I spent my entire morning watching every episode of There Will be Brawl on The Escapist.  For those of you who don’t know, TWBB is a dark look at the Nintendo universe after all of the Game Over screens.  It’s live-action, fan-made, and totally awesome.  Since it’s loosely based on Super Smash Bros. Brawl, pretty much any and every character from the game gets an appearance in one form or another, be it as a wheelchair-bound Sonic the Hedgehog, or a homeless Solid Snake that lives in (go figure) a cardboard  box, or a snobby, alcoholic Princess Zelda.

The storyline follows Princess Peach’s quest to find a killer, a la Silence of the Lambs, but she gets kidnapped.  Again.  Mario goes off the deep end, getting drunk and ultra-violent, so it’s up to Luigi to stop selling drugs for a bit to find her.  The costumes and music are just great, and there are plenty of little in-jokes for Nintendo fans who really pay attention.  The acting is pretty great too, except for Peach, who belongs on a soap opera.

I first found TWBB when Colin posted a link about “The Creepiest Smash Brothers Cosplay you’ll ever see.”  (The photographs on that site are incredible, by the way.  Mario is my new wallpaper.)  Now, he didn’t actually know where they came from, but Ash, who commented on the story, did!  And that’s awesome.

There’s this whole story on the TWBB site about how they could only afford to make the first two episodes, then fans stepped up with money, then they got bought by The Escapist, and now they put out a new episode once a month.  It’s heartening.  It reminds me of when Red Vs. Blue was just a little upstart machinima… now you can see their episodes in HD on Xbox Live.  For 120 Microsoft Points.  What the crap?  It’s free on the Internet.  Oh well.

But I’ve long since lost interest in Red Vs. Blue… I don’t know if it was just the fact that, once I saw them all, I had to wait for a new episode and got distracted by other things, or if it just got less funny and more mainstream, or what.  Hopefully, Brawl will continue being awesome.  There are some jokes, but it’s not meant to be funny.  It’s a serious piece of art by some very, very dedicated and ingenious fans.  And that may be what will allow them to be watched over and over and over again.  We’ll see when the next episode drops in a few days.  Can’t wait!