Maybe I should clarify: I know the movies produced on this site aren't at all legitimate WR's and no one makes any pretence of them being so. I should probably have rephrased the point I was trying to get across: Makers of these videos generally have the idea in mind of (1) completing a game in as FAST a time as is possible (i.e. SMB1 being sub 5 minutes is a sort of WR only among the tool-assisted community) and (2) making the game look as entertaining as possible while still adhering to (1). That said, if a person completes Zelda II like the authors of this one did, I merely suggest that it's such a sharp deviation from (2) that even though it succeeds in completing (1) the fastest possible time (I know I misused the term WR here, but that's what I meant anyway), it's still undeniably a weird, almost psychadelic departure from merely watching an ultimate player play the game with the greatest skill possible. While (1) is unquestionably at the heart of this movie, I merely suggest posting both runs and (I know I'm probably in the minority here), even making stricter rules for non-glitched runs in accordance with TG rules. That, I feel, has a great potential for competitition with real and legitimate standards vice cracking a new bug and doing something like Z2. I doubt very highly that I will persuade anyone to form anything like what I suggest, but I just put it out there merely as a friendly (and perhaps vain) suggestion and nothing more.
On a somewhat different note: I know this may be anathema to this community, but I also think it would be cool to make movies where cutscenes or dialogue are still kept at normal speed and the action is blazingly fast. Since the object of these types of movies is not to be as fast as possible, some huge liberty could be taken in controlling the character more life-like. This would be a new form of speed run that aims at being as "movie-like" as possible. Instead of having a robotic automoton of a character, actually moving the character as a character would move (usually not taking damage unless extreme circumstances would warrant it) might have serious entertainment value. This may not be as off-the-wall as I'm making it out to be. There's a huge difference between Terikamashi's Samus and "Samus Aran's" -- so much so that they almost have different personalities in their time attacks. I think it would be really cool to see movies made by people who place a greater priority on how the person looks in relation to the action vice only going for speed while sacrificing aesthetics. I'm not suggesting that these movies replace current runs, but that possibly a whole new genre of speed runs be created based on this "movie" concept.
Take Ninja Gaiden for instance. If cutscenes could be seen as well as the action, it would look like a real video-game movie. If you truly wanted to just skip to the action, you could just press whatever hotkey (if you're watching it in an emulator) to skip through if you don't want to read, or press fast-forward if you're watching the AVI. With the way current videos are made, you can't do that at all. Also, the ultra fast wall jumping could be taken out in place of a slightly toned down version that would look aesthetically better (more like a ninja would move and less like this weird fluttering thing going up a wall) Again, I don't expect universal support for this, I'm just putting it out there. I absolutely respect the hard work and dedication that time attackers go through to make their movies (I do notice the rerecord statistics) and I'm not coming down on them. Rather, I'm just making a few suggestions about time-attacking in general.
Oh--one last thing--even if Morimoto's SMB3 run wasn't the first, it certainly was one of the most influential in the gaming community. All of his early runs were. And all I wanted to do by discussing them was to harken back to why they were so influential--what made them so, to kind of debate glitched versus non-glitched movies and to possibly answer the question: "how much can entertainment really suffer for speed?" Well, the good news is that for the most part, this site tends to publish additional runs of a similar game if the popularity of the run warrants it (i.e. Metroid) enough so I'm sure I'll have the good fortune of seeing a Z2 run 100% or non-glitched pretty soon anyway.
Also, your point about the submission queue was definitely well-taken and that's where I download most of those files. I was thinking more of the person who knows nothing about the site just kind of stumbling onto it and still being fairly accessible to novelty runs without going through all the trouble--that's all.