These things actually work as advertised.

Cable works as advertise

I ordered a converter that does not upscale as it seems others have had luck with playing the Wii through the Wii U at 480p, but I haven't found anyone that converted the HDMI signal to 480p and tried that on the original Wii yet

The result to my eyes is that in-game motion is just not as smooth as when you use a normal HDMI cable