Wakka Wakka... What the?

From the LG logo to Pac-Man with two simple modifications:


The above logo has been in use ever since this South Korea-based company shortened its name from Lucky Goldstar in 1995. Though the Lucky comes from the company’s original name, Lak-Hui Chemical Industrial Corporation, I still want to say that Lucky Goldstar is some Engrish attempt at making a brand name that would create positive associations with English-speakers — as in, like, Lucky Goldstar A+ No. 1 Homerun. Plus Pac-Man.

(Sources: Wikipedia, the “cloudbush” thread)

Previous items of interest from the cloudbush thread:

• “Hidden” musical references in Smash Bros. Brawl
• Toad has been flipping us the bird for more than 20 years
• Those aren’t equals signs in the Golden Axe intro
• It sure seems like Sega ripped of the singer from Deee-Lite with Space Channel 5
  
• Some similarities between Deep Purple’s “April” and music from Legend of Zelda
• A brief smattering of odd sexiness hidden in early video games
  
• The clouds in Super Mario Bros. are not what they seem
  

The Nicotine Robot

Another bit from the “cloudbush” thread: Heat Man, the boss from Mega Man 2 with the fire-based attacks, was clearly modeled after a Zippo lighter.

original concept art

revised concept art

I never noticed this before and find it kind of amusing. Furthermore, the arcade game Mega Man: The Power Battle, has unused animation frames that show Heat Man smoking.

(image source)

Previous items cloudbush posts:

• Pac-Man hiding the LG logo
• “Hidden” musical references in Smash Bros. Brawl
• Toad has been flipping us the bird for more than 20 years
• Those aren’t equals signs in the Golden Axe intro
• It sure seems like Sega ripped of the singer from Deee-Lite with Space Channel 5
• Some similarities between Deep Purple’s “April” and music from Legend of Zelda
• A brief smattering of odd sexiness hidden in early video games
• The clouds in Super Mario Bros. are not what they seem

Game geek? Subscribe to the video games-only feed for Back of the Cereal Box.

The Coin Heaven Quickstep

Another gem from the “cloudbush” message thread: The music that plays during Peach’s Final Smash move in Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a sped-up version of Super Mario Bros. 3 “coin heaven” music, which plays on the up-in-the-clouds map of the fifth world and whenever Mario finds one of those coin-filled bank vaults in the sky.

A neat little Easter egg for long-time Nintendoites that also reminded me of an additional less-than-obvious musical reference in Brawl. A post over at Cruise Elroy discusses in great detail how the the Ocarina of Time medley, which plays on Brawl’s Zedla-themed stages, seamlessly blends in snippets from the various songs that Link has to play throughout the game. They’re nearly impossible to hear until someone points them out, but they’re there. Neat stuff.

Previous posts involving stuff taken from the cloudbush thread:

• Toad has been flipping us the bird for more than 20 years
• Those aren’t equals signs in the Golden Axe intro
• It sure seems like Sega ripped of the singer from Deee-Lite with Space Channel 5
  
• Some similarities between Deep Purple’s “April” and music from Legend of Zelda
• A brief smattering of odd sexiness hidden in early video games
  
• The clouds in Super Mario Bros. are actually just re-colored bushes
  

Game geek? Subscribe to the video games-only feed for Back of the Cereal Box.

Sega’s Less-Than-Groovy Heart

Another from that “cloudbush” thread — and one that gets to reference “Groove Is in the Heart,” so it’s inherently extra special. You remember the song, of course.

Apparently sometime after this song by Deee-Lite hit it big, the singer, Lady Miss Kier got word of the existence of Space Channel 5, a music-based video game released by Sega in 1999. Kier concluded the game’s mascot, Ulala, bore more than a passing resemblance to her own stage persona — specifically by being a dancing girl sporting knee-high boots, a short skirt, a pink ponytail — and sued Sega. There is a similarity, I have to admit.


And according to Kier, Sega offered $16,000 to use her likeness in the game. When she declined, Sega used it anyway. Sega maintains that Ulala was different enough that they could legally use the character. Ultimately, a judge ruled in Sega’s favor and Kier was forced to pay the video game company $608,000 in legal fees, which surely took a big chunk out of any money Kier would have made with the success of “Grove Is in the Heart,” the band’s only real hit. (I mean, they had a cover of “You Sexy Thing” on the Dumb & Dumber soundtrack, but how many other songs by Deee-Lite have you ever heard?) And so ends the strange and acrimonious intersection of these two pop culture elements that I wouldn’t have imagined had a shared history.

That is, except for an even more curious epilogue: “Groove Is in the Heart” is featured in the 2008 Wii game Samba de Amigo — another Sega-produced music-based game — and notably the song appears in a stage that also features a cameo by Ulala. And that’s either an ironic little coincidence or a very purposeful fuck-you from the video game giant and to Kier.

Less-than-groovy indeed.

Stephen King Meets Super Mario

So here’s something I didn’t expect to write ever.

For you who don’t follow video games, a quick preface: 2002 saw the release of Super Mario Sunshine, the Hawaiian shirt-wearing black sheep of the series that sent Mario off to face all manner of tropical danger during an island vacation. One of the areas Mario must hop through is Sirena Beach, which exists in a state of perma-sunset and which is home to the Hotel Delfino and more than its share of ghost problems. In fact, Mario’s first mission in this area pits him against this weird, manta ray-shaped shadow that emerges from the ocean and slowly slimes over the whole resort. Mario can only kill it by repeatedly attacking it, breaking it down into smaller and smaller mantas until the smallest of them die for good.

Here’s a video of the manta monster in action:

Note that the music is appropriately creepy and David Lynch-y. I though this would be the extent of pop-cultural connections to be made, but that’s apparently not the case. The “cloudbush” thread, an ongoing NeoGAF message board discussion that’s been trying to find “mind-blowing” video game trivia since 2008, makes an interesting point about the Super Mario Sunshine manta. (It’s not the first surprising connection it’s made, and this isn’t the first one I’ve noted on this blog.) Basically, the whole scene could be a riff on The Shining. At the end of the book, when Wendy and Danny are fleeing the burning Overlook with Dick Halloran — remember, the Scatman Crothers character doesn’t get axed to death like he does in the movie — only Dick looks back, and when he does he sees something odd... even in the context of everything else that happens in The Shining.

From the window of the Presidential Suite he thought he saw a huge dark shape issue, blotting out the snowfield behind it. For a moment it assumed the shape of a huge, obscene manta, and then the wind seemed to catch it, to tear it and shred it like old dark paper. It fragmented, was caught in a whirling eddy of smoke, and a moment later it was gone as if it had never been.

These creatures aren’t the same, and the message board post incorrectly calls the Shining manta “paper-thin,” when it’s actually the Mario manta that gets called that. The Shining text does eventually compare its manta to paper, however. And both mantas fragment into nonexistence. Debatable physical qualities aside, how many giant manta shadows can you think of that are associated with pop culture hotels that have serious ghost problems? That’s a fairly specific condition, you must admit. I have no idea whether the similarity might be intentional, but on coming to your own conclusion, please consider about these two points. First, I would have never thought that a Legend of Zelda game would have been inspired by Twin Peaks, but it happened, and weirder things have inspired video games. Second, Nintendo loves obscure references. Even Super Mario Sunshine is full of them. The whole Sirena Beach map, for example, is designed to look like a Gamecube controller. See?

The controller of the system you’re using to play the very game is less out-of-nowhere than The Shining, as far as references go, but I feel like the hidden controller at least shows that Nintendo sometimes operates on a subtle level. Someone just casually playing the game probably wouldn’t notice either — the hidden controller or a debatable nod to a Stephen King novel. I’m not sure who at Nintendo could say with any certainty “Yes, it’s supposed to be The Shining” or “No, who are you and how did you get past security?” but at the very least, this must be a very specific, very strange coincidence a double ghost hotels and oversized mantas that have both fragmentary and papery qualities.

Video games weirdness, previously:

• Tom Sawyer and Squaresoft: a tragedy
• Mario and the scrotal problem
• The terrific typos of Super Mario Bros. 2
• Sexuality is a choice in Bahamut Lagoon
• Does Nintendo hate eggplants?
• Green, hairy balls of death
• The very awkward family dynamics of Bubble Bobble
• Gendering Balloon Fight

Legend of Cloudbush

After years of following video game blogs — sometimes diligently, sometimes hardly at all — I decided to check out for myself the oft-referenced NegGAF, a site from which much breaking game news gets leaked. While there, I found a message board thread dedicated to strange factoids that would “blow your mind.” It’s essentially a list of random bits of information that, had they been posted on Back of the Cereal Box, would have fallen under the “pop culture minutia” post tag, some of them gaming related, some not. What I’m reporting below represents the most interesting of them.

First off, the bushes that appear in the backgrounds in the original Super Mario Bros. are just recolored clouds. I literally played through these game at least a hundred times when I was a kid and never noticed.


In the FedEx logo, there's a perfect right-pointing arrow in the negative space between the "e" and the "x." Never noticed it before. Now I can't not notice it.


In addition of looking like a baseball mitt, the Milwaukee Brewers logo also contains an "m" and a "b."


In the original Legend of Zelda, the eight dungeons fit together in a sort of interlocking puzzle piece- or quilt-like fashion, save for a few blank spots, though this apparently results more from memory constraints than any desire on the part of the programmers to hide something neat.


As explained in this non-embeddable YouTube video, Michael Jackson was allegedly employed by Sega to write music for Sonic the Hedgehog 3, but that eventually fell through. Nonetheless, a lot of the tracks in the game bear strong resemblance to "Jam," "Stranger in Moscow" and "Who Is It?" It's even more remarkable when you consider that Jackson had previously collaborated with Sega for the video game Moonwalker, which itself featured blippy, video game versions of his actual music.

On that subject, someone also pointed out that the beginning too the music from the Elec Man stage in Mega Man sounds suspiciously like the beginning to Journey's "Faithfully." Evidence:

In concept and basic aesthetic, at least, Nintendo's Animal Crossing games are reminiscent of the Lego offshoot Fabuland, sets of which I actually owned as a kid and which I'd entirely forgotten until stumbling onto this thread.



The logo for the 2012 London Olympics, as a few people have already noted, kind of looks like an abstracted, pink Lisa Simpson giving a similar pink and abstracted gentleman a sexual favor. What was passed over in favor of this atrocity was a rather cool ambigram logo shown below.

the bad, chosen logo

what could have been

That’s it, more or less. The rest seems to revolve around bickering over whether the Star Fox character Krystal implies Nintendo’s endorsement of furryism. Alls I know is that foxes shouldn’t sit like that. It’s improper.

Legend of Purple

Note: Eight years later, I updated and expanded this post. See it here.

Below is a YouTube video that plays the song “April” by Deep Purple. Yes, Deep Purple — the guys most familiar to me, at least, for songs like “Smoke on the Water,” “Woman From Tokyo” and the original version of “Hush.” I’d imagine most people my age haven’t heard “April,” however. It’s not even famous enough to warrant its own Wikipedia page. Those with a childhood rooted in Nintendo may wish to give a listem however, as it has numerous similarities to various themes from the original Legend of Zelda.

Frankly, I’m astounded. According to the Wikipedia page for Koji Kondo — the guy responsible for the music in most of Nintendo’s major titles, including the Super Mario Bros. theme — hasn’t necessarily admitted that “April” was a major inspiration for him when composing music for Zelda, but it’s hard to overlook the similarities.

Credit goes to NeoGAF’s “Cloudbush” thread, which I’ve written about before. Full of revelations, it is.

And for the sake of comparison, here is a clip of the actual Zelda theme. I felt a guitar version would best demonstrate the similarities. This one is played by Zack Kim, who does it by playing two guitars at once, which is pretty remarkable in an of itself.

Also, I’m going to include a different rendition as well — one of the original Zelda’s dungeon theme. Around the two-minute mark in “April,” there’s a brief part that sounds almost exactly like it, perhaps even more so than the overall song sounds like the Zelda main theme. Here is that, again played on guitar.

EDIT: Okay, while it's not ad admission of anything, Kondo mentioned in an interview with Nintendo Power magazine that he at one point played in a band that covered Deep Purple, among other things. So it at least seems possible that he could have been familiar enough with “April” to have had it influence his work. That's probably as close to a yes or no answer as we'll ever get.
Video games and music, previously:

• Fleet Foxes and Final Fantasy
• Coldplay, The Creaky Boards and Legend of Zelda
• Mega Man and music terminology
  

Sick, Sad World (of Video Games)

In the spirit of the "Legend of Cloudbush" post — which noted, among other things, the fact that the background clouds in the original Super Mario Bros are nothing but re-colored background bushes — I'm taking this opportunity to share with you the best of the video game oddities presented at the too-cool website Flying Omelette.

Despite Nintendo's strict policy against the depiction of sex or nudity in video games, a few things snuck past — some blatant, some not. For example, in the game Breath of Fire 2, there exists a big bad by the name of Deathevan. (Yes, I know. It sounds like the screen name that your high school friend Evan used during his goth phase.) Flying Omelette points out that the character sports a pan pipe of worm-like horrors emerging from his lower abdomen that evokes peens of an H.R. Giger aesthetic. Yikes. I dub thee "penis dentata," awful thing.


It's not all so grotesque, however. My beloved Kid Icarus boasts two instances of nudity, even in Nintendo's early days. First, the background of the game's final level features some Venus De Milo clones, as armless and full-busomed as the actual statue. More surprisingly, the game's manual depicts artwork for a minor harpy enemy — called "Syren" probably for the same reasons that the game's goddess damsel is called "Palutena" instead of "Parthena" — that has some very exposed breasts, nipples and all.


Another game that sucked away my valuable childhood hours, Secret of Mana, snuck in the nude female form through the presence of a minor enemy: a floating, spell-casting book saddled with the unusual name of "National Scar." The name makes a lot more sense knowing that the book occasionally flips to a two-pages spread featuring a said nudity. That's "National Scar" in the sense of the National Enquirer or some other such tabloid rag.


It's perhaps as much of a stretch as the Mario Kart penis rock, but the game Yoshi's Island has a stage with a background feature that looks suspiciously like a the torso of a bikini bottom-clad female torso. Funny, but pretty benign, and I'd imagine resulting from a programmer who didn't want his sense of mischief to get him fired. "What are you talking about? I don't see it. If you see it, then you're the pervert."


And, continuing the theme of risque elements in video games only as a result of her previous associations with less-than-normal sex, Flying Omelette's extensive Switched at Birth pages posit where Nintendo might have been inspired to create Birdo: the Snowths, the snout-mouthed whatchamacallit Muppets best known as the back-up singers in the "Mahna Mahna" sketch.


The newer Muppet Show redid the "Mahna Mahna" sketch, apparently, with Sandra Bullock. The below screenshot of said remake depicts the Snowths looking vaguely more Birdo-like. Who knew the Birdo-Snowth relationship was so profound?


This has been your foray into the sexual undercurrent of modern video games.

All images from the good people at FlyingOmelette.com, execpt for the one of dancing Sandra Bullock.

Princess Daisy Stole My Face!

A short history of an endlessly enthusiastic princess.

Today, Daisy serves to make the Mario games’ Princess Peach more appealing by comparison. Sure, Peach has the social agency of a jar of mayonnaise and can’t seem to keep herself from being kidnapped on a monthly basis, but put her next to Daisy and Peach seems like she’s actually worth all the effort of rescuing her. Daisy today mostly shows up in Mario spin-offs — golf, tennis, go-kart matching, probably badminton someday — and fills the role of a female “player two” in that she’s a partner either for Peach or Luigi — or, that is, a clonish buddy for the leadying lady or a clonish girlfriend for the guy who himself is kind of clonish. Not an enviable position to be in, I guess, but hey — she’s been in more games that most video game characters.

Daisy first appeared in Super Mario Land, a 1989 Game Boy title much in the style of the original Super Mario Bros.. By that I mean that it plays a lot like Super Mario Bros. but has a certain exotic flair that that game lacked. No towering mushrooms in the background for this one: it’s instead pyramids and general Egypt drag, the stone faces of Easter island or traditional Japanese scenery, depending on what level you’re playing through. Super Mario Land is also the only Mario game designed not by Nintendo wizard Shigeru Miyamoto but the late, great Gunpei Yukoi. Perhaps in an effort to make this installment of the series his own, Yukoi renamed and slightly restyled a lot of standard Mario elements. (The Koopa Troopas, for example, turn into bombs when Mario stomps them instead of offering up their shells as a kickable projectile weapon. That’s some mind-blowing shit right there.) Included in this effort was a new skirt to be rescued, Daisy, whose color scheme has always reminded me more of how Peach looked in the original Super Mario Bros.

daisy per super mario land, her lass flattinering in-game
appearance, and peach in super mario bros.

(Sidebar: I’m nearly tempted to guess that Daisy might have taken her name from Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. Miyamoto has said in interviews that the damsel-in-distress from the Legend of Zelda games, Princess Zelda, was named after Zelda Fitzgerald. That being said, it seems plausible that Nintendo creative types would be familiar enough with Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald to have read Gatsby. If Miyamoto himself had created Daisy, I’d say the chances were especially high, but he didn’t — Yukoi is credited with creating her. The matter remains a little mystery for me and whatever other Nintendo diehards may be following along.)

Just as Luigi started out as a perfect palette swap for Mario, Daisy began as a differently colored Peach — a Midge to Peach’s Barbie, if you will. And she remained that way for about a decade, with a few blink-and-miss cameos in the meantime. When Nintendo reintroduced her in 2000 for the Nintendo 64 version of Mario Tennis, she showed up with a slightly new look: the improbably combination of tan skin and red hair.

It didn’t last.

By the time the Gamecube arrived, Daisy sported a different look: fair skin and a brunette do.

I know, I know — big fucking whoop, the girl got a makeover. I’m only writing about this because Nintendo did something interesting in piecing together this B-lister’s new face.

There’s a company called Camelot that handles a lot of the Mario Golf and Mario Tennis titles in which Daisy so often appears. A lot of these games also feature a host of generic human characters, for whatever reason. One of these is a little lady named Azalea who, to put it bluntly, had Daisy’s face before Daisy herself did.

See? Same colors, same eyes, and the same hair too, if it wasn’t for the stupid hat.

Way weird, I think, that Nintendo apparently didn’t take the effort to design a whole new look for Daisy and — at best — borrowed from an existing C-lister or — at worst — stole some poor girl’s face. And that’s not to mention the strangeness in making a character’s skin look noticeably whiter.

We know your shame, Daisy. You owe someone a face.

Other noteworthy Mario-related posts:

• The strange origin of Mario characters’ names
• Obscurio: The most famously un-famous Mario characters
• Birdo is even more complicated than you think
• Who Put the “P” in the P-Wing?
• How the worlds in Super Mario Land got their names
• Horsehair plants are not actually plants
• Toad, Birdo, Yoshi and Kamek are not actually who you think they are
• The legend of Cloudbush
• The famous Super Mario Bros. 2 tomato
• The sexually suggestive plants of the Mushroom Kingdom
• An excessively close reading of Princess Shokora