The Weirdness of Super Mario EXPLAINED! | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
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The Mushroom Kingdom is…weird. From evil mushrooms, carnivorous plants, plumbing used for transportation, and flying turtles, Mario's world stands out as one of the most bizarre universes of its era. But could there be an explanation for all this.. weirdness? Join Jamin on this week's episode of Game/Show to find out just why Nintendo's Mushroom Kingdom is such a strange place!
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Hosted by Jamin Warren (@jaminwar)
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The Goombas originated from the mushroom and as they needed an enemy simpler than the Koopa, a one-hit-one kill enemy, but they were running out of memory so they made something that couple move by switching between frames 1 and 2.
+PIKMINROCK1 Super interesting! -jj
As for the reason why they chose a mushroom, I was told it is due to the bumper shape of the goomba which naturally suggests the player to jump on it.
+PIKMINROCK1 It is actually just the mirrored sprite as the two frames.
+PIKMINROCK1 I believe they're not supposed to be mushrooms. In the manual they are described as chestnuts. Maybe a translation error, but idk.
Mr. Guy The chestnut thing is weird because they are clearly based off the design of the mushroom.
They later retcon this chestnut stuff with the Galoomba and the Goomba's 3D appearance
I feel like Mario is so popular that it just doesn't seem weird anymore. But yeah, it's pretty weird.
The reason he had a mustache is because without it, you couldn't tell where his nose was. Not really about pixels, more about framing his face in a way that the human eye could make it out.
I always thought that since hes a plumber he would have access to the undergrounds through pipes; and mushrooms love growing in dark places underground; and people would flush unwanted animals like turtles that would mutate later on; and the coins were just children flushing money because it was fun.
That... Actually makes sense
Ularg
I literally gasped
Woah very clever i wouldnt have thought of that in 10 years
yea, pretty much...
+HeirOfGlee As opposed to figuratively?
I very much agree with the idea that the more constraints you have, the more creative you become, its damn near impossible for me to think of something when I have complete freedom, it's like trying to pick a single raindrop out of a thunder storm, there's just too much, but when you actually have limits, confines you must work within, thats when you're creativity shines, because you are trying to get the absolute most you can get out of something rather than trying to get something out out just everything.
+DireZyre Exactly! -jj
The world of Super Mario is both bizarre and charming. Every new Mario game you play, you don't know what to expect. The world is inviting and whimsical. The enemies and creatures that populate the worlds are simple in design and can become very memorable. I think it helps makes these games seem timeless. Everything is just so weird and it just works!
The Goomba was actually the last thing designed in the game. Miyamoto said Koopa Troopas were a 2-step enemy, pretty difficult to defeat, and they needed a simple 1-step enemy to fill the world. So, he created Goombas, which look like they should be stepped on. Miyamoto said the guiding philosophy behind Mario's enemies is that you know how to deal with them just by looking. They free themselves to use any creature or object as long as the end result makes design sense.
Miyamoto said if there was anything dangerous, make it hot or sharp. So there are spikes and lava, but lava and a few spikes can only go so far as obstacles. The designers came up with tons of permutations on that idea: giant spikes with spikes that fall from the ceiling. Firey turnstiles. Spikey thwomps. Spikes on Koopa Troopas. Blarggs, enemies made of lava, etc. etc.
The guiding principle behind Mario is design first, always.
The background music for these videos is extremely dope. Whoever dubs it in has very awesome tastes.
It's neat how these creative solutions to technical limitations become a tradition of unique fantasy long after the limitations have ceased to be a factor.
I believe the use of mushroom was mainly from Miyamoto's childhood memories of exploring caves and forests in his hometown. As for the Koopas and Bowser in particular are based on the Bixi (a mythical hybrid of a turtle and a dragon).
+HitomiNoRyu I thought there might have been a little bit of the Kappa in the Koopas too.
I played Mario the first time when I was too young to really understand that having giant mushrooms with eyes was weird. I also grew up with a lot of animated shows that had inanimate objects with eyes and mouths all the time (1991 Best Picture nominee Beauty & The Beast chief among them), so I never really thought of the Mushroom Kingdom as weird. The only time that's happened for me in a Mario game is from Mario & Luigi SuperStar Saga, with the BeanBean Kingdom, but that was more the personality of the characters than the actual place itself.
Actually, the Monkey King doesn't hop clouds. He rides a special one called 筋斗雲 gandaauwan in Cantonese which translates to "somersault cloud" and lets him travel about 34,000 miles in a single leap.
Being able to walk/ride on clouds though isn't something that's tied to just him. That's supposed to be a trait of many of the immortals of Chinese mythology and "Heaven" in Chinese myth itself is basically a city in the clouds where the ground is clouds. It's just flat out Chinese mythology and not necessarily just the Monkey King. The Monkey King himself is only able to do such a thing because he trained with and learned from an immortal in order to learn how to not die because he witnessed an old monkey dying and didn't want that to happen to him.
Many immortals themselves were regarded as beings that were once people that achieved a particular state of enlightenment where they were granted a place among gods and were deified. Notable heroes in quasi-historical Chinese history were said to join the ranks of the immortals due to their heroic accomplishments.
Mario being a selfless hero in that context, would then make sense to have attributes like an immortal.
Maybe not but Bowser was originally based on the Ox King so the idea that the cloud is what gave them the inspiration is still difficult to deny.
Also worth noting is that in Dragonball, Goku didn't need any training to ride the cloud, he just needed to be pure of heart.
+Reika Well, an immortal mario actually fits in, what with all the 1-ups.
Aren't immortals supposed to be...you know...immortal? That's one thing that irks me about the nordic pantheon BTW.
mattwo7
"Immortals" is really only what the word is translated to in English. The word is 仙人 which really refers to more of an enlightened person who may or may not be a hermit or celestial being. They're transcendent and super-human and possess lots of knowledge and experience. They're also called wizards, sages, fairies, etc. The various English translations really don't do justice to the actual concept.
Their immortality is a lot more spiritual rather than living "forever". They live a great long time in myth owing to their magic and access to special things like peaches that elongate their lifespan and elixirs that make them impervious to many things, but they aren't immortal in the sense that they can never die. They're *hard* to kill for sure, but if there was a war between them, they could kill each other.
I think the Western idea of "immortal" derives more from Greek mythology where the idea is that beings literally never die. It's not the same thing though and isn't really translatable over to other pantheons around the world, but I think at the time those other cultures were "discovered" by the West, relating them to the Greeks and Romans was probably the easiest way to get people to understand hence the semantic confusion.
Miyamoto talked to Eurogamer about world 1-1. He says about mushrooms, "What is that magical item that we need [ to make Mario grow]? And we thought a suspicious mushroom would be globally understood."
So I think the goomba's and mushrooms came from Alice in Wonderland.
+Chris Strott There's mixed evidence out there about Lewis Carroll's influence. -jj
Limitations don't make you more free to do what you want, they force you to compromise.
+GastonAsston Precisely.
***** Nice rhyme. Thinking about it more, there is some truth to both sides. Too much freedom may make it difficult to settle on any one idea/structure/etc. But not enough freedom is restrictive, requiring compromise or otherwise a sacrifice of something.
It really depends on the situation and how you look at it, I suppose.
+Ashy Peak I know from experience. The Russian composer speaks the truth.
What do mean you can't explain Goombas? The dev team originally created Koopas, then realized they needed an additional easier enemy to begin with. They were running low on data space or something, so they took the Super Mushroom, edited the image, and based it on a shiitake mushroom. The eyebrows are a hint that it's a bad guy. Technical limitations, design tricks, and a bit of culture can *totally* explain the Goomba. I was surprised to hear he didn't find a source mentioning this.
Admittedly, Mario was always weird, but a lot of the weirdness of Mario has come from the fact that since Mario is Nintendo's flagship franchise, it is often used to try out new genres or mechanics which will in turn require new characters/elements which are then considered part of the lore. Mario has been around stacking up new weird elements from what could have been one off games but instead became reoccurring characters. A lot of the stuff from Mario 2 was designed for a completely different game and universe, but then Shy Guys, Birdo and other other characters became staples. Same thing happened with Wario, the Kong family, Mario RPG characters all sprawling out the continuity of Mario.
Mario never seemed weird in the slightest to me, I really don't understand how so many people seem to think it's so incredibly bizarre.
Perhaps I'm weird.
At the time, Super Mario Bros. to me was just a logical extension of the single-screen Mario Bros. game, taking a play mechanic that already existed from one game and adding a whole lot of stuff to it that basically made it stand out among all the other games that came out in 1985. It really didn't matter to me that everything in the game was so weird when mashed together. All that really mattered was whether the game was fun to play.
Mario being weird doesn't mean that Mega Man isn't weird. Or that Zelda isn't weird. There's far more bizarre stuff out there. I think looking at how technical limitations molded games is cool, but it's cool on it's own right!
+Wednesday's Serial The Japanese are mad.
It's all a matter of perspective. What would Mario think about our world?
'Mama Mia! Why can't you breathe-a underwater?! You die-a without air, right?' or, 'Holy shit-a! You keep These Koopas as pets?! What a world!'
I grew up with the development of platform games. Before Mario, we had Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy on the Spectrum home computer. Both very simple games about jumping and moving left and right, but with peculiar enemies and a crapload of surreal undertones. So by the time Mario 1 rolled around, I just expected platform games to take place in weird worlds.
I don't try and rationalize fantasy with reality personally, because it doesn't matter. Like people who try to complain about Battlestar Galactica's ending being "Unrealistic" or there being no way Cloud could swing his sword the way he does: In Fantasy, you can do whatever you want.
Goomba explanation: they needed a 1 hit enemy to teach the player how to deal with enemies. Players at first would be confused with the Koopas because their stomp, kick, and wall ricochet mechanics were too much to learn at the game's start. So the Goomba was created to teach players to stomp, and then they would later learn to kick the shells.
I don't have anything clever to say for this one so... cool episode Jamin and crew!
I've never really considered Mario weird since I grew up playing the games and never questioned it.
the mushroom power up is a reference to alice's adventures in wonderland, in wonderland the caterpillar told alice that one side of the mushroom he was sitting on would make alice grow while the other side would make her shrink. Nintendo probably simplified it to just growing so the sake of some logical consistency
The Goombas can be explained with technical limitations. There was only so much memory available so many things are copy and pasted (like the Koopa Troopas and flying versions of them). The Goombas being the exact same shape as the mushrooms Mario collects. Similar to this are the bushes and clouds that are the same shape but different colours.
Goombas were invented because the only enemies were koopas but play testers thought they were too difficult, so they took the mushroom sprite cause they didn't have a lot of memory space. Then they made them flip back and forth for there walking animation.
in SM64, SMG and SMG2 MArio has to hold his breath when he goes underwater.
I always thought that Mario stylistically drew a lot of inspiration from classic cartoons of the 20s and 30s, where everything could be alive(mountains with eyes) and physical rules are more flexible(turtles have been depicted flying out of their shells many times before). Considering Miyamoto's professed love for Popeye, it's not all that weird to think those elements were borrowed somewhat.
+Ron Corwin Great point!
They made the goombas look like mushrooms because they needed an enemy that looked like a bumper. From the design of this first enemy you had to understand one of th core mechanic: jump on enemies to kill them. Back then this wasn't the standard, so they made enemies round, kind of... This is also why you fight turtles, and why the only enemies you can't jump on usually have spikes. They chose the mushrooms because it's a simple shape, added eyes so that you can tell it's an enemy not a power up, and there you have it: the goomba!
"Goomba" is another slang term for Italians in the northeast United States. It was probably well intended, but it turned out to be derogatory.
While Goombas do look like Shiitake mushrooms, and the original game manual reffered to them as mushrooms, their Japanese name; Kuribō, is roughly translated as as "chestnut person". So are they chestnut mushrooms?
Gooba were introduced because they wanted another type of enemy other than the koopa and like you said they were low on memory so the design and animation of them walking had to be as simple as possible
lol he asks is it weird.... sir...what if I told you there is no normal. (insert inception music here)
What about the similarities between kappas and koopa troopas?
0:49 The leaf thing makes somewhat sense if you're familiar with Tanooki (spelling?).
The whole mushroom= grow thing was inspired by Alice in Wonderland. And the weirdness in Alice in Wonderland was inspired by the author's hatred of the changes in Mathematics at the time. He preferred the math we used since the Greeks, not this new math with the imaginary numbers and whatnot.
Does anyone know where that "Mario on shrooms" video at the beginning is from? I'd like to see that full video.
The "raccoon" suit is actually a tanuki (or raccoon dog) and is more related to canines than raccoons.
Shocked he didn't talk about flying squids.
The goombas are actually chestnuts. that makes them no weirder than mushrooms but does give a cultrual refference and explain why in certain incarnations they seem round.
other than that The mario games are just lite hearted fun to me.
+Tristra Gyopsie I dunno, squishy angry chestnuts seem more weird in my book -jj
It's a Japanese cultural thing.
Gaijin Goombah did a culture shock on it if you want to check it out.
I just thought it was an interesting tidbit to pass along.
I never thought the mushroom kingdom was weird
Maybe now it seems weird from a western perspective but as a child I never questioned the world as it kinda felt familiar from most of the 80's cartoons on TV (Say Turtles, MIghty Ducks, He Man, Chipmunks) or some Disney movies like Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland etc. It may be that the influence was diofferent but as as child I didn't care and now as an adult I still don't but admire the creativity that the world of Mario offers.
my fave channel on youtube :) :3
I think, pretty much every choice they made was about game play. Goombas are mushrooms because it looks like a bumper, so it drive our gamer instinct to jump on it. Once we understood we had to jump on ennemies to kill them, we do the same with Koopas. Then we see they leave the carapace so we can use it as a weapon and so on.
The same with pipes which induces us to press on bottom to go in (and I guess it explains why he's a plumber too).
If the Mario universe remove everything that would make sense in a movie or a realistic story it's just to create the perfect plateform game. If it doesn't make any sense for a story line (and the Mario movie will not make me wrong on this) everything makes perfect sense for a game play and by extention for a gamer.
All the weird things in Mario are complety logical when you think about it that way : "What a gamer would do?"
Great show btw!
Not sure why mushrooms, maybe Miyamoto eats mushrooms a lot? He is Japanese after all. But I know why Goombas! Again, the design is meant to save disc space. The walking animation is done with just 2 sprites and mostly just color swap and add a few body parts to the already existing 1UP and growing mushrooms. But once again, no idea why so many mushrooms.
I don't know why yet, but, it IS really weird !
+Allan Ben Aziza Right? -jj
You deserve more views.
Is the Mushroom kingdom weird? I'll answer a question with a question: If we teleported someone who lived in the 1500s, do you think he or she would call our world weird?
Koopa Paratroopas have wings, not Koopa Troopas.
"The more skill you have, the less lucky you are" I find that statement to be just.....wrong. You can be just as lucky as before, whilst having additional skill. You might not notice the luck as much, but its there. I can understand your analogy of luck & skill being blurred, but if your overall chances of winning increases, then either you've gained luck (unlikely) or skill.
You want Mario Weirdness? Ok...Here it goes...
If they are the Mario Brothers, and Mario is the family name, what is Luigis brother called?
+caveymoley Super?
+caveymoley the official name for the Mario bros. is Mario Mario and Luigi Mario
+MrCoolkid60000 the official name for the Mario bros. is non-existent. Nintendo said that the movie just made stuff up, they are just Mario and Luigi
FigAndFriends can't i troll in peace?
You should have collaborated with Gijin Gumba on this, He does great incite videos on Japanese culture from a western perspective.
I feel like this is not entirely weird. see, the world is weird if you try to put too much logic into the game play or the design aspect. but with a little logic, you appreciate the bizarre ness of the mushroom kingdom, and I think your right to find it weird, Jamin, but at the same time, it's a game that was pretty much made from the most basic things, but never really had a bad startup. I think that, in part, coloring Mario games with too much thought simply puts the games in a not so appealing light.
I like my vodka, 5:05
I think we're all abit weird in our own right.
4:10 WHAT IS ON THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD?!
Also, I thought you were going to address the strangeness that is the game manual for Super Mario Bros. Apparently, the brick blocks in the Mushroom Kingdom are the transformed bodies of Mushroom Kingdom residents. So why are we encouraged to destroy them?
Koopa is a turtle because of Kappa, ins't? Kappa is from Japanese folklore too.
And what is this on the back of your head at 4:10? haha
While I won't call the Mario series to be this, a lot of the constraints and forced traits reminds me of Programmers' art and asset filled cheap steam games. They're all bizarre in the sense that the art is there only for function, and not necessarily consistent in style. Given Miyamoto was a cartoonist, I do think the original was more aesthetically consistent than those games, especially in its color palette. So maybe its somewhere in between programmers' art and cartoony?
that's an interesting point, and I agree that Mario takes on a cartoony feel at times... which to me is pretty weird...
Maybe Mario is just weird because it is new type of "fantasy" .... I mean theoricaly elfs and dragons should be weird, but we are used to it. Kinda like Scientology looks really weird but only because it is young, you know ?
If we had more works of art like literature, movies or games with a magical kindgom with flying bricks andlots of mushroom maybe we would be more used to it. Hey they tryed to make it more "real" in the movie and we all know how well that went =P
+Platy News Well said. It's kinda weird that fantasy universes aren't made with a lot of fantasy.
Yes, of course it is, but that's not the point. Elves, dragons and etc. have precedent in out culture, and the world of the mario games doesn't, and that's what makes it weird. That's not to say it's any less realistic than dragons and elves, but it is definitely weirder.
Is PARA-troopa. 4:36 ty
The goombas are chestnuts.
Goomba = Kuribo = Chestnut guy
+Uejji The Goombas are Goombas, the chestnuts are Galoombas. incredibly simiar, but still different
+FigAndFriends In Super Mario Bros, what we know as the goomba was named "Kuribou," which means "chestnut guy."
"Kuri" is the Japanese chestnut, and it's a root word that shows up in... several characters. Another example is Kuririn from Dragon Ball. "Kuri" because his head is bald and smooth like a chestnut.
The galoomba in Super Mario World was named "Kuribon" in Japan, also based on the root "kuri."
Uejji I remember hearing that they were confirmed to be fungus based, just like the toadstools. Maybe that's where their name comes from because a part of the dev team thought they looked more like chestnuts than mushrooms?
+FigAndFriends They are in fact based off of Shiitake mushrooms. I still always thought they were chestnuts.
+Uejji They're named "kuribo", but are based on Shiitake mushroom (as pointed out above) indeed.
shrooms dude.
+monkeycaboose Obviously! -jj
You say weirdness, I say Japan - and everything is now clear.
But, they didn't design Mario's look for Super Mario Brothers. They designed his look for Donkey Kong, since it was released 4 years before Super Mario Bros and was the first game that Mario was in. So why are you making references to his appearance in Super Mario Brothers when you're explaining the origin of it? That's just misleading.
4:10 What the frick is on the back of your neck?
and also hallucinogenic mushrooms were legal in Japan until only about 15 years ago
by the way, "super Mario 2" was not the original one. instead, a game called doki doki panic was altered with Mario characters, and labeled as Mario 2. the real Mario 2 was brought later as The Lost Levels, in the Mario All Stars game.
Seems like a lackluster episode, 'Mario's on drugs, lulz, the end'
Seems like someone didn't actually watch the video :P
clearly, the video was more in depth than my comment gave credit, and no nothing about drugs, I'm just used to more in depth videos on this channel. The original super mario brothers was incredibly well thought out, but I would not have know it from this episode.
Second
Goombas aren't mushrooms, they're chestnut
First Like :D
Goomba's aren't mushrooms, they're chestnuts. Their original name is Kuribō, "kuri" being the Japanese word for "chestnut" (and bō means "guy"). This is the same root word of Krillen from DBZ's name, who is called Kuririn in the original language.
I think what you've done in this video is not so much prove that the Mushroom Kingdom isn't strange, but rather show *why* it became so strange.
I think the explanations you give here are the real reason for most of the oddities in Medea. As opposed to silly "fan theories" like the Pixar thing, or the "all tv shows are the delusions of 1 autistic boy" thing.
Also, just because something comes from mythology doesn't mean it isn't strange.
Take the Greek goddess Athena, for instance. She was "born" when someone smacked Zeus in the head. She sprang out of a crack in his head, fully grown and clad in armor.... That's pretty weird.
A couple of minor nit-picks!
Mario doesn't wear a base ball cap. It's much closer to a flat cap.
Middle Earth isn't that strange. The magic in it is very down played and most of the stuff you see around is more like an alternate medieval Europe.
Anyway, interesting episode.
First!
Hooray, first!
Aw dammit!
You're just taking it too serious and strictly. In that term any game is wierd.
not t shirts, the look more like tank tops to me.
Disliked out of love, not here for analysis of game worlds . Looking for more broad ideas that span between games, like Extra Credits. I think you do a much better job on mechanic or emotional elements in games, or the psychology behind why we do things in games. When you hone in on one game, it feels like you're out of fresh ideas and you needed a filler episode where you can just nerd out on something and not need to do research--and I get that, but maybe be more honest with everyone about it so we know we're not getting a thought provoking topic. In all likelihood, this comment will be lost in the sea of... everything. But that's my two cents.
I had to dig up several posts downward to find your irrelevant comment. I don't expect you to reply because you put this 7 years ago and you may not even be alive anymore. Buuut.... like you said, that's my two cents. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Wow... the view counter is under 100 when I got here... I need a life
I can explain it in one word. "Japanese".
I'M NOT RACIST