lou looked like the icon,” said Wells. Lou lived on the East Coast, I lived on the West Coast. With Mario and Luigi cast, the work began. There were no prerequisites, like being Italian or having a moustache, he added. “They try to woo you into it and you negotiate a deal, and you either agree to do it or you don’t,” he explained. Wells said he got a call to see if he would be interested. Wells in his recurring role on The Jeffersons His most famous role is playing Charlie the bartender on The Jeffersons, which lasted for 11 seasons, but Wells has been in countless films and shows, from Love, American Style to K-Mart commercials to Magnolia. There, he found steady work, which continues to this day. He met everyone along the way - “you name it, Sinatra on down” - and was urged to move to California by his talent agency. The Montreal-born Danny Wells had left home in the 1960s to try his hand at stand-up comedy in New York City. I’ve already had some acting experience because I have been in movies like Wise Guys and Body Slam and TV shows like Miami Vice.” “I met with Nintendo people and I had done a cartoon before. Though he didn’t have a moustache, he looked like Mario, so he got the gig.Īlbano did an interview with the Kidsday newspaper insert when the show was coming out and explained how he got the part. Wells and Albano voiced the characters in the animated portion of the showĪlbano had entered the mainstream culture while appearing in Cyndi Lauper music videos, and had landed a few small roles in movies. It’s always the other way around.”Įventually, a deal was reached and the Super Mario Bros. They finally agreed, but we have to pay them a royalty, and very healthy one, which is unheard of in the kid business. “Their first answer was, ‘No, we don’t want to do it We can’t meet our demand right now We don’t need you and we don’t need any television show.’ We begged and pleaded and we brought together a creative team they were very impressed with and we said we felt we could produce good entertainment that would be viewed independently of the game. “When we went to Nintendo and said we wanted to do a TV show on the Mario brothers, we thought they were going to jump up and down and offer us a terrific deal,” Heyward told the Tribune. With franchises like Ghost Busters, ALF, Dennis the Menace, Heathcliff, and Inspector Gadget already under the DIC banner, Heyward found a challenge in Nintendo company, based in Japan. In a 1989 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Andy Heyward, the executive producer for DIC Enterprises and one of the show’s writers, talked about the difficulties in getting the deal to take root. Albano and Wells show off their vocal pipesīut the idea of a television show, combining live-action with cartoons, while not exactly revolutionary, was foreign to the people at Nintendo.
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