I agree.
I think that Mario acting as different roles should be put first and foremost in games that differs from his main series. Like when he is refereeing, go-karting, wrecking crew member, F-Zero pilot android etc. It's like in Donald Duck comics where Donald suddenly is a brave knight in the middle ages fighting dragons or when Popeye and Brutus takes various roles in cartoons while their personalities and rivality are mostly the same. He's both Mario Mario and an actor playing a Mario.
The question is if Donkey Kong series still counts as the main series, probably not.
DRW wrote:O.k., to make sure I didn't misunderstand you, let's put this together:
Question 1:
In "Super Mario Bros. 3", do you think that small Mario has regular size while Super Mario is a giant?
Or do you think that small Mario is a dwarf while Super Mario has regular size?
Question 2:
In "Super Mario Bros. 3", do you think that Princess Toadstool and Toad have regular size or are they giants?
(With regular size I'm not talking about "default" size. Which one is the default is not important here. I'm talking about the actual absolute values. Regular size would be something like 1.55 m (or maybe 1.30 for Toad) to 2.10 m. Giant would mean 3 m and dwarf means 70 cm.)
1: I'm not sure, it's possible they had already decided that the big Mario is his natural size at the time of SMB3. But I think it wasn't something carefully planned, it probably just happened in that case, and after that it was just natural.
2: They are definitely sized like normal humans as in all other games. So I guess that's regular size.
Sumez wrote:
Pokun wrote:As a Swede I (thankfully) wasn't exposed to the American Super Mario Super Show though.
You really didn't? In Denmark we had both the original and the SMB3 show (which was actually shown first, as it was on a larger channel that would get newer shows), and they got rerun constantly every single morning. Man I watched the hell out of those, and I probably have to admit owing a lot of headcanon to those shows. The most popular one being that stupid thing about Mario and Luigi coming from Brooklyn. It actually made me happy when Yoshi's Island came out and Nintendo made sure to wipe out that misconception forever
I didn't. I had only 3 TV channels (SVT1 and SVT2 they are like the Japanese NHK) and TV4. All other channels would require you to have a dish on your roof to get satellite channels back then. So it's possible the show was running on one of those channels but I don't remember any of my friends with a dish talking about a Mario show.
We did rent a tape with the show on once though. But we just wanted to see the Mario cartoons and was freaked out by the strange humour, weird rapping and what not that was in between the cartoons. My dad was actually angry that he had allowed us to rent such a weird show.
But I wasn't entirely shielded from the Brooklyn Mario, the Swedish Nintendo Magazine had Voyager's Mario, Zelda, Captain N and Super Mario Land comics. They all tie in pretty well with the corresponding animated series (a bit more serious though, and Link didn't use his sword as a gun).
Sumez wrote:Pokun wrote:
From the deleopers point of view: Retconning the Koopalings from being Bowser's children doesn't mean that these old games are thrown out of the continuity. It just means that they are retroactively not his children anymore, i.e. Bowser didn't give the seven magic wands of the Mushroom World kings to his children, but to his minions in SMB3.
I see, so it fits in both timelines if you ignore the fact that Koopa introduces them as his kids in the SMB3 manual. I still don't like it though.
I'm surprised no one commented on this, or maybe I missed it, but I think you should keep in mind that the Japanese developers of the game usually don't care about what's said in the foreign versions of the manuals. But I'm traditional too, so just like the princess will always be "Toadstool" in my book, and the king of Koopas' name is "Bowser", the koopalings are also Bowser's kids.
But none of these were ever the case in Japan, I think that is also "common knowledge" by now? The Japanese manual makes no reference to the koopalings being Bowser's kids, and even the name "Bowser" was made up in the same English manual, as he was only referred to as "The king of koopas" earlier on, which also explains why he never had the "Bowser" name in the cartoon show either. However, koopa always referred to the entire tribe of turtle creatures in the west, but in Japan, Koopa/Kupa is straight up Bowser's name, while the turtles are called nokonoko. Basically, it's all messed up due to translators taking too many freedoms back in the 80s.
I believe the koopalings were also only given names in the west alongside all the enemies who also got similar names based on popular (and some less popular) musicians.
It's kind of funny how Nintendo went with retconning some of these, while never touching the others (kind of like how the names of the three boss characters from Street Fighter II remains screwed up in the west, even today). The name "Peach" was introduced in Mario 64 alongside "Toadstool" as a kind of nickname, but from that point on, no one would ever refer to her as Toadstool again. Meanwhile the concept of the koopalings being Bowser's kids was just quietly forgotten as Bowser Jr got introduced, and the koopalings were completely missing in action until their surprising return in NSMBW.
However, "Bowser" and "Koopa" remains messed up, but I'd say it's probably too late to change that at this point.
No one commented because my statement wasn't wrong. You even posted a page of the Japanese SMB3 manual where King Koopa says this: "ワッハハ。これから俺様の息子達がこのゲームを説明するぜ。" ("Wahaha. From here on the mighty yours truly's own children will explain the game."). So it was canon in Japan all along and not something made up by the translators (the word for Koopaling is kokuppa where ko means small or child). The Koopa kids' names were made by NOA as you say, so I guess it was too late for them to appear in the Japanese manual. But they are canon as DRW proved (just as Mario and Luigi themselves that also had their names invented by NOA and their family name by Hollywood
).
Bowser and Toadstool are names invented by the translators, but I think it's kind of funny that American media used Koopa although I don't recall any non-Japanese Mario game that ever used that name. And I think the spelling is funny as it's actually pronounced Kuppa (short "u" and long "p"). "Koopa" implies a long vowel. It's the canon spelling though and even used in Japanese games like SMW.
The turtle clan are called kame ichizoku (among other things) which literary means turtle clan or tribe. I guess they retconned King Koopa to be Bowser Koopa (Koopa being the clan name works well with the Nokonoko's English names) or they intended Koopa to be the clan name all along. But I can't recall to have ever seen the name Bowser in a Japanese game, nor have I seen Koopa in a non-Japanese game (for referring to Bowser), so I'm not sure. It's obvious though that Nokonoko, Hammer Bros, Jugemu (Lakitu), Bunbun, Kuppa himself, his kids and all other turtle-based enemies were supposed to be part of this invading turtle tribe.
As a kid I thought Toadstool was simply her last name because you wouldn't refer to a princess in first-name-terms. But we do that all the time with real royalty (as long as you attach the royal title), I don't know why I thought that. But anyway I guess they retconned her whole name to be Peach Toadstool universally, but the name Toadstool hasn't really been used again since Mario 64. Also the Shindou Edition of Mario 64 (and the DS version) are the only Japanese Mario games I've seen that the name Toadstool have been used in a Japanese Mario game. And that is obviously because the voice clip where she reads up her own letter was made for the English version (the actual letter in Japanese only contains the name Peach).