Mari, Mari! Sweeter than a cherry. Head is kinda airy. SHE LOVES YOU!
Kari, Kari! Horrible and scary! If you mess with Mari, SHE'LL KILL YOU!
Kari, Kari! Horrible and scary! If you mess with Mari, SHE'LL KILL YOU!
— The show's theme song.
Mari-Kari is an animated web series created by FEARnet in the Summer of 2010. Spanning 8 minisodes, the series is notable for its cartoony style, gore, and mayhem.
Mari and Kari are identical twins. They're best friends and never apart. Mari is the liveliest girl you'll ever meet. Kari is, too. Her problem: she's dead. From there, it just gets weird.
The entire series can be downloaded from Shannen Doherty's personal website here
.
Mari-Kari provides examples of:
- And Starring: Shannen Doherty. Her name even appears below the show's title, as seen in the page image and the intro.
- Angsty Surviving Twin: Subverted. Mari remains cheerful in the wake of her twin sister's death, much to everyone's confusion, but that's because Kari is still with her "in spirit."
- Ass Shove: In Episode 3, a boy who rejected Mari's invitation to the dance gets his football put into a very uncomfortable place until it comes out of his mouth by Kari.
- Ax-Crazy: Kari's murders tend to be incredibly graphic and brutal.
- Big Sister Instinct: Kari will kill anyone who dares to make fun of her sister Mari.
- Black Comedy: It's a show centered around a ghost girl slaughtering students left and right. For laughs.
- Chainsaw Good: Mari kills a blonde Alpha Bitch in Episode 2 with a chainsaw.
- Character Title: The title mentions two of them. Mari and Kari.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Mari, with a ditzy voice and an unfailingly chipper disposition to boot despite her sister's recent passing.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Some of Kari's kills are needlessly violent, yet also creative. She tears a boy's head off along with his spine, for starters.
- Disproportionate Retribution: The kids at school who tease Mari don't really go beyond the usual playground bullying, yet this is enough of an excuse for Kari to gruesomely butcher them. Possibly subverted when it turns out the whole school is actually out to get Mari, forcing Kari to massacre the entire student body and destroy the school when one of them tried to drop a pig on her.
- Domestic-Only Cartoon: The entire series was produced and animated in-house by Liquid Theory Inc., which was headquartered in Los Angeles, CA.
- Dumb Blonde: Mari repeatedly fails to understand other people's attitudes and motivations.
- Expository Theme Tune: It's even quoted above. "If you mess with Mari, SHE'LL KILL YOU!"
- Girl Posse:
- The snobby girls who play a prank on Mari in Episode 2. Needless to say, Kari makes short work of them afterwards.
- Ditto in Episode 5, when they have her hanging "streamers" made of pig entrails. Instead of Kari, however, it's Larry who does them in.
- Girlish Pigtails: Mari, complete with pink hair bows to finish with. Kari, as well, though she's more creepy than girly.
- Gorn: When you have a show where someone's intestines are used as jump ropes, you're bound to wind up with this.
- I Take Offense to That Last One: The school newspaper refers to Kari as a "hideous ghost killer". Her reaction is to crossly exclaim, "Hideous?!"
- Meaningful Name: Gilles de Rais Elementary. As in that Gilles de Rais. As in the dude who sent hundreds of children to their deaths by sacrificing them to Satan just to get in his commanding general Jean De'Arc's pants and was unceremoniously discharged and executed for his crimes. That Gilles De Rais.
- My Nayme Is: Mari and Kari seem to be creative spellings for the names Mary and Carrie, respectively, since they're pronounced the same.
- Name and Name: Specifically, "Name[hyphen]Name".
- Prehensile Hair: How Kari generally does her thing. Most of the time, her arms dangle at her sides while her pigtails do all the work.
- Rhyme Theme Naming: Mari and Kari. There's also Larry, a red demon ghost, who is introduced in Episode 4 and appears regularly afterwards.
- Riddle for the Ages: The cause of Kari's death, why the newspaper headline about Kari apparently says that people rejoice her demise, and Kari's ability to kill people from beyond the grave are not elaborated on.
- Sadist Show: Apart from Mari, the entire student body is subjected to brutal murder, courtesy of Kari.
- School Newspaper Newshound: Captures a picture of Kari slaughtering mean boys. It makes a great front page story, but doesn't end well for her.
- Shout-Out: Episode 8 is a massive Shout-Out to Carrie when two bullies plan to humiliate Mari, but instead of pig's blood, it's a pig's carcass. Fittingly enough, it's Kari who does all the slaughtering once she sees what they're up to.
- Too Dumb to Live: Seriously. Despite the whole school hating Mari, most of them know that those who bully her die horribly and yet they keep doing it anyway.
- Trivially Obvious: Kari's reason for why Mari should play with the cool girls is initially to say she's cool before defaulting to "You're a girl," which is enough encouragement for Mari.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Whenever someone gruesomely dies in plain sight, it's not met with much shock, though there are exceptions. A good example is the first episode, when a student has his head pulled out by Kari during class, and the teacher is visibly disturbed but manages to keep her composure. None of the unseen classmates are heard screaming in horror either, but they were excited for recess.
- Vengeful Ghost: Kari is a variation where she gets back at her sister's bullies as a means of looking out for her.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Mari seems to think she's in a Slice of Life kids' cartoon centered around school, what with her upbeat attitude and gee-whiz optimism, never entertaining the idea that people are out to get her or that they live in a Crapsack World where students are dying on a regular basis thanks to her overprotective yet homicidal poltergeist sister.
