Trivia / Super Mario Bros. Z

• Approval of God:
  • Haynes is, apparently, part of the Super Mario Bros. Z fan discord, and has volunteers there that help him with the series.
  • Haynes gave fans the go-ahead to develop a reanimated collab based on episode 6 of the original series. A collaboration based on episode 8 of the original series is currently in the works.
  • Haynes has approved of 1 Minute Melee and Retro Rumble using his version of Mecha Sonic in some of their battles, even Mecha Sonic lost, and has animated a rematch as tribute.
• Colbert Bump: Generally speaking, music that gets featured in the show usually gains new popularity.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Alvin has gone on record stating that he feels that the series dialogue in general is "godawful". For the 4K re-release, he went back and changed some of it.
  • Alvin is not proud of Episode 7 outside of the 8-bit parts. He feels it had too much dialogue, the exposition involved was completely pointless since that had nothing to do with overall plot, and the ending with Kolorado's stopwatch was a major Deus ex Machina. A big part of this comes from the fact a co-writer of his who helped with prior episodes wanted to write a whole bunch of lore and inject it into this episode, something Alvin came to regret not putting his foot down about for the reasons above.
  • Despite positive fan reception, Alvin regrets how he used Basilisx because his presence was shoehorned in due to lacking proper buildup and backstory, and distracting from the other intended battles of that arc like the Koopalings. As such he isn't planned to appear in the reboot's version of the Doomship arc, instead being saved for a future Smithy Saga.
  • In hindsight, Alvin has come to hate his attempt to obfuscate the identity of the mysterious rotund doctor with a mustache supplying Bowser with technology, feeling it's dumb and pointless to dance around it like it's some big secret. Accordingly, he appears early in the reboot's Episode 2 and reveals his identity in under thirty seconds. Another reason for this is that Alvin felt like saving him until so late wasted a lot of potential, and he doesn't want to repeat that even if it negates the "twist".
• Creator Breakdown:
  • This happened a couple of times in the original run, due to fans pressuring him about the release date of the next episode. One of his breakdowns led to him temporarily cancelling the series before making an apology and un-canceling it the next day.
  • Unfortunately, the reboot had him falling back into this hard, due to continuing physical and mental health issues that left him unable to do much work on the series, as well as the takedown of his Patreon, which in turn exacerbated his mental health issues since he was upset at having let his fans down. Episode 2, which Alvin had hoped wouldn't take a year to come out after Episode 1, would only enter production 4 years after episode 1 had been originally posted.
• Follow the Leader: The series was so inspirational that it led to many creators making similar Mario/Sonic x DBZ series based on Alvin's style. Some of the more notable ones are Super Mario Bros.: Heroes of the Stars, Mario & Sonic: Worlds in Danger, and Super Mario Bros Super (later changed to Super Mario Bros GT and then Super Mario Bros DX).
• Inspiration for the Work:
  • According to Alvin-Earthworm, the reboot is, scale-wise, inspired by Asura's Wrath.
  • The series was inspired by the plethora of Newgrounds flash animations back in the early 2000's, namely Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom, Sonic's Quest for Power, and Power Star. Since there were a lot of animations that had Mario and Sonic fight each other, Alvin decided to make a series where the two were allies.
• In Memoriam: The first episode of the reboot is dedicated to Monty Oum and Satoru Iwata.
• Meme Acknowledgment: Many years after Mecha Sonic declaring "I'LL CRUSH YOU!" became memetic, the IDW Sonic comics had him say the line in Scrapnik Island. The writer all but affirmed it to be this.
• Milestone Celebration: Episode 2 of the reboot released not long after the series' 15th anniversary.
• Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: Most likely the reason Alvin's second Patreon page removed all mention of SMBZ so as to not have it taken down like the first one.
• Promoted Fanboy: Jonny Atma, the musician behind GaMetal, is a fan of the series. Some of his music was used in Episode 1 of the reboot, and Alvin-Earthworm specifically requested him to create some music to use in a future episode.
  • xfireMH a fellow sprite animator is a fan of the series and Mark used some of his custom sprites in Episode 2 of the reboot.
• Prop Recycling: As a sprite animation series, this is naturally all over the place. Some examples of new characters being made from existing assets include Super Mecha Sonic's form being an edit of Bass' from Mega Man 8, Axem Rangers Red, Black, and Green being recolors of Zero with the respective Axem Ranger heads on them, and Axem Yellow and Pink using the bodies of GutsMan.EXE and Roll.EXE respectively.
• Schedule Slip:
  • The original series suffered from this terribly in the later episodes, and somewhat ascribable to Creator Breakdown. There was a 16-month gap between episodes 6 and 7, a 12-month gap between episodes 7 and 8, and a 30 month gap between the release of episode 8 and the original series' cancellation.
    Kolorado: I hate to break it to you, Goombella, but that joke had been done in the previous episode.
    Goombella: Aw, come on, Professor! That episode was released, like, a year and a half ago! No one's going to remember what happened in it!
  • The reboot suffered from this as well. Episode 1 was released in January 2016, and Episode 2 didn't see release until May 2021, nearly five and a half years later. There’s also been a year and a half long year gap between episodes 2 and 3.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: On February 2016, Alvin's Patreon page, which he was using to fund the series, was taken down by Nintendo due to a DMCA. His new one has no mention of SMBZ, though he's confirmed on Twitter that all funding still goes to it.
• Series Hiatus: Many cases of this for the original and reboot series.
• Two Voices, One Character:
  • Sonic's voice lines are predominantly recycled from Ryan Drummond's performance of the character, but there are some pitched-up voice lines of Sean Schemmel's Goku mixed in, along with Jason Griffith's clips from games like Sonic Rush in there too.
  • Shadow uses clips of both David Humphrey and Jason Griffith's performances.
  • Wario and Waluigi have a case of this in Episode 2 of the Reboot. Waluigi's "Bombs Away" line was provided by AsylusGoji91, and the Wario Bros. "Blasting Off Again" line was voiced by Chris Niosi.
  • Metallix in the Reboot uses voice clips from Cooler, but his "Chaos Control" line was voiced by John Mondelli.
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: Part of the reason why Alvin cancelled the original run was because he was constantly pestered by impatient fans.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Alvin had planned for there to be 3 Story Arcs spanning over 45 episodes before he decided to cancel the original series. Important plot points included:
    • Mecha Sonic was going to hold a tournament, similar to what Cell did in Dragon Ball Z.
    • Smithy was to serve as the Big Bad of the second arc, with the rebuilt Axem Rangers at his side. He would have also used Mecha Sonic's parts to build an Axem Ranger Blue.
    • The third arc would have featured Rosalina.
  • There was going to be a feature length episode that had Chaos as the main antagonist.
  • The Mario characters were originally going to use Super Mario World sprites, similar to Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom and Power Star.
  • The old anime-style opening became this after the original run of the series was discontinued. It showed off a lot of characters that were meant to appear in future story arcs. In particular is Wart, who is confirmed to not appear in the reboot even if it gets that far.
  • In the original run, episodes 1 and 2 were meant to be a single episode, as were 5 and 6. Alvin had to split them into two due to software limitations at the time and pacing, respectively. The revival had episodes 1 and 2 made into a single episode as originally intended.
  • According to this tweet, one of the writers suggested that Mecha Sonic destroy Diamond City with Mona as the sole survivor, who would be nursed back to health by Shadow and then would get "an angry emo dark form or some shit" with black hair and porcelain white skin. Alvin almost added it to the script, but is now glad he didn't.
  • The original plan for the Reboot's Yoshi fight was to use the song "Circuitry" by Front Line Assembly (the song that was ripped off by the soundtrack of Blast Corps, which was then used for the original series version of the fight), before Alvin settled on "Type-03", Fulgore's theme.

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