Excuuuuse me, Princess
Media
Polygon has a wonderful (and relatively short) oral history of the short-lived Legend of Zelda cartoon that was embedded inside of the The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!
There were elements of the games, like sound effects and visuals, but the show mostly has Zelda and Link posted up in Hyrule castle defending the Triforce of Wisdom from Ganon while trying to acquire the Triforce of Power from the evil wizard himself. (The Triforces talk, by the way.)
Naturally, they address the origin of the famous Link catch phrase…from a character that famously never speaks.
Robby London came up with the idea of the line, “Excuuuuse me, Princess,” which is inspired by the Moonlighting relationship and a snarky line from a Steve Martin routine.
I also love this little bit from Eve Forward:
I’ve no idea what the reception to the show was. This was in the days before internet; you couldn’t just log in and see your work torn apart in real time. My own feeling is that the Super Mario Bros. show wasn’t very good, especially the live-action bits, and that Zelda was the best part of it[…]
She nailed it. I love the Super Mario Bros. Super Show for the nostalgia, but I never loved the show. What I loved was when, seemingly randomly, I would catch one with an embedded Zelda episode.
Related Posts
AI Hype Comes Back Down to Earth
AI’s hype has been out of control for a long time now. Truly. It’s a shame too, because there’s interesting and useful functionality here. This isn’t the crypto boom which only birthed NFTs and accelerated ransomware, there are real benefits here, but none of this was even close to “AGI” (or even real “AI”) so there was a segment of the technology industry that sat and waited for days like the last few to come.
Read moreHacking the STLToday Paywall v2025
Welcome back to our continuing series of breaking new STLToday paywall versions. Want to hear something crazy? We’ve been doing this for over 10 years now! Or to put it another way, STLToday.com, the website for the St. Louis Post Dispatch, has been using a paywall for over a decade, and they haven’t been able to make one that isn’t cracked in a matter of minutes.
Read moreMy Current AI Workflow
Sometimes, after rebutting someone’s extreme exuberance over AI or cracking a joke, I feel like people may assume that I don’t like AI or I never use it. That’s not the case at all! I do use it and I integrate it (or advocate for its use) in my CTO role at Ten2 and when consulting but I do take care to use it in situations that make sense, such as text generation, and not places where it doesn’t make sense, such as decision-making.
Read more