Hey, I've been following this site a long time, but never really felt like making an account until now, mostly because I don't really have enough time to spend making a TAS lol. Anyway, I am really interested in seeing a TAS of this game as I remember it being a very fun and interesting game when I played it. But as I said, I probably wouldn't have the time or patience to actually do a TAS of this game, but hopefully I might be able to be of some help by watching WIPs and giving helpful advice. I made a really rough test run of the first level with pretty obvious mistakes, but I think it should give you some helpful ideas to make your run faster.
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=b8fb407ee7ff91a02fb2ca15d7ea42d9e04e75f6e8ebb871
Also, 3 things I thought I should mention:
1. I noticed in your WIP that at the end of the first section of 1-1, you jump about halfway up the ladder and climb up the rest of the way. Just thought I should note that you can jump up from the ladder while you're climbing, like in some other mario games, which might be faster in some areas in the game.
2. Just kind of a warning, make sure that when you use the cry vibe or whatever, that you use it only on distances long enough to make up for the start up time, like for instance, at the end of 1-1 after the toad, I think it's faster to just run to the end normally rather than wait for the cry vibe to start up just for that short distance. Hopefully this makes sense lol, sorry if I explained it weird.
3. Haven't really testing it frame by frame, but it looks like in levels with slopes if you slide on them, you go faster than you would if you used the cry vibe. I've also found that you can keep this speed by jumping when you land or going into a slide for a short time when you land and then jumping again. This is kind of hard to explain lol, I might do another test run to try and show this if it's hard to understand, I just remember thinking it might be pretty important in a TAS. I would do some testing if I knew anything about RAM addresses or whatever, pretty clueless there, but maybe you'll have better luck.
Anyway, I hope some of this will help you and I'll try to keep up on your run and help you in any way I can. Good luck running this awesome game :)