Thrilling Tales of Birdo

This is a post I’ve tried to write several times, but for whatever reason no version ever made it live. I’m not sure why, because it’s good news and it’s a relatively quick message to deliver: If you were a fan of this blog and you miss my writing, I have a new blog where I’ve been writing since 2022. It’s called Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games, and it’s a more concentrated version of what I did here. In fact, many of the posts I have at this new blog are expansions or revisions of ideas that I initially put on this blog, just refined and reapproached with the experience of an extra decade or two.

Foremost among these is a recent post I did about Birdo, everyone’s favorite egg-spitting dinosaur, and how she’s been fairly straightforwardly trans ever since her debut, even if Nintendo has shied away from explicitly saying so. In “A Complete History of Birdo’s Gender,” I track the different ways Nintendo has portrayed her gender identity in English and Japanese, from Doki Doki Panic until today. It’s nearly 10,000 words long, which is to say that it’s a very niche piece that I didn’t imagine would get much recognition outside of the LGBTQ gamers who have traditionally enjoyed my writing, but this one has been received with some success — and considerably more than most of my Back of the Cereal Box postings ever did. As of this morning, it’s been linked to by Critical Distance, Kottke.org and the Sunday Longreads newsletter, the last of which puts my humble nu-blog alongside some much better-known publications, so if you want to learn about Birdo from the same place where you learn about Simone Biles, check it out.

All these years later, I realize that one of the problems that kept Back of the Cereal Box from getting a wider readership is that few people actually wanted stories about video games, pop culture at large, my personal life and etymological trivia, so I decided to specialize rather than diversify. If I have something non-video game-related to share, I suppose I can do that at my personal site, which also has a blog, but this is the writing that makes the most sense for me to do now.

Here are some links to pieces that began in some form as posts on this blog back in the day.

• Sci-fi Stripteases in Barbarella, Mach Rider and Metroid
• Nintendo’s First Playable Female Protagonist Isn’t Female in Japan
• A History of Toad’s Gender… One Way or Another
• Did Super Mario Bros. 3 Change Our Understanding of the Tanuki?
• What’s With the Equals Sign in Golden Axe?
• Who Put the ‘P’ in the P-Wing?
• Is Princess Lana Based on Palutena from Kid Icarus?
• Is Samurai Shodown Referencing a Real-Life 16th-Century Cyborg?
• The Real-Life Revolutionaries Behind Charlotte from Samurai Shodown
• Why Is Super Mario Bros. 2 Missing a Level?
• If His Name Is Blanka, Why Is He Green?
• Cliff’s Notes for Dante: Final Fantasy IV’s Elemental Fiends

Plenty of pieces are wholly original, however, and as I exhaust the the ideas that initially debuted here, more and more will be.

Singing Mountain

It’s not that I’m neglecting this blog; it’s that I’m more often engaged in creative ways that are not writing, and I’m simply using the shell of this blog as a platform to promote these other things.

I started Singing Mountain, a podcast about video game music a few weeks ago. It’s an experiment, and I’m not sure exactly what form it will take. It may change episode to episode, based on my whims and availability, but I can tell you at least that it will always be about why the background music from whatever game you barely remember is actually more important than you might have realized.

I posted the fourth episode of Singing Mountain yesterday. It’s actually a remake, of sorts, of a post that went up here back in 2012. Once I started this thing, I realized that a podcast actually was the better medium through which to tell the story, just because you can exert a little more control over your audience than you can with just text. Topics discussed in this fourth episode include Earthbound, the closet where my mom would hide Christmas presents, The Cars, Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory,” the actual persistence of memory, the litigiousness of Beatles and, finally, Janet Jackson. It will likely prove to be the exception more than the rule, as far as future episodes go, as this one is also about me. I was interested if I could use this sort of podcast as a means to make creative nonfiction, I guess, and I’m eager to hear what you think of the result.

If you’re interested, you can subscribe to Singing Mountain both on SoundCloud and on iTunes. And if you’re curious, you can also listen to my previous three episodes, which cover Super Mario RPG, the Mega Man series and the work of German composer Chris Huelsbeck.

In case you’re wondering, the logo art uses a slightly re-colored version of the Dragon’s Hole dungeon background art from Seiken Densetsu 3. And please — if you’re so inclined, write me a review on iTunes. As a podcast person, I’m required to ask you that.

The Saddest Super Mario Fan Art You Will Ever See

Hi.

It’s 2017, and one of the promises I made this new year was to write on my blog more often. It’s more for me than you, because it’s helpful for me to put thoughts into writing and better understand myself, but maybe it’s entertaining for you to gawk at my weird mental processes.

I’ve been going to a therapist for three years now, and more often than not, I end up talking about the way I was—how my childhood shaped the way I operate today. It may not surprise you to find out that I was an introverted kid, to the point that I didn’t have close friendships, and I think I tried to fill that void with TV and books and video games. Often, I’d get more attached to fictional worlds than I was to real ones. I’m still this way to an extent, but until I began talking to my therapist, I’d forgotten how deeply I sunk into all this stuff back in the day.

While I was home for Christmas, I had to clean out boxes of childhood stuff, and this included a lot of drawings I made. Here’s the one that made me want to go back in time and tell seven-year-old me that it was going to be okay.

If you can’t tell, it’s a masterpiece inspired by the first two Super Mario Bros. games. The 34-year-old me has some notes.

• The scale is all off. Why is the 1-up mushroom so much bigger than everything else?
• I’m fairly certain that’s Princess Toadstool at the bottom. Why she has a coin on her head and why she’s telling it to leave is beyond me. (I’ll ask my therapist about it.) But the fact that she’s in the foreground—or what would be the foreground, if I understood a damned thing about perspective—is probably telling of a bond that would last long into adulthood.
• I have no idea why there’s only one Mario brother, why he’s so much smaller than the rest of the characters and why he’s lacking a mustache. Maybe I didn’t like mustaches back then?
• To the right of Generic Hero Plumber, I appear to have drawn a potion from Super Mario Bros. 2 but have given it a face. Unsure why. Ditto on what would appear to be a hammer and a mushroom block below it.
• The question mark on the question mark box is backwards. What a fucking idiot I was.
• I have no idea what the mushroom-like thing in the top-left corner is supposed to be. Because it’s Mario, I’d assume it’s a mushroom, but I think I proved that I could more competently draw those elsewhere in this piece. Anyone?
• In the center of the piece, I seem to have drawn two Toads—a boy one on the right and girl one on the left, who has long hair and who seems to be taking off her mushroom hat in a vaguely seductive fashion. This is notable because my fanciful she-Toad preceded the introduction of ones in the games by years, though it may be that the Toads could maybe have been intended to be female in the first place.
• I *think* the small thing immediately below the maybe-mushroom in the top left corner is a female version of the pluckable, chuckable vegetables from Super Mario Bros. 2. And I *think* the thing immediately below it (her?) is a smiling version of the springboards from Super Mario Bros., with a face in the void between the top and bottom halves. Who can say for sure? Again, what an idiot I was.

So that’s the drawing. It’s not all that different from stuff other kids drew out of love of whatever thing they were into, but here’s the part that stung a little bit. There is a piece of lined paper taped to the bottom, and on it I’ve written something strange, albeit in lovely penmanship for a seven-year-old.

“Happy Birthday Drew! From all of us from Nintendo’s Mario 1 and 2!”

I made myself a fucking birthday card—from fictional entities that I cared about enough that I felt like I deserved to hear from them on my special day. On one hand, it’s cute, but on another, it’s weird. I was lonely, and so I gathered together the stuff that was familiar, which included a lot of smiling produce but also a lot of other stuff from the games that didn’t come with faces but which I gave faces anyway, possibly to make it look like more friends were happy to see me. This makes me a little sad.

So yeah, that’s a weird thing to process. But just as Super Mario Bros. begat Super Mario Bros. 2, there’s a sequel to this little anecdote.

Late last year, I finally made good on something I’d wanted to do for years: I drove to an arcade machine refurbishment studio in Glendale and put money down on a custom build—a repurposed frame that the people there can fit with a new CPU, new monitor and new control panel and load up with old video games. I’d known about this place for years, but it took me until November to go in and order the thing. I’m very excited, because I’ll get to play games I loved for years in the format they were intended to be enjoyed, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that one of the best reasons I was excited by this whole project was that I could design my own art for the machine’s control panel and above-the-screen marquee.

Without hesitation, I knew what I wanted, and I made it.

On the top, it’s Super Mario Bros. 2—and the game that preceded it that isn’t Super Mario Bros.—and it’s all made from the original sprites, modified just a tad, for aesthetic purposes and because it’s mine so whatever. Do note that in this version, I still made the princess front and center. In fact, she’s leading the charge. When the machine is turned on, this will light up, and I’m more excited for this than I can tell you.

On the bottom, it’s a mosaic of all the items from Super Mario Bros. 2 and Doki Doki Panic, most of which I realize are smiling produce. Old habits die hard, but no, I didn’t draw little pixelated smiles onto the items that didn’t have them in the first place, but I still made a whole wallpaper of grinning vegetables to look back at me when I finally get to play at this thing.

Nearly three decades later, I’m still seeking refuge in the stuff that felt safe when I was a kid. I feel like that’s an important connection to make. And believe me, I realize that a private arcade paradise won’t necessarily be the thing that gets me out into the world and interacting face-to-face in the way I didn’t get enough of as a kid. But hey—this machine has controls for a player one and a player two. I intend to make use of both in 2017.

Here’s to typing it all out.

Falling Eggplants and Gay Pixels

For all but the deepest subset of the Venn diagram overlap of nerds and homosexuals, this may well be your introduction to the bizarre gayness that is Cho Aniki. I’m honored to extend the opportunity.

I’m still on my kick about being from the generation of pixels and VHS static, and I’m still mucking around with weird video clips and lesser-known pop songs from the era as part of a larger project. I’m not quite sure yet what, exactly, that project will turn out to be, but at the very least it will be interesting to look at.

Yesterday, I finished one chunk of it that may just merit a post on its own. Here, please enjoy inasmuch as it can be enjoyed.

If your response to all this is “Wait, what the fuck?” then you are correct! This is footage from Cho Aniki, a Japanese video game series whose name translates as “Super Big Brother” and whose chief contribution to the world is a lot of nonsensical homoerotic imagery. The games have largely not been released outside Japan, and consequently a lot of people in the U.S. don’t know that it even exists, despite it being one of the stranger assemblages of pixels ever. This particular clip comes from a playthrough of the second game in the series, 1995’s Ai Cho Aniki. (The original video has been edited, truncated and manipulated. The song I synced to it is “Happy Station” by Fun Fun. Also also, what is the deal with Japan and eggplants?)

And if you’re interested, here’s another piece of the puzzle: the disco sequence from the Bollywood Nightmare on Elm Street, manipulated and destroyed, with another italo disco gem added in.

The song is “Follow Me” by Giusy Dej, BTW. Happy Cho Aniki Awareness Day!

The Deep Legend of Purple Zelda

Discussed herein: the original Legend of Zelda, the band Deep Purple, the man responsible for what are arguably the two most famous compositions in video game music history, and open-ended questions about music law.

Last week, a Los Angeles jury concluded that no, Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” did not plagiarize another song—or, at least, appropriate enough of that other song to constitute plagiarism and subsequent monetary compensation. Led Zeppelin got to continue living atop a towering pile of money that did not become a slightly-less-towering pile of money, and the 1960s band Spirit got a neat little footnote in its history when the estate of the band’s singer, Randy California, unsuccessfully tried to argue that a brief snippet from the intro to “Stairway to Heaven” sounded too much like Spirit’s 1968 song “Taurus.”

Neither being a member of that jury nor someone who claims to understand music on a constructional level, I can’t say whether that verdict was just. I can say, however, that to my ears, the two songs sound similar enough that it seems that the one could have helped bring about the other, regardless of whether anyone deserved money for that inspiration.

Listen for yourself. The “Stairway”-esque part of “Taurus” begins around the 44-second mark.

And here is “Stairway to Heaven,” just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last forty years.

The plaintiff’s lawyers had claimed that because Spirit had played on the same bill as Led Zeppelin back in the day, it was plausible that members of the latter had heard “Taurus” and therefore used bits of it in writing “Stairway,” which was released in 1971. In my head, that seems like a fair enough argument, and I feel like people following the story in the news probably did too, especially in light of how the family of Marvin Gaye successfully sued Robin Thicke, to say nothing of similar squabbles making the news recently. (Tom Petty vs. Sam Smith comes to mind, even if it ended amicably, and now Ed Sheeran is being sued for alleged plagiarism as well.)

These kinds of stories stand out to me because I’m the kind of guy who frequently hears similarities between two songs that other people dismiss with “No, that’s just a common chord progression” or “No, that’s just a feature of this genre of music” or “No, you’re crazy.” For example, I think the old song “Smoke Rings” sounds remarkably like a downtempo version of the overworld theme from Super Mario Bros. 2.

I’m okay with accepting that the connection I’m making only exists in my head, but there’s this one similarity in particular that always jumps into mind when I read stories like these, because I think it’s a stronger connection to most: the Deep Purple track “April” and the dungeon theme from Legend of Zelda. And yes, there’s something slightly more thrilling to me about the prospect of a song working its way across the pop cultural continuum and ending up in a video game, at least in some form, years later.

“April” is the final track to Deep Purple’s third album, released in 1969. It’s a doozy. You probably know Deep Purple as the bad that performs “Smoke on the Water” or the hard rock version of that song from I Know What You Did Last Summer, but “April” is worth a listen too. It’s grand and orchestral, especially in its intro, and wouldn’t be out of place as the soundtrack to some medieval fantasy sequence, I say.

Or maybe that association comes from the apparent Legend of Zelda connection. At around the 2:00-mark in “April,” there’s a brief section that should sound familiar to anyone who played through the original Legend of Zelda for the NES. It’s the bit that concludes the game’s dungeon theme before the track loops back to the beginning. (That dungeon theme isn’t very long, and if you played through the game, you’d hear this section of music hundreds of times over.)

I made a video that lines the sections up side-by-side, in case that’s helpful.

Given my history of the playing “thing is like other thing” game, I’d be willing to write this similarity off as a random, meaningless one, but there’s slightly more to the story. Koji Kondo is the music whiz responsible for a lot of Nintendo’s most memorable compositions, including all the music for the original Legend of Zelda. What’s interesting about the Deep Purple connection is that Kondo himself has admitted to being a fan of the band. In a 2005 Nintendo Power interview, Kondo even said he once played in a band that frequently covered Deep Purple, so the odds that he would be familiar with “April” would be fairly high—at least as probable as Led Zeppelin having heard “Taurus.” Of course, in the end, the jury found that Zeppelin hadn’t stolen those guitar riffs—or at least that if they had, they weren’t substantial enough to warrant Zeppelin having to pay off anyone as a result.

I suppose, then, that I have to conclude this post on a note of confusion. I don’t understand how we can make a legal differentiation between homage, sample, legitimate borrowing, and lawsuit-worthy theft. (And yes, I have thought about how it’s notable that the multimillion-dollar exception to the rule would be a song titled “Blurred Lines.”) So I pose the question to anyone reading this who understands music or music law better than I do: Am I confused because these distinctions are better made by people who understand music on a fundamental level that I don’t? Or is it just that no one knows—and that every post-“Blurred Lines” lawsuit is gambling in favor of the odds of some judge or jury saying, “Yeah I hear it. Here, have a wheelbarrow full of money”? Is it weird that laypeople, musically speaking, would ever be given the opportunity to issue a verdict about something that seems like it should take inside knowledge of the music industry to understand?

Meanwhile, I keep “April” on my playlists in case I ever encounter a situation that needs to feel more epic. And every time I get two minutes in, I get to think about Legend of Zelda, whether or not it’s just a coincidence.

Miscellaneous notes:

• Yes, this is was something I’ve written about on this blog before—eight years ago, in fact. I decided the Zeppelin lawsuit made the story timely enough for an update and expansion. I originally came across the info in the “cloubush” thread, which, eight years later, is still going strong.
• There actually is a purple Zelda, literally. Her name is Hilda. She’s Zelda but purple. Go figure.

• Koji Kondo composed the soundtracks for Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda but not those for Metroid and Kid Icarus. He did, however, do the music for three early NES games that weren’t released in the U.S.—Mysterious Castle Murasame, Devil World and Shin Onigashima. Given how iconic the Zelda and Mario themes ended up becoming, we American gamers missed out.
• Kondo also composed the music that ended up in Super Mario Bros. 2, and I wonder if the Deep Purple thing makes it anymore likely that he would have been inspired by “Smoke Rings” in creating that game’s soundtrack.
• In 1970, Spirit released an album saddled with the improbable title Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, and that’s one of those names that seems like a joke on The Simpsons.
• Not that I nor anyone else actually needs to hear “Stairway to Heaven” again, but did you know that Dolly Parton does a cover of it? It’s actually not bad—not that Dolly is capable of bad things—and I wager she finds a layer to it that other cover-ers may not.
• Spirit’s biggest commercial hit was 1968’s “I Got a Line of You,” which I’d heard before and which I’m surprised was done by the same band that did “Taurus.”

Video game music, previously:

• Deirdre in the Final Dungeon
• Left-Handed Ghosts
• Misplaced Nostalgia
• Luigi in the Dining Room With the Vacuum Cleaner
• She’s… So Popular
• Wizards and Warriors and Montagues and Capulets
• Owen Pallett in the Star Maze
• The Lonely Overworld

How Howard Phillips Gave Princess Peach to Little Gay Nerds

The TLDR version: My friend’s stepdad is responsible for Princess Peach being my gay nerd icon, because his actions resulted in her being a playable character in Super Mario Bros. 2.

I’d wager it’s strange for anyone to live in Los Angeles, but it’s especially weird when you were that certain type of lonely kid who used pop culture to relate to the world around you, just because this dumb city happens to be where a lot of that stuff originated. Stay here long enough, and you may end up bumping into one of the people responsible for some movie or TV show that hit you on a personal level. So far, I’ve had a few interactions with people where I had to temporarily dump journalistic pretense and say, “By the way, thank you — that thing you did helped me feel less broken.”

Back at the 2012 Indiecade in Culver City, I met Howard Phillips, a guy who shaped the childhoods of many young video game nerds by being the Nintendo’s first American employee and its unofficial ambassador to the U.S. I originally knew him from Howard & Nester, the Nintendo Power comic that had a cartoon version of him alongside Nester, the magazine’s mascot and a character Phillips himself created.

via the howard & nester comics archive

At Indiecade, the non-cartoon Howard Phillips was meeting and greeting a lot of people who, like me, grew up playing Nintendo games and realized that he helped shape their experiences. And I got to talk to him a little more than the average fan because I’m friends with his stepdaughter Katherine. She and I worked together at the time, and she had once bragged that her stepdad was the Game Master. I initially assumed she meant Captain N: The Game Master and that she was crazy, but she explained that “the Game Master” was one of Phillips’ monikers during his Nintendo heyday and that she therefore grew up having a level of access to Nintendo products that would have made my head explode. When I got a few extra minutes to speak with Phillips as Indiecade, the conversation veered into Super Mario Bros. 2, which was my favorite game — a fact that should already be known to you if you read my blog.

Phillips happens to be the person who informed Nintendo of Japan execs that the “true” sequel to the original Super Mario Bros. was too difficult for American players. And while there was a lot of doing on the part of Nintendo’s Japanese developers to transform a game called Doki Doki Panic into something that starred Mario and Luigi, the impetus, as I’ve understood the story, was this single decision my friend’s stepdad. When I spoke to him, I’m not sure I truly grasped that had it not been for him, this weird game with vegetable-plucking, magic carpets and a curious preponderance of masks probably wouldn’t have become part of my life. But more than just that, Super Mario Bros. 2 is important because it was the first game in the series that let you play as Princess Peach.

Back then, Peach was still known as Princess Toadstool, but she was otherwise the same character we have today: blond and wearing a tiara but nonetheless able to fight the bad guys as effectively as Mario and Luigi could. She was a captive in the first Super Mario Bros. and again in Super Mario Bros. 3 — and in fact when news of that later game came trickling out in the pages of Nintendo Power, I remember thinking, “It’s weird how they’re only showing screens with Mario and Luigi,” because why the hell would Nintendo ditch one of the best parts of the previous game with this new fancy sequel? But that’s exactly what Nintendo did. It would take until the Super Nintendo to see Peach playable again — but only in spinoffs like Super Mario Kart and Super Mario RPG. In fact, it wouldn’t be until 2007’s Super Paper Mario that she would be allowed into the side-scrolling, hop-and-bop action of the original titles, and it wouldn’t be until 2013’s Super Mario 3D World, which is in many ways a spiritual successor to Super Mario Bros. 2, that you could play as her in a “real,” non-spinoff Mario game.

(EDIT: It’s been pointed out that I forgot to mention 2005’s Super Princess Peach, the game that had the princess using her rapidly changing emotions as weapons — angry fire, pouring water for sad tears, etc. It’s possible I just wanted to forget it.)

In Super Mario Bros. 2, you could select which character you wanted to venture through each level, and on many occasions I’d play the whole thing through as Peach, just because I could and especially because I didn’t have to play as a male character if I didn’t want to. As time went on, I’d default to the female character in any game that gave the option. In Street Fighter II, I was Chun-Li. In Mortal Kombat, I was Sonya. In Donkey Kong County 2, I would routinely pick Dixie Kong and her whirling helicopter ponytail over Diddy Kong, the male counterpart who had no magic ponytail.

Growing up in a more rural, more conservative town, this was well and good for home console gaming but slightly awkward in public at arcades. I can remember going to a pizza parlor birthday party and bouncing from Darkstalkers (where I played as Felicia, the oversexualized cat-girl) to Tekken (where I played as Anna, a brassy female fatale who fights in an evening gown). This prompted one of the other kids to ask, “Why do you always play as the girl?” That was a scary question. I felt like I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t have, and I think I weaseled out of answering by lying about these characters being the best ones per all those video game magazines I read. But I honestly didn’t know what the motivation was at the time. I liked playing as female characters but couldn’t explain why.

In fact, I think I only came up with a reason relatively recently. When I was a kid, I had no idea I was gay. Looking back, me being gay helps explain a lot of things I did, and I think it might explain this. I knew I didn’t want to be a woman, but I something about playing as a female character in these games felt right because they represented an alternative to the overtly macho types that comprised the majority of the character select screen, especially in fighting games.

As a boy, I was expected to succeed at certain things that I was simply not cut out to do: sports, being handy with tools, exuding confidence, not crying at the drop of a hat and “boy play” with miniature cars or whatever the hell else is socially acceptable for male children to entertain themselves with. I failed constantly, and as a result, I felt like I was disappointing the people who had these expectations. The one stereotypically male pursuit I excelled at was video games, and something compelled me to do so as female characters because they could be every bit as successful as male characters, even if they didn’t look the part of a traditional hero.

Like Peach. Look at her. Farrah Fawcett flip, jewelry, a ball gown that’s wholly impractical for adventuring. She’s pink — so very pink — because there was a considerably long time in video games when most female characters were pink, just so there’d be no mistaking their gender. In short, Peach is kind of a big sissy, but so was I, in a lot of ways, and the fact that she was coded in this manner made her all the more attractive to me. While none of the other three heroes in Super Mario Bros. 2 were exactly Stud McBeefcake — come on, Toad is damn near genderless — there was no doubt from the first time I fired up that game that the princess would be my hero of choice. She still is.

Post-Lara Croft, post-Bayonetta, post-it becoming general knowledge that the dude from Metroid is actually a woman, Peach probably seems antiquated to a lot of gamers. She’s a vestige of an age in which female characters generally just yelled for help as the big bad carried them away. However, she’s also quite possibly the female character who’s been playable in the most games ever, and in my head, it makes her all the cooler than she can still be the best, on her own merits, neither because of or in spite of her unabashed girliness. Should you choose her to be, Peach can kill the monsters, win the race, score the winning shot and, in the case of Super Smash Bros., kick the stuffing out of everyone and anyone.

In case you’ve made it this far and don’t know, Smash Bros. features video game mascots fighting each other, and from the second game on, Peach has been a playable character. I’m ending on this note because it ties back to Howard Phillips and Super Mario Bros. 2. Each character fights using moves that originated in whatever game they’re representing, and Peach’s repertoire draws from Super Mario Bros. 2. She pulls turnips from the ground and tosses them at her opponents, for example, and she can float in midair, and both of these elements originated in my favorite game.

Now, even if Phillips hadn’t set into motion the chain of events that created the American Super Mario Bros. 2, it’s quite likely that Peach would have ended up playable in subsequent Mario games anyway. She’s the main female character, after all. But she wouldn’t have ended up the way she is now had it not been for Nintendo ultimately deciding to substitute Doki Doki Panic for the game released as Super Mario Bros. 2 outside Japan. Doki Doki Panic’s heroes, a jolly Arab family, were transformed into Mario characters.

Imajin, the main hero with the average stats, became Mario. Papa, the strong one, became Toad. Mama, who jumped high, became Luigi, and cute little sister Lina, who could hover in midair and who, yes, is clad in pink, became Peach. Lina and the rest of her family have since been relegated to footnotes in video game history, but every time someone plays as Peach in Smash Bros. and floats for a second in the air to trip up their opponent, they’re using Lina’s old move. Thanks to Phillips (and Nintendo (and Super Mario Bros. 2))), she’s not completely lost. She’s just hidden.

This is all a very roundabout history lesson, but it seemed important to me. It’s the little details that make given movie or TV show or whatever resonate with you for the rest of your life. I like that Princess Peach is a big, pink powderpuff of a character, and that she’ll probably always be that way. It clicked with me when I was a kid, and as strange as it might sound, I feel like it put me on a path to figuring myself out later in life, all in addition to shaping subsequent video games for decades to come. And it all happened because my friend’s stepdad made a decision. He would probably be surprised to know that it had any big effect on one little gay nerd in the middle of California, but I’m happy to put it out there.

Miscellaneous notes:

• Earlier this month, I wrote did a post about Troop Beverly Hills and how Shelley Long’s character treats her femininity as an asset and not an obstacle. I would have seen Troop Beverly Hills at the height of my Super Mario Bros. 2 fixation, now that I think about it, and writing that piece probably resulted in this piece.
• Nester did eventually make it outside the pages of Nintendo Power, even appearing in a few games. Most notably, he got his own game in 1996, the Virtual Boy title Nester’s Funky Bowling, where he appeared alongside not Howard but a girl version of him named Hester.
• You may remember Katherine as the owner of the dog who fell victim to a hilarious skunkening last year. She currently hosts a delightful but suggestively named podcast about food history.
• The history behind how the American Super Mario Bros. 2 came to exist is explained in beautiful detail in Jon Irwin’s 2014 book, and if you loved the game half as much as I did, you may also enjoy this deep dig into it. Game Historian also has a good video on the history of Mario 2.
• Peach may be the most famous playable character in a Nintendo game, but she’s not the first. Metroid came out two years before, though many players wouldn’t have realized its hero, Samus, was female. Mach Rider, which came out a year before Metroid, might also have a female hero, and then there’s Bubbles, the anthropomorphic goldfish hero of Clu Clu Land, which came out in 1984, even before Mach Rider, though there’s hardly much about Bubbles to identify her even as a goldfish much less a female one.
• Two unheralded NES-era with female protagonists: The Krion Conquest and Ghost Lion, one of which stars a girl who may or may not be Kathy Santoni from Full House.
• Finally, my love for female heroes made me fall in love with Athena, a SNK game that was ported to the NES. It’s not great, I realize in retrospect. Bad play control and punishing difficulty, but the lead character is girly as hell, and at one point you could transform into a mermaid. I was hooked, in spite of it all.

This Is a Post About Undo Dog

Warning: This post is a fairly deep drill-down on a minor footnote in video game culture. If obscure Nintendo lore is not your thing, kindly move along and wait for a less niche post.

One of the most insignificant video game characters ever has recently returned to my life: Undo Dog. He’s technically a Mario character, though only in the loosest sense of the expanded Marioverse. He first appeared in 1992’s Mario Paint, a sort of Nintendo approximate of Photoshop that came packed with the Super NES Mouse and allowed players to draw and paint images and create crude animations that couldn’t be uploaded or transferred off the game pack in any way. Mario-branded but not really all that Mario-specific, the game came out when I was only ten, and I loved it. And one of the things I loved most about it was Undo Dog, the game’s equivalent of CTRL+Z.

Clicking him undoes whatever disastrous aesthetic decision you made, and he makes a crude bark noise when you click. If you let the mouse sit idle, he also dances about in the tool tray in the bottom of the screen, and if you opted to create your sixteen-bit masterpiece without background music, he’d occasionally sneeze. (He was allergic to silence, we gathered.)

Here, watch and listen.

Even at ten years old, I was a sucker for anything canine, and the fact that Nintendo chose to imbue one of the most functional aspects of Mario Paint with a dog personality is a great example of why I am a lifelong Nintendo loyalist. And the fact that the icon border around Undo Dog’s face was revealed in his “dancing in the tool tray” animations to be a weird, square collar? I was in love — with the character design but also with whatever clever person who implemented it.

I felt catered to — and that rarely happened when I was younger.

Given my history on this blog writing about various Super Mario games, it shouldn’t surprise you that even back then, I had an encyclopedic knowledge of them. I knew everything that a North American fan could know, and I was a strong supporter of the series’ also-rans. When Super Mario Kart came out in September 1992, the only thing that seemed more pressing than beating the game on every conceivable level was dreaming up ideas for the inevitable sequel, and I sank hours into this task. I drew maps for tracks based on levels from Subcon, the setting of Super Mario Bros. 2, and Sarasaland, the setting for Super Mario Land, and handpicked the characters that would join the roster of Mario Kart racers. No lie: I even drew new versions of the Super Mario Kart box art that featured then-unknown characters like Princess Daisy (the ruler of Sarasaland and a character most players wouldn’t have recognized back in the day), Birdo (Super Mario Bros. 2’s Yoshi prototype, essentially, and also the most gender-complicated bipedal dinosaur in the history of video games) and Wario (the minor Super Mario Land 2 villain that no one cared about once upon a time).

All of these characters eventually did become playable in later Mario Kart games, I should point out. However, my never-distributed, beyond-unofficial concept art also included characters like Pauline (the Donkey Kong damsel who has since been made to look like Sofia Vergara), Wart (the Super Mario Bros. 2 villain who has subsequently showed up as a Zelda character but never again as a Mario character) and an ultra-obscure Mario D-lister named Heavy Zed, who was in retrospect not a character in any way.

Heavy Zed was a big, dumb owl that Mario would hop onto in Super Mario Land 2 and prompt him into waking up and fluttering in a single direction until Mario encountered a second Heavy Zed, which he’d then hop onto. Essentially, he was a platform lift, like the dolphins in Super Mario World, but ten-year-old me didn’t care: He had a name and therefore deserved realization as a playable Mario character. Yeah, I had some big ideas.

Included on this wishlist was Undo Dog, just because he also had a name and I had seized on him as a thing worth paying attention to, and I drew him into my terrible mock Super Mario Kart 2 art, stockade collar and all. In retrospect, it seems silly and misguided in the way most fan fiction seems to anyone not at the heart of the subject matter’s core fandom. Time passed, and although I admit to being guilty of jotting out the occasional dream Mario Kart roster during my free moments — E. Gadd from Luigi’s Mansion! Dixie Kong! Captain Syrup! — I forgot about dumb ol’ Undo Dog.

And then Super Mario Maker came out. For those who don’t know, Super Mario Maker is essentially the game that Mario Paint should have been, and it allows players to create their own Mario levels and then upload them to be enjoyed by others. Presentation-wise, the game owes a great debt to Mario Paint, and this includes the implementation of Undo Dog as the CTRL+Z function, twenty-three years after the fact.

Here is a trailer to help you understand why Super Mario Maker is weird but great.

But there’s an additional reason I’m writing about Undo Dog today. One of the more fan service-y aspects to Super Mario Maker is that its Super Mario Bros. mode includes the ability to “costume” Mario as various characters from other Mario games — Bowser, Dr. Mario, Rosalina, etc. — as well as characters from other franchises — Zelda from Zelda, for example, or Kirby from Kirby or even the Wii Balance Board from Wii Fit.

This is remarkable is that it plays into the new Smash Bros. style Nintendo is applying to all its franchises, in which characters from games that have little in common get to interact. I mean, hell — Super Mario Maker allows you to sub in Ness from Earthbound, the squid-kid from Splatoon, Foreman Spike from Wrecking Crew and even Lottie the Otter, from and Animal Crossing game that hasn’t even been released yet. And mixed up into all this is Undo Dog.

Per the game’s instruction manual, which doubles as an art book:

I’m not saying this makes Undo Dog a shoe-in for the next Mario Kart, exactly, but my inner ten-year-old is gratified to see the most minor of video game characters resurrected in my adult life, in a new age where Nintendo has gone Crisis on Infinite Earths with every game. I don’t think my placement of Daisy, Wario and Birdo in the Mario Kart karts was prescient, necessarily, but I’m currently placing more money on Undo Dog than I am on Heavy Zed, were that a bet to be made in some dank corner of the nerdy internet. And that is a surprising thing for a longtime video game fan to say, twenty-three years later, just like it was surprising to get a new Kid Icarus game after so many years and finally see a Super Mario Bros. 2-themed track in a Mario Kart game.

Go Undo Dog, you sneezing marvel, you. May your video game career be long and unusual.

With “It” Being Hilariously Outdated Streetwalker Garb

This week, I had to watch Pretty Woman. I realize that I grew up in a generation of kids who watched this movie willingly and repeatedly, but I wasn’t allowed to, I’m guessing because my parents wanted to leave explanations about prostitution to the Bible. As a result of not having grown up with it, I kind of hate Pretty Woman. I think if you see it when you’re a kid, you just accept it as good. If you see it as a grown-up who has the slightest inkling about what a prostitute’s life might be like, you can’t get past its phoniness. In fact, the only part about Pretty Woman I really enjoy is Laura San Giacomo, and that probably puts me in a super-minority.

In watching it in order to write even the dinkiest listicle about it, I realized that my fashion vocabulary completely failed me regarding Julia Roberts’ first costume in the film. You know the one: the most streetwalkery, the least hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold. It’s hooker with an aluminum spleen at best. But while I didn’t know how to describe it beyond “What the fuck is she supposed to be wearing?” and thereabouts, I could liken it to another pop cultural woman of the night.

In the original Final Fight, you encounter a female enemy, Poison, who’d later go on to become playable in the Street Fighter games. She’s never stated to be a prostitute, but she is a streetwalker in the literal sense: She trots up to you as you scroll down the street and attempts to kick your ass, just like every male enemy does. Poison lacks Vivian’s thigh-highs and the smoking jacket, but the two characters are baring similar amounts of skin beneath their tank tops. And then there’s that hat. The Pretty Woman hat is either a pageboy cap or a Greek fishing hat, according to my panel of experts. And while most probably assume Poison is wearing a cop hat, reappropriated punk-style, I think it’s actually a Greek fishing hat.

Were Greek fishing hats in style for a certain class of woman in the early 90s? I have no idea. Was the Pretty Woman outfit representative of something a prostitute would have actually worn? Or would she have looked odd and out-of-place even in the skantastic fashion netherworld that was Hollywood Boulevard in 1990? Again, not having been in the market for prostitutes when I was seven, I can’t say.

And in case you’re thinking that Poison’s outfit might have been a tip of the hat — that is, the 90s prostitute hat — to the most famous hooker of the era, it’s not. Pretty Woman hit theaters on March 23, 1990, and FInal Fight first hit arcades in December 1989. Poison technically debuted first, so the two designs probably originated separately, though I’d be interested to know if they were both inspired by a real-life look, hookery or not.

Who Wore It Better? — previously:

• Gwen Stefani / Ghirahim
• Bob Dylan / Jean-Ralphio
• Amy Sedaris / Lil from Squibillies
• Bjork / a gerenuk
• Jane Lynch / an angry ostrich
• Lena Dunham / Little Critter
• Kim Kardashian / a sex robot from a vintage Japanese comic book
• Fiona Apple / some other chick wearing an octopus hat
• Kris Jenner / Eclipso
• Michael Cera / Edith Crawley
• Lana Del Rey / Camilla Rhodes
• Adam Scott / Seth Gabel
• Tabatha Coffey / an angry, white cat
• Grace Jones / a cassowary
• Coco / the Venus of Willendorf

Frequently Asked Questions About Smash Bros.

Someone recently pointed out to me that the new Smash Bros. at its most frantic looks to lifelong gamers the way early home console video games must have looked to our parents: a boggling flurry of colors and shapes that just doesn’t make any sense. It’s true. In spite of a life playing video games, I still feel my eyes glazing over when I play Smash Bros. Suddenly, I’m watching someone else’s character as I calmly trot my guy off a ledge.

See for yourself.

Here, then, are the frequeenly asked questions about Smash Bros., based off a grow play session comprised of people who grew up playing video games but still could not keep up.

Wait, who am I?

Wait, who’s killing me?

Did I just die?

Why did I just die?

Wait, why did they make it so Wario could be basically identical colors to Mario? How is that fair?

What did I just do? Am I winning?

Wait, is that Pac-Man?

Really, Pac-Man?

Is Pac-Man still a thing?

Really?

Can you play as Rampage?

Can you play as Dixie Kong?

Can you play as Ms. Pac-Man?

Why isn’t Bowser bigger?

Why are there two Kirbys?

Why did my Kirby just fall asleep?

Why didn’t I know that Nintendo owns Pokémon?

Why can’t I ride Yoshi?

Who is shooting me?

Wait, are all my lives gone?

Closing thought: Video games have given us an opportunity to speak the sentence “I died” heretofore unseen in human history.

A Weird Walk Through the Mushroom Kingdom

Hi. Here’s the third and final part of my little series on that obscure Super Mario anime from 1986. (Or, as the non-video game-giving-a-shit-about portion of my readers consider it, a last deep dive into geekdom before I resume writing about funny old people I meet at the grocery store.)

In the first post, I wrote about how The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach! probably caused the rumor that Toad used to be a girl. In the second post, I wrote about all the other elements from the movie that later appeared in Super Mario Bros. video games. In this one, I’m just posting all the spare images and videos that I didn’t reason to post anywhere else.

Looking without reading! Fun!

As if the movie didn’t feature enough musical sequences, there’s also one where Mario fantasizes about wearing a tuxedo and waltzing with the princess. You know — for the dreamy-eyed romantics in the audience.

I have Mario dressed like a Mexican bandito. See, because he felt angry, so he just transformed into this costume. See?

And here is Bowser attempting to woo Peach by dressing in drag.

Screenwriting at its best! I actually don't get why these would be the subtitles here, honestly. Jugem is Lakitu’s Japanese name, but I have no idea why these subtitles would be in English when most of the rest are not, at least per the video from which I got this still.

You can tell by Mario’s eyes that he’s overwhelmed by the prince’s flagrant disregard for gender norms.

“Don’t come back!”

And finally... GIFs! You love gifs, apparently. I made these and they maybe don’t completely suck. Here is Mario allowing a sprouting beantsalk to tickle his bottom, to the dismay of everyone watching. “No, Mario, that is neither a sanitary nor an appropriate use of a beanstalk.”

Here is Mario making the “video game zombie” that he’d make a generation of kids make.

Here is a gif of Mario shattering that you can use to illustrate your next horrifically traumatic moment.

Here are mushrooms raining down from the heavens.

Here are suggestively pulsating mushrooms.

Here is Peach, kicking some major ass in a video game.

And here she is weeping in isolation. The two sides to Princess Peach!

Super Mario, previously:

• You got Mario in my Zelda!
• The awkward Super Mario Bros. 3 testicle connection
• The busiest bosom in the Mushroom Kingdom
• The most famously unfamous Mario characters
• Stephen King meets Super Mario
• Questions reasonable people should have upon playing Super Mario Bros. for the first time
• Three-dimensional death in a two-dimensional world
• How Super Mario Land 2’s “Star Maze” music got an extra life
• Why there’s a stage “missing” stage in Super Mario Bros. 2
• Super Mario, king of Japan
• Kandinsky does Super Mario
• Birdo is complicated, but not for the reason you’re probably thinking
• The happiest Arab family in video game-dom

Why the Super Mario Bros. Anime Matters, Even If You’ve Never Seen It

Yesterday, I got to explore a weird little Super Mario Bros.-related rumor that led me to The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!, a 1986 movie that received a theatrical release in Japan only. As far as obscure Mario lore goes, it’s a strange one in that it’s something that would have been extremely familiar to Japanese kids growing up around the time, yet it’s something few of their Western counterparts would have even heard of, despite the Mario mania of the late 1980s and early 1990s. We simply never got the movie here, and that’s a shame, since it’s a beautiful rendering of these games back before Nintendo had really solidified what Mario’s world looked like.

First up, we might as well fix that lack of international exposure right now. It’s fairly simple to find it online, and you even watch it right here.

It’s only an hour long. According to the Mario Wiki, it was paired in theaters with a video guide to playing the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2, the game we know in the U.S. as The Lost Levels. The game came out just a few weeks before the movie.

Watching the movie for the first time this week, I thought it was interesting how many details from the movie ended up working their way into the games. Some of it’s coincidence, I’m sure; the movie-makers were just exploring ideas that the game designers eventually would have had regardless. But some of them seem pretty spot-on. Today, I’m listing these off, as well as a handful of concepts that Nintendo maybe should have thought about incorporating.

For example, that same Mario Wiki article points out that the movie has a sequence where Luigi has a bad trip after eating the wrong kind of mushrooms. The scene could be a reference to the fact that The Lost Levels introduced nasty, trick mushrooms that hurt you instead of powering you up.

It seems plausible, even if it just makes me wonder how an eight-bit, pixelated psychedelic freak out might look.

The movie also features a scene where Mario and Luigi escape on a flying ship, years before the Super Mario Bros. 3 came out made airships a staple of the series.

When Mario and Luigi meet Lakitu, Mario ends up stealing Lakitu’s cloud and buzzing around the sky in it. That’s something that Nintendo eventually implemented in Super Mario World — and again now that Lakitu is a playable character in the Mario Kart games and you can stick anyone you want in his little cloudmobile.

In the movie’s climatic fight, Mario beats Bowser by grabbing him by the tail and then spinning-tossing him into the horizon in the style of an Olympic discus-thrower.

That’s remarkably similar to how Mario dispatches Bowser in Super Mario 64.

Again, that might just be an obvious way to excuse a giant turtle monster from your presence, but to me, this one in particular seems one of the most likely to be intentional among all the similarities between the movie and later games.

The game even has gargantuan versions of the typical Mario baddies — the very kind that got their own series of levels in Super Mario Bros. 3.

An odder coincidence, perhaps? These Goombas standing in this oversized boot. It could be nothing, of course, but the Nintendo fan in me really wants to connect them to the “Kuribo’s Shoe” Goombas from Super Mario Bros. 3.

The Mario Wiki even points out how Luigi’s off-model color scheme — dark blue with yellow, as opposed to the traditional dark blue with green he has in official art or the white and green his original Super Mario Bros. sprite has — gets a nod in the new Smash Bros. game as one of Luigi’s palette swaps.

There’s even an odd scene where Bowser, in an effort to calm the captive Princess Peach, transforms into a scarecrow. That may mean something more in Japan than it does in the U.S., but to me that seems like an awfully specifically thing to turn into… especially since it was something Bowser and the other playable characters in Super Mario RPG could get transformed into.

I’ve never seen scarecrow transformation as a negative status effect in any other video game. Is that, like, a problem in Japan? An epidemic of people turning into scarecrows?

Perhaps the one aspect to The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach! that most gets my attention is Peach herself. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s this movie that made the princess look the way she looks today. Check out how she is drawn on box art for the Japanese release of Super Mario Bros.

The feline eyes are there, but everything else looks different — darker hair, a dress that looks like jammies and altogether a cruder look then she’d eventually get. In promotional art for The Lost Levels, Peach looked a lot closer to how she looks today, save for those dimples on her cheeks, which read as pimples in both the Super Mario Bros. and Lost Levels art. The dress is about right, the Farrah flips are in place, she’s a banana blonde, and she’s even sporting her trademark brooch.

She looks much more like this Lost Levels version in the movie.

Well, she’s not wearing a butt on her head in the games, but you can see the resemblance, literal asshat notwithstanding. “But Drew, surely then it was the Nintendo artwork that finalized Peach’s appearance and not this non-canon movie. You are dumb!” But no! And also shut up! I’d suggest it might actually be the other way around. Do you know how long it takes to make an animated feature? Even an hour-long one? If the movie hit theaters juts a few weeks after The Lost Levels started selling in Japan, I’d say that someone had to decide beforehand how Peach was going to look. Maybe it was the animators at Toei. Maybe it was Nintendo giving notes to the animators. But either way, I think it was the movie that determined her appearance in a way that’s stuck for nearly thirty years.

Of course, some of the film’s original bits didn’t carry haven’t yet found a place in the Marioverse proper.

First up, them backgrounds. Back before Nintendo decided that every bush, rock and cloud needed an eerily grinning face on it, Super Mario Bros. skewed more surreal than saccharine. The game includes a few montages where you see vast expanses of the Mushroom Kingdom as it’s navigated by Mario, Luigi and Kibidango, their little canine friend with the weirdly ant-like body.

(Yes, it’s weird that the same song plays so often in a movie that’s only an hour long. Certain creative decisions were made, clearly.)

Maybe it’s the quality of the transfer, but the colors in these backgrounds look less saturated that the bright greens and cyans that defined Super Mario Bros. for a long time, and in an unexpected way, it lends the film a slightly less child-like feel. Eventually, Nintendo would come around to a degree, but it’s notable to see the Mushroom Kingdom look large, alien, and a little imposing instead of just Candyland-esque.

Speaking of Mario’s dog-like companion, Kibidango, who’s apparently named after a type of Japanese dumpling, failed to affect the series mythos in any direct way. It took until Super Mario World for Mario to get an animal buddy (Yoshi), and until Yoshi’s Island for Mario to meet a canine friend (the peculiarly nose-less Poochy). At the end of the movie, however, Kibidango transforms into Peach’s true love, dandy Prince Haru of Flower Kingdom, who was in search of the owner of the other half of his magical brooch when he was turned into a dog… ant… thing.

Haru may seem foppish, but at the end of the movie, everyone seems to agree that he’s a better match for Peach than the portly plumber is, and Mario sets off with only a kiss on the nose for his troubles. It’s probably a stretch, but you could say that there’s an echo of Prince Haru in Yoshi’s Safari, a Super NES shooting game that had Peach asking Mario to rescue the monarchs of a neighboring kingdom. The younger of the two — Prince Pine, whose Japanese name is a reference to pineapples and not pine trees, I'm just learning — has some vague similarities to Prince Haru, but the greatest of them is the fact that he’s a male monarch needing Mario’s help.

There’s also a debatable similarity in Princess Shokora, the damsel Wario rescues in Wario Land Advance. Her appearance varies according to how much money Wario earns over the course of the game, and her “most expensive” form is rather boyish — and not unlike Haru, who maybe looks a little girlish.

And sort of similar to the way that Haru spends most of the movie as a dog, Shokora spends much of Wario Land Advance trailing Wario in the form of a little black cat.

In the “Lady Toad” post, I mentioned how Toad became a playable character in the American Super Mario Bros. 2 almost by default. He wasn’t named in the first game, and Nintendo simply needed a fourth character to round out the roster. Hypothetically speaking, had Nintendo brought The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach out in the U.S. and had Americans been familiar with the characters, it wouldn’t have been unthinkable that ol’ Haru might have gotten that fourth slot. You’d have had the two brothers and the two royal lovebirds, and today this dandy prince would be a staple of the series.

Just conjecturing, but it wouldn’t be unthinkable.

The game’s other original character is a kooky pile of beard hairs simply called the Mushroom Mystic. There’s nothing close to him in any of the games, by why shouldn’t there be? Perhaps we’d all like playing as a white pushbroom of an old man.

I have one final creative choice in The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach! that Mario lifers might be interested to know about. In the movie, Mario and Luigi aren’t plumbers, like there are in the American version of the games, or carpenters, like Mario was in Donkey Kong. They’re grocers. That’s… maybe an aspect to Mario’s mystique we could do without.

(Note: There’s also now a part three in this little series, if you’re interested.)