Franchise: Mario

In 1991, Nintendo and MCA Records released a compilation album titled "Nintendo: White Knuckle Scorin'". While the original plan was to have numerous rock and pop acts record songs based off Nintendo franchises, all but one of the songs contributed to the album have nothing to do with them. The album booklet featured a short comic loosely based on Super Mario World that was written and illustrated by the team responsible for the "Nintendo Comics System" comic book series released in the early 1990's. The comic and the album's release were designed to promote children's literacy, and was dedicated to Bobby Brooks, a talent agent passionate about promoting that cause who was killed in a 1990 helicopter crash that also took the life of blues musician Stevie Ray Vaughan.

The most notable thing to come out of this album's existence is an officially-licensed original song based on the Mario series titled "Ignorance is Bliss" written by Andy Sturmer and his then-girlfriend Sarah Wirt, and performed by Sturmer's psychedelic pop band Jellyfish. Sturmer, despite not being interested in video games, took it upon himself to make sure the song's lyrics remained relevant to the Mario series by directly basing them off of the album booklet's comic, which featured an illiterate Bowser ranting to Princess Toadstool about his plans of turning Dinosaur Land into fossil fuels and using his newfound status as an oil tycoon to join the real-life Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), as well as how much he hates reading. Sturmer later described the song as a "mini-opera" that was "a lot of fun to write".

While filming the infamous live-action Super Mario Bros movie released in 1993, Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo would deliberately get intoxicated before shoots to help them cope with the disastrous production.

On April 22, 2015, Nintendo of America uploaded a tweet with an image of a Waluigi plush doll riding a Wiggler plush doll, with the caption:


Someone at Nintendo of America forgot to spell-check Wiggler's name, because the term "wigger" describes a white person who emulates the cultural behaviors attributed to African-Americans.

Shortly after finding the mistake, Nintendo of America took it down and apologized for the error.

In a 2023 interview done to promote "The Super Mario Bros. Movie", Shigeru Miyamoto shared his thoughts and opinions on certain aspects of the character Mario that the filmmakers could easily take from the video games that made him endure over time and become so beloved the world over:

"It's the very fact that he is not your typical superhero that makes him such an interesting movie character[...]He's so relatable. He's an Everyman character. He never gives up. He always keeps coming. Those qualities make for a very compelling central character.

I think part of it is the idea that Mario never gives up[...]And he's kind of got this shy side to him. When all the attention is focused on him, he's a little bashful and doesn't maybe want that. That speaks to me. He might seem brave, but that's still a fundamental core essence of his character."

In the 2023 film "The Super Mario Bros. Movie", the Japanese name for the character Spike (the foreman from Wrecking Crew) was changed in the corresponding dub. Although no specific reason was given as to why the change was made, it can be assumed it was done to avoid controversy as the character's original Japanese name is "Blackie", which is also a derogatory racial slur in English-speaking countries used to refer to dark-skinned people of African descent.

Charles Martinet, the voice actor for Mario from 1990 to 2023, first officially voiced the character as part of a motion-capture Silicon Graphics interactive exhibition used at Nintendo trade shows (with the role at the time sometimes split between him and musician Steve Coyle). The first commercially-released product to feature his voice acting is purported to be the Super Mario Bros. pinball machine released in 1992 and produced by Gottlieb. According to Martinet when asked by a fan in 2018, Gottlieb "stole" his voice clips and did not credit or pay him for his acting. While the 1995 PC game Mario's Game Gallery is often cited as Martinet's first official role as Mario in a video game, the actual first credited video game to feature him as Mario is the 1994 PC educational title Mario Teaches Typing, where he replaced the DOS version's voice actor, Ronald B. Ruben.

The lead technical character artist for Luigi's Mansion 3, Jeffrey Zoern, previously worked as the art director for Hotel Mario, another Mario series game themed around hotels that Nintendo has historically been reluctant to acknowledge.

Lexibook, a company infamous for low-quality unlicensed NES-based consoles (or "Famiclones") featuring plagiarized content from a variety of sources including Nintendo games, entered an official agreement with Nintendo in 2020 to license various Nintendo IPs including Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda, and Mario.

There are a total of 19 modern-day countries Mario has been to in an official Mario game to date.

Mario’s Time Machine has him visit Greece, Egypt, China, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, United States, Austria, India, and Japan.

The Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games series adds Canada, Brazil, and Russia.

Finally, Mario Kart Tour features tracks based on cities from a few new countries: Australia, Singapore, The Netherlands, Thailand, and Spain.

Mario Tennis on the Game Boy Color and Mario Kart Tour are the only Mario multiplayer games where Mario is unlockable. In terms of single-player games, Mario is also unlockable in the single-player mode of Mario Golf on Nintendo 64, as well as Super Mario 64 DS.

Starting with Super Mario 64, the Koopa Troopa's voice is an incredibly short snippet of "HUMAN, YELL - YELL: FEMALE", a sound effect of a woman gleefully screaming from the Best Service Voice Spectral Volume 1 sound pack, modified into different pitches and speeds. In some games, a different snippet from the sound effect is used to represent Koopa Troopas screaming or being frustrated.

In a 1996 interview with Shigeru Miyamoto published in Super Mario 64's first Japanese strategy guides, he revealed that Mario's running animation, speed and movements in that game were influenced by Arale, the main protagonist of the 1980 Akira Toriyama manga/anime "Dr. Slump":


However, Dr. Slump's influence throughout the Mario series could trace back even further. Some particular examples from Mario games include:

• His running speed, animation, the Racoon and Tanooki Suits from Super Mario Bros. 3
• The Wing Cap from Super Mario 64
• The Cat Suit from Super Mario 3D World

Even traits of Mario's happy cartoonish personality, his short stature and gloves, and blue-red-overalls color scheme bear enough similarities that they all could have been taken from Arale's appearances and other elements throughout Dr. Slump. Despite this, outside of Miyamoto's comment, these connections are not known to have been elaborated on by any other employee from Nintendo.

In the 2023 film "The Super Mario Bros. Movie", Mario and Luigi's family are prominently featured. This includes:

• Their Father, voiced by Charles Martinet (and bears a resemblance to Talon from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time)
• Their Mother, who previously appeared in "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!" and is voiced here by Jessica DiCicco
• Uncle Arthur, voiced by John DiMaggio
• Uncle Tony, voiced by Rino Romano (and was coincidentally mentioned in live-action segment "Glasnuts" from the TV series "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!")
• Aunt Marie, who's presumably married to Uncle Arthur
• An unnamed niece, who's most likely Marie and Arthur's daughter, being a first cousin once removed that's referred to as a "(second) niece"
• An unnamed grandfather, who's implied by the co-director Aaron Horvath to previously have been a boxer and wears an outfit similar to Luigi in the 1983 commercial for the Atari ports of Mario Bros.

Interestingly, all of the credited voice actors for the family are all of Italian descent to stay true to the family's Italian heritage.

According to Shigeru Miyamoto, the design of the family were based on character design sheets that former Nintendo illustrator Yoichi Kotabe drew decades before the film began production.

The audio used for Bob-ombs, Monty Moles and Goombas in various games starting with Super Mario 64 is actually pieces of Mario's voice saying "Here We Go" from said game after being pitch-shifted. This would continue being the case even after Charles Martinet was replaced with Kevin Afghani starting with Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

Years prior to the animation studio Illumination having a film based off the Mario franchise with the 2023 film "The Super Mario Bros. Movie", the series had been referenced in a handful of films by the same studio, including Donkey Kong references in "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax" and "Despicable Me 3", and an homage to kicking a Koopa Troopa shell featured in "The Secret Life of Pets".

Ever since Samantha Kelly became the voice of Peach, Toad and Toadette starting in 2007, she would always record her voice lines for Peach first whenever recording new dialogue. This is because her voice is unable to go high enough after doing the more extreme sort of voice that Toad has.

In 1983, an album was released on vinyl by Kid Stuff Records titled Donkey Kong (alternatively called Donkey Kong Goes Home), retelling the story of the video game of the same name. It is notable for not only potentially being the first time Mario was voiced (having an unknown release date in 1983, which was also the debut year of Saturday Supercade), but also giving Mario a stereotypical Italian accent with an "-a-" verbal tic as opposed to the gruff Italian-American accent that would be used in multimedia projects for the rest of the 80s (including Saturday Supercade), predating Charles Martinet's debut as Mario in Mario Teaches Typing by 8 years. According to Kid Stuff Mario voice actor Pat McBride, the reasoning for this voice direction was


Nintendo never gave the team behind Donkey Kong Goes Home any form of guidance for the project, and did not give any word - positive or negative - about the finished album beyond approving it.

According to Super Mario Bros. Wonder's art director Masanobu Sato, Shigeru Miyamoto reportedly explained during the development of the first Super Mario Bros. that the reason why Goombas damage Mario when walking into them is because they bite Mario on impact. Due to graphical and hardware limitations, this could not be shown at the time. However, while Super Mario Bros. Wonder is thought to be the first game in the mainline series that shows this detail in gameplay, it's not the first game in the overall franchise to show it, as Goombas had been seen biting in earlier spin-off games like Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars.

As of 2023, Mario has prominently appeared in at least one theatrical film per decade since he was created in 1981:
•1986’s Super Mario Bros: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach, which is one of the first film adaptations of a video game.
•1993’s Super Mario Bros, the first live-action film adaptation of a video game.
•2007’s The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a documentary that revolves around Steve Wiebe attempting to usurp Billy Mitchell’s high score on Donkey Kong.
•2015’s Pixels, which incorporates Donkey Kong as the final boss of the film’s climax (alongside Mario making a brief cameo).
•2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which is the first video game film to make $1 billion dollars at the box office.

Interestingly, the two films that weren’t direct adaptations of the games, The King of Kong and Pixels, were directed and produced respectively by Seth Gordon, who considered making a 3D film adaptation of Super Paper Mario back in 2008.

One criticism that the 2023 film "The Super Mario Bros. Movie" received is that while composer Bryan Tyler collaborated with Nintendo veteran composer Koji Kondo to create a score that incorporates orchestrated rearrangements of iconic songs from the Mario franchise, there were too many moments of Illumination-mandated pop songs replacing the score in certain scenes. The most infamous example of this being the replacement of the original composition "Driving Me Bananas", a medley of songs from the Donkey Kong Country games, with a-ha’s "Take on Me" feeling somewhat out of context.

According to Jamey Scott, who worked in the film's sound department, Tyler fought hard to keep his orchestrated rendition of the Super Star theme in the film over the studio's suggestion of Van Halen's "Jump", and succeeded.