Retronauts - 792: Mario 101 - Part 1

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

The Goomba is a mushroom. We still don't know how Bowser got his name. Doki Doki Panic began its life as a Super Mario game. Is this sheer lunacy? No! These facts are the thoroughly researched findings of one Drew Mackie, who uncovered 101 Mario mind-blowers via his Mario 101 series on Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games. And on this episode, Drew is here to lead Jeremy, Bob, and Stuart through his collection of truth bombs that dispel conventional wisdom, pinpoint surprising origins, and speculate about the big questions that still don't have answers. Once you press play, reality as you know it will be changed forever.(And check out Drew's entire Mario 101 series RIGHT HERE!)Retronauts is a completely fan-funded operation. To support the show, and get two full-length exclusive episodes every month, as well as access to 100+ previous bonus episodes, please visit the official Retronauts Patreon at patreon.com/retronauts.

This week on Retronauts in Japan, it's called Dokey Dokey Podcast. Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I'm your host for this one, Bob Mackey, and this week's podcast is titled Mario 101, and it's all thanks to Drew Mackey's remarkable collection of facts about the Mushroom Kingdom. So over the course of 101 entries, Drew dispelled conventional wisdom. He pinpointed surprising origins, and he speculated about the big questions that still don't have answers. And this week, he's here to share his findings, while we mutter our apologies for all the things we've gotten wrong over the past two decades of this. this podcast. Before I go on any further today, who is here with us? Who is the first and only person

I've mentioned so far that's on the podcast? Non-Italian mustache-having person, Drew Mackey. Yes, Drew. Drew is the engine running this podcast, and I thank you so much for your contributions to Retronauts and the world's knowledge, Drew. And who else do we have other American in the room? Oh, that's me. It's Jeremy Parrish currently residing in the mushroom kingdom as a horsehair plant. Excellent. And because of Drew's article, I know that the only the mushroom Kingdom, sorry, only the question mark blocks are the mushroom kingdom people who have been turned into things.

Based on your trivia. Is that correct, Drew? And the bricks are just random bricks. So, disguised bricks are mushroom kingdoms, hiding, mushroom kingdom people hiding surprises from Mario and everyone else. You don't have to be bad about killing them because they're not actually alive. You're not murdering them. Yes. It changes a lot, actually. I feel a lot better about playing

Mario now. We have to assume once the question mark block expels the coin or the power up, that thing will then be safe once it turns back into a mushroom person. But before we go on any further here, who else is here with us in the room today? Hello, I'm Stuart Chip, and I'm really excited to finally find out what Mario is. So thank you. The only thing we know is that saying Mario is potentially wrong, although there are certain old commercials in which Mario is what they say. And I have to say, we need a real New Yorker here,

and that person is not present. So we just have to tell them they're wrong for now. You want me to ask my wife? She's home. Oh, oh, sorry, Jeremy, does Kat, your wife? Does she say Mario or does she never say that man's name? She would never say Mario. Interesting. Okay. I know a guy I used to work with, oneup.com, Jose Otero, New Yorker, as far as I know, he said Mario.

So Jose grew up in the Bronx, Kat grew up in Queens, so I feel like it's a regional dialect difference depending on which borough you grew up in. Well, now we're making Drew write the Mario Mario article that I don't think exists yet. I got a reply earlier today for an inflammatory post

I did that said, motherfucker, you can't even pronounce Mario. It's like, okay, you know what, and this is going to become relevant later,

so it's fine, it's fine. Wait, how did you pronounce it? I always say, I always say Mario, because I'm posh. Interesting.

Well, okay, now we're just assigning Drew homework, and we're posing a question with no answer. But yes, Drew, you were the one who wrote the Mario 101

article, a 101, a series of facts, 101 facts about Mario. Like I said, in that series, you are dispelling conventional wisdom. You're often examining questions that don't have answers.

And this is all at your blog, thrilling tales of all video games. Yes, blogs do exist. And Drew has one of the best new blogs on the market right now when it comes to retro games. Might be the only blog, actually. It could you, I mean, yes, ever since Legends of Localization came to an end, I think Drew was able to pick up that torch and carry it with this new discussion, these new explorations of video games. Well, you flatter me because I am only doing what I'm doing.

because Mado did such a good job with that website. And Drew, I did want to dig a little bit into this project before we get into your findings. We'll cover a bit of them, but if you want to read the rest, you'll have to go to Thrilling Talesable Video Games, look for the link in the show notes. So in general, what inspired this project, why the focus on Mario, and how difficult was it to come up with 101 entries? Was that always your goal? It was going to be the 101st post on the site, and then the process of putting this together took much more time than I thought it would. So I kept it at 101 because that seemed like a nice thing to call the piece. Mario 101 made sense because that has the other meaning of like basic knowledge.

And I did it because Bob, you will remember that some years ago I made a video of all the gay jokes on the history of the Simpsons, seasons one to 32. And it ended up being like a two and a half hour long super cut that got like millions of views and ended up being very successful for me and my podcast and got. a lot of people listen to my podcast. And I'm like, okay, I want to do the video game version of that for thrilling tales of old video games. What do I know a lot about? And it turns out Mario, because I've been playing since 1988, and I've accumulated a great warehouse of knowledge about it in my head. And I thought it'd be interesting to go through and sort of dive into the subjects that I've been diving into repeatedly since I started this website, which is stuff we think we know is actually inaccurate for reasons that are complicated

and basically telling people well you're actually wrong about this but the reason you're wrong about it is more interesting than you should be mad at me so just listen to why you're wrong and then you'll be right about it and hopefully have a fun story about it. People still do get mad at me however which is unfortunate

I will say if the creator of Mario can be wrong about his character's origins anyone can be wrong so we've learned ultimately from your series of articles never trust Shigeromiomio no he's a fabricator and a liar and just, I don't know what's going on in his head right now. He's becoming the Chuck Jones of Nintendo in his old age.

So, Drew, what was the research process like? And did you have to find any kind of surprising sources? It seems like you were sourcing original translations for certain things, too. I work with a professional localizer named Fatima, who is from the United States but lives in Japan and does this for a living. And she turned out to be the perfect partner in crime for this particular thing because she's willing to get into the weird, forgotten official Nintendo literature as much as I am. So a lot of it is digging up old documents and seeing how her translations compare with maybe what English speakers have decided those documents set a long time ago and then never really looked into again.

But other than that, a lot of it's going on places like newspapers.com and searching for like what is the first definition of Shigeru Miyamoto or. at Nintendo in like Reuters articles that ran into a bunch of national papers back in like 1985 or something like that. And seeing how things you're discussed then when basically no one had much of a concept of what a Nintendo was or how to talk about it

in a way that someone's grandma would understand. Yeah, it feels like at least within the past 10 years, I'm not sure if you guys agree with me on this, but there's been a focus on translating old magazine articles and interviews more than ever. And this is not, This shouldn't get to be considered news, but I guess it was never in English, and we didn't know it. It is news.

So so many new facts have been revealed simply through, here's a eight-page interview with the creator of Dragon Quest in 1991. Wow, there's so many things I never knew before. And groups like Schmoplations are bringing us these nice little nuggets from the past. Yeah, they've been, Schmuffelations articles were useful like maybe a dozen times in this project. So stuff like that is invaluable. Before we move on, Drew, I want to ask you about pushback on your discoveries. Has that been happening? One thing I love about your lavishly research articles you put so much time into,

often a response will be, uh-uh, and it's sort of like just a drive-by. Regardless of all the things you've sourced, there will be just kind of like a snoddy. I don't think so. That's not what I heard. But has any pushback happened? Has any pushback caused you to refine your thoughts on your discoveries? Yeah. I mean, I noted in the text of the very first item, but Chris Kohler had some pushback on that first item and had a suggestion for why Shiguro Miyamoto might be

shaky on the facts about how Mario got his name. And once he pointed that out, I was like, oh, you're right. I was sort of embarrassed that I hadn't even thought about that. And that was much more helpful than, say, the people who just read the blue sky post. And they're like, no, no, no, the story is, and then just repeat back to me the story I'm specifically trying to refute, which is like every single item I post on there. That's, that's great. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's the most common pushback I get. So we're telling people don't do that.

I, I, I don't believe. capital of punishment, but I will send you to a gulag for the rest of your life if you respond to my post without reading it. I'm starting to feel that way. Yeah. We're coming up with some bold political beliefs on this episode of Retronauts. Any questions for Drew about this series before we move on to the individual items? How many people have you blocked in response to this project?

I've been blocked. I've, I've, so at the suggestion. That's fantastic. So just one, just you, basically. Yeah. So at the suggestion of my podcast co-host and friend Glenn and my therapist and other people, I'm trying to be nicer to people online. And literally, this guy responded to something I posted.

And it was actually this. I was like, oh, actually, if you click the link, like, I explain all the reasons why that's not the case and I actually get into it. And I think it's a pretty cool article. And he's like, I'm not clicking on your website so you get money or something or you'll feel cool because you know stuff. This conversation is over blocked me before I could even screen grab. like his response and be like, I'm getting yelled at for suggesting that someone should read. And I guess the problem took care of itself,

because I don't have to talk to him anymore. But hopefully he's a listening to this podcast, and he knows that I think he's a dickhead. Yes, getting yelled at for encouraging someone to read does feel like a real 2026 vibe to me. Yeah. Like, yeah. It's like, oh, this is where we are now.

This is like, not even for something important. Like for something that's just like, it should be a fun. thing for people to spend time with. It's not like I'm asking them to do homework, although you guys had to read it. You guys were required to read it, but it felt like homework to you.

It's great homework for me because, I mean, a lot of these things are the conventional wisdom that I was spreading around on podcasts and articles where I realize, oh, there's a lot of contradictory information out there. And my response was not to get mad at Drew. My response was to think,

oh, I should change what I say in the future to reflect this new information I've discovered. Yeah, my response is generally just, oh, God, damn it. How many videos is that? but yeah no this this was not homework it was so much better than doom scrolling absolutely yeah so I want to get into Mario 101 and like I said go out there read the series because we're

only going to highlight a few items I wanted Drew to come on here present as information we can have discussion about possible answers for things that don't have answers or what we've gotten wrong in the past and I selected 20 of the 50 first items from your list drew and then we're going to come back for part two in a few months and discuss 20 entries from there as well so I want to move on to item number one and for every item I will play like a little sound sting so we know we're on the next topic here so item number one Mario may not have been named for Mario sagale so this is the origin story for Mario's name that I'm sure we've heard a billion times. If you search for it on Google, it'll be the top 500 hits. Everyone retelling

this story where essentially there are different versions of this Drew. But we've heard the story where Mario Sagale was the landlord for Nintendo's Warehouse in Washington, Nintendo of America. And when they're sitting around their Donkey Kong machine thinking, what do we call this guy with the hat and the overalls? He pounds on the door. He says, where's my rent? Because I assume he has an Italian accent. And when he leaves, they say, that's a lot. And when he leaves, they say, that's it, that's it, that's the name, that's Mario. And that is essentially the story that hasn't passed on over and over.

And it's a great story. But from what I hear, Drew, it's not true. For multiple reasons, it's not true. The telling of it is so, like, faky seeming and stage. And he even has them calling him Super Mario when they're naming the character, even though Super Mario would not exist for like several years after Donkey Kong

was released in arcades. It's just one of those stories that, like, anyone, I feel bad saying this, but I'm like, if you stop and think about it, you're like, this, this is, this is a made up story. And no shade to game over, the book by David Schiff. But like, I'm surprised that so many people who like work in this industry and like report on stuff circulated that story without ever second guessing. It's like this does not seem like a realistic depiction of how Mario got us did.

Yeah, it's very, it feels like it could come right out of that Tetris movie from a couple of years ago. Yes. it's extremely like huh that's the Hollywood version I mean it adds up for me in a way because it does explain his interest in coins but

I mean this has really torn my world upside down I don't know I think Saga would be mad if you tried to pay him with all coins unless they were gold coins and then I think he would get the idea but yeah we mentioned David Schep's book and I feel like this is the source of a lot of anecdotes that aren't necessarily true

and that's only because because for a time, this was kind of the only book about the topic of Nintendo and the history of the company. But now there are so many. And by the time I started hearing about this book and seeing everyone source it, it was well out of print. I don't think it's ever gone back into print since it went out of print like in the late 90. So it's been in circulation. It's come out with new forwards and stuff. I'm pretty sure that it's been in circulation in the current millennium for certain. I have a revised version of the book. I don't know when it was revised, but that's the one I have existing on my shelf somewhere here in my house. And he changes something, but not this story. This story remains.

Okay. I'll say I'll be damned because the last time I tried to find this, it seemed like it had been out of print for a while, but it's actually available on Kindle and other sources. So it is in circulation, and I'm wondering how much of it was revised since it was originally printed in 1993. Yeah, I feel like he's probably not going to go back through

and do a whole lot of work. My understanding is that this book was, I'm not also trying to throw shade on David Schiff, but my understanding is this was like the one time that Nintendo opened up to a journalist and, you know, kind of allowed them access to the inner sanctum and did interviews and stuff and the way it turned out made them say,

well, that's not happening again. So, yeah, I've always, you know, kind of taken it with a grain of salt, at least since kind of getting into the press and getting to know people like Chris Kohler who actually, you know, have spent time in Japan and have done a lot of research and reading of Japanese sources to make me say like, so, you know, maybe this isn't the clearest source, the best source. And, you know, Chris, Chris had a book 20 years ago called Power Up that kind of debunked some stuff in game over,

although it wasn't specifically focused on that. It was just sort of incidental. So we run with good people, is what I'm saying. Yeah. And according to your account, Drew, this was reported on in the book Game Over. And then later on the GameLife podcast

that Yiver used to have Don James former Nintendo employee pointed out, well, Sagale was a recluse, but it's still coming from him. And then, if you rewind in time back to 1986, we see Miyamoto being interview by the Toronto Star, and he is saying, oh, actually, Mario is named after a caretaker at this New York Hotel where a lot of Nintendo employees stay when they visit the state. So we have conflicting stories, a variance on stories. But by the time we get to, what's the year here? 2016, Miyamoto sticks with this pre-Sagale story, but then he starts repeating the Sagale story. So he transitions to the more popular story at some point in his life. And that seems super weird, but Chris did point out a very interesting exclamation for all this.

This is all information he would have been getting secondhand because he would have not been in the room when Nintendo of America employees decided to name the hero of Donkey Kong after Mario Sagale. That was something that happened in the United States. And Japan found out after the fact, then apparently was like, okay, I guess that's what we're doing then. And that might explain why Miyamoto's stories are kind of all over the place because it's hard. to remember the details of a story you were not there for. And especially if you're not as media trained back in the day as you might be now, you might be going into an interview like that, not prepared with the details of a story and needing to recall it on the fly.

And that might explain a lot. And I honestly do think that Mario was named for Mario Sagali. That makes the most sense. But I think the greatest takeaway you can have from this sort of weirdness is that sometimes Shigeru Miyamoto doesn't know what he's talking. about because he's the spokesperson for a giant company that's been making projects for decades that he's not necessarily always going to be keyed into and he's allowed to be wrong sometimes. It doesn't mean that he's a liar or he's crazy or anything.

It just means that he's a human person who doesn't have a perfect recall of everything Nintendo's ever done since he started there. Yeah, and then our next item has quite another different origin story for Mario's name. So let's cut to that one. So our next item, it's not clear what came first, the mustache or the Italian heritage. So yes, it's the chicken egg situation. Yeah, very existential question, Bob. By the way, non-Italian people can't have mustaches.

It's possible. I've seen it. I've been Italians without moustaches, by the way. That too. Their body resists the razor, but it can still happen. It takes one of those, like, machetes to really cut through the hair. Biologically, it's a struggle. But we all know Mario's design comes from limitations.

We've all heard the story. We don't need to reiterate that here. But we need to know how he became Italian. So, Drew, what is a story here, the mustache Italian chicken egg thing, where did the mustache inspire the Italianist or the Italianist inspire the mustache on the character? The answer is yes. Oh, awesome. According to Shigari Muramoto, there's two different versions of how this happened. For one thing, because Mario was given a mustache to divide up his face so you could have just a few pixels that could make it clear what part was his nose and what part was the mouth that they didn't want to draw, he had a mustache.

and that read as Italian for all the reasons that, like, you know, anyone's ever seen a pizza box has seen a stereotype version of Italian man who has a mustache like that. But in other versions, they always wanted him to be Italian. They knew this character was going to be Italian. And therefore, the mustache was incorporated into the design because they always had in the back of their head that he was going to be an Italian character. At least Miyamoto cited this particular illustrator who he thought was Italian, was actually Argentinian.

Mordio, I think, is how you would say his name. And Drew, you looked into this illustrator. and you found that, yes, his characters are known for their big potato noses, but you were not able to find any character of his with a mustache. Right. So that that detail came up in one of those, if it wasn't an Iwada ass, it was a Iwada astile roundtable, where people are just like recalling things from back in the day,

and it's a free-willing conversation, and people aren't necessarily double-checking all their sources because they're just reminiscing about stuff. And he does bring up Mordio, and that's how he remembered it. And I can see it why he would remember it that way. But no, Mordiou does not give mustaches to all his potato-nose characters. And then this leads to another origin story for Mario's name. Because Miyamoto is inspired by this designer, this cartoonist he thinks his Italian.

He thinks, oh, Italian, Mario is kind of an Italian name. So that's like origin story number five for the character's name at this point. So that is another question about Mario's origins. Let's move on to our next item here. And that is Mario's time as a plumber was shorter than you'd think. Because for me, I really noticed, and I'm glad you dug into this, Drew, that is really what people in the West are fixated on because of the materials surrounding the games. And I find it very interesting that the new movies, it's their time to start fresh with a new variant of Mario in a new format. They decide to stick with the plumbing thing.

They decide to stick with the super show origin story, even including the theme song to that cartoon. Right. Well, I think that's just because Chris Pratt belongs in a sewer. We can all agree on something. But yes, Mario and Luigi are never once described as plumbers in the original Mario Brothers arcade game. I'm guessing, I don't know what was the intention. Now that you mentioned it, Drew, with your article, it feels like are they exterminators in this game? Because that's essentially what they're doing.

Like they're pre-Stanley the Bugman type exterminators who are trying to kill vermin in the sewer. That does seem like what's going on. They're not doing any sewer work. But I guess the sewer setting. and then the fact that pipes are used as transportation in Super Mario Brothers led us to believe that it made sense for them to get to the mushroom kingdom via pipes and via doing plumbing work. And that's just not part of their origin story at all until later games put it in there

and sometimes even the Japanese games do do that. It's interesting that you mention Donkey Kong 3 because those games came out in the arcade like two months apart or something. They were really close together. And both of them involve a guy killing bugs. I don't know why they wouldn't have just put Mario in there, killing bugs and zapping Donkey Kong in the butt. And also doing the sewer stuff.

Like it would be consistent. It would make sense. It's like, oh, yeah, there's Mario. He really doesn't like bugs or monkeys. And, you know, now he's got two adventures where he's doing the same thing. And Stanley is just Mario without a mustache, essentially. The design is not that different. He's the non-Italian Mario.

Yeah. He could not grow a mustache. I can't either. So I can identify the Stanley. I've got my Northern European heritage and it's delicate hair and no facial hair. I feel like, so there is a Stanley item that is in the second half of these. And I, for the life of me, could not find any evidence for why Nintendo didn't think that Mario could do both jobs. Like, it's almost like they're like, Mario's busy with Mario brothers.

He can't be in the greenhouse fighting Donkey Kong. We'll have a new guy and he'll be just as popular. and they did try to push him as a new popular character they thought people would love briefly before they realized that no one cared about him and then dropped him forever. But yeah, it is a very weird choice that they didn't think Mario could do everything when he was designed to do everything. He was designed as a character who was like a Joe Schmoe who could have any blue collar job he needed in order to be the star of a game, which explains like why he owns a cement factory in that one game in watch title.

It seems like it would make perfect sense for him. him to be an exterminator plumber in Mario Brothers and also in Donkey Kong 3. I would actually argue that they moved him into his own game and replaced him with Stanley the Bugman because they didn't want his popularity and visibility to overshadow Donkey Kong, who was the marquee title character. And Mario was kind of, you know, taking off in a way. He was the star of the Saturday morning cartoon. There was a lot of merchandise around Mario.

And I think they wanted to create a separation. like Donkey Kong does his thing, Mario does his thing. These are both popular characters and now they're separate. So they can both be popular separately. That's kind of where I would speculate, but who can say with Nintendo? They make all kinds of choices that we have no transparency into. I like that theory. And I also think that for Miyamoto and Nintendo, Mario was going to be a basically Mr.

Game and Watch, but with more features because Mr. Game and Watch was their Mario stand in on game and watch, the character that can do anything. And Mario was intended to be Mr. Video, the character that could kind of star and everything. It goes back to like Tezica's manga, we had like a cast of characters. He could slot in. Even though they look the same, they could be different characters in different manga series. But I think that's why Miyamoto and possibly other people on Nintendo did not want to just pin Plummer on him because he was supposed to be versatile. And we'll see in the next item just how little Mario did plumbing or Luigi, for that matter. And if you look at Nintendo's official materials, they reference it in 2017.

Like, it said that Mario has worked as a plumber a long time ago. So they're just sort of dishing themselves from it. But then somebody sent this into you, Drew, there's a Super Mario Brothers Wonder, a bit of text on the loading screen that does say Mario and Luigi are currently plumbers, and that exists in Japanese as well. So perhaps that was to acknowledge what's going on in the very popular movie as well, just to say, like, yes, we acknowledge it here. this is what's happening with

Mario and Luigi and we can't really hide it anymore. I guess maybe they're newly plumbers? Maybe this is a new profession for them. It doesn't necessarily say that they've been plumbers the entire time and we just didn't tell Japan about it. They liked the sewer so much they thought back and were like, you know, we should try that again, but for real. I feel like certainly in the West,

a lot of our perception of them as plumbers comes from the Car 54, where are you commercial for the Atari game, the Atari version of Mario Brothers, which is like all operatic and stuff. And it really kind of paints them as looking like plumbers and a very plumber-like kind of milieu. And, you know, millions of kids saw that

and it kind of imprinted on us. So I feel like that really plays a big part in it. I may have never seen that commercial that you're referring to. Oh my gosh. It's an all-timer. It's a classic. I will look it up. Good production value on that.

I guess it was for the, was it for the Atari version of them? It was a 2,600, I think. Okay, I thought so. So let's move on. More talk about plumbing with our next item here. Mario has been seen working as a plumber in a video game, but only twice. Drew, this was shocking to me. I had to, like, pace around the room, get some coffee when I realized the truth here.

And it didn't happen until pretty late in the series. So Drew has identified two instances in the games in which Mario and Luigi actually do plumbing, in quotes here. So in 2003, Mario Luigi Superstar Saga, they are known as being famously plumbers, at least in the English localization of that game. And the Japanese version of this line does not mention their profession, but in both versions, they have to fix pipes to prove their identity. You're a plumber, you fix pipes, show us your Mario and Luigi. And then 10 years later, in Super Mario 3D world, that opens with Mario Luigi fixing a pipe to go to this new world that they're going to be jumping around in. So this is it. For 40 years of Mario games, they actively plumed twice.

Right. Never held a plunger that we've seen the most iconic plumbing tool that I can think of. They just never been associated with it. Maybe Nintendo doesn't want us to think about them in toilets together. I don't know. And Stuart, are you shocked by this news? A little bit. Although I've got to say, in Mario 3D world, it's a glass pipe, like a bond, right, basically, that they're fixing.

Right. So I guess they're bong creators instead. They're bong repairmen. I don't think that counts as plumbing, you know? I don't mean to be fastidious, but I think you're going to need to go back and change this one. I don't think it's glass. I think you're projecting. It's just a see-through plumbing pipe, which we have in America.

If you don't have them yet in England, that's on you. Oh, yeah, that's gross. All of our pipes are transparent. We want to see what's going through them. We want to see everything. It lets us track the fatbergs. Yeah. Oh, okay.

Fair play. Yeah, you want to be like, okay, I wonder where this is going. Uh-huh. Yeah. It's really fun. You guys, Britain should, Britain should try it.

I am going to maintain that it's made of either glass or crystal because the noise it makes when you, when you, uh, build the pipe. That is a crystal ting or a glass ting noise. I am going to stand by this one. Uh, throw me in the gulag if you have to. Well,

Stuart, I'm going to say that if you fix a bong that is shaped like a Mario pipe, you're a temporarily a plumber. You don't have your license yet, but you are doing plumbing work. So that's where I'm going to leave it. I think, Drew, you're trying to jump in? No, I was just saying, I was excited to have my first disagreement with Stewart on a podcast. I've been waiting for this since I started on retrognons.

But not the last. And then also, so we see in Super Mario RPG in 1996, there's a reference to Luigi wanting to be a plumber, a great plumber like his brother Mario. This is reverted back to the original Japanese expression or the original Japanese text. in the new remake of Mario RPG. So you can see that there is a decided effort to sort of pull back on plumbing as a whole with these characters. The original Japanese version in Mario, the text was not, did not mention plumbing in Mario RPG. No, that was the localized text that put it in there specifically because Western players would expect that.

A localizer who grew up seeing Atari's 2,600 commercials. I'm buying this, yeah. I have to admit, I am actually staggered that it's only in two games. if indeed it is two, like, in not just one, as I can tend. Like, that's crazy. There's been, how many Mario games have there been, like, 900?

Well, the pipes are, like, iconic for the series, and, like, it is, it's, like, almost there. It's just nothing that Nintendo has specifically ever said, the Japanese side of Nintendo has ever said themselves, really, until, I think, wonders, loading screen. Because going down a pipe and emerging into a cave, that's not plumbing.

Like, at, you. I'm sure some, surely some people will have said that that counts, but it doesn't. It doesn't count. They don't do that. It's an elevator, really. I mean, you're talking about it. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Okay. So we're going to move on to our next item here. Yes, Luigi was quote, unquote, similar, but that's apparently not the origin of his name. And yes, this is a great coincidence, but not the origin story in that the Japanese word, Ruigi means similar, but that's wholly unrelated to why Luigi is named the way.

he is. And I think, Drew, you recently dove into Luigi, the origin story of that name, which is even fuzzier than the origin story of Mario's name. We don't know. It's one of those things where we have multiple versions of it. The longstanding urban legend is that there was Italian there's a piece of place in the

Redmond Washington area called Mario and Luigi's, but there is no proof of this place ever existing. And that doesn't mean it didn't exist. This is something we can't prove at this point. And more recently in Japanese video game mags, Miyamoto and other people have said well if Mario was an Italian

name we had to give him his brother his own Italian name and Luigi is also a famous Italian name and that he just got it because of the perceived Italianess of these characters that's it yeah like what is the second most popular Italian name Italian stereotype name rather it would probably be Luigi in 1983

or whenever you're naming him that is definitely my favorite one of the theories is just yeah there's a bunch of Italian people called Mario and Luigi let's just call him that like whatever that's a decision off my own heart. It's, I mean, they're not wrong. You've charted this, Drew, throughout the history of the characters.

Luigi was similar at first, but then you charted how the depictions changed over time. And then Luigi in the artwork first depicted as different in a Famicom Grand Prix pre 3D Hot Rally, but then within games, not until Tetris or Game Boy, do we see different Luigi? No. And it's, it just, however the timeline works out, it just took a Nintendo much longer to decide that Luigi should have his own look. It's quite ridiculous. So any other Luigi thoughts, feeling conspiracy theories?

Do you have any other Luigi vibes? I do want to mention that even though he didn't look different for a while, Luigi was differentiated from Mario as more than just player two in Super Mario Brothers the lost levels for Famicom Dissystem, which was like early 1986, early to mid. So they started to say, like, this should be a different guy. pretty early on in Luigi's adventuring career. But then the American version of Mario 2 took it a step further by giving him his own sprite. And then Mario 3 undid that by making him a green clone again.

Right. Well, he was mama in the mother in Super Mario Brothers, too. He was the, yes, he was the mama. That is true. He's Mama Luigi. So she just had a different look than the father, who was just a stubby little guy. as mothers and fathers often do have different looks. I think you all know way more about Mario than me

because you're talking about like Mama Luigi and I'm like, what happened there? What did I miss a memo? There's many YouTube videos about Mama Luigi. Lots of scholarship has been done about Mama Luigi. We're going to move on though, Stuart, to our next item here. We don't know how Bowser got his name. This blows my mind because I did a two-parter for retronauts about Bowser

and I assume like, well, I'll find this answer somewhere. No, like with a lot of these notable characters, We don't know where it comes from, but there are some working theories. We know where Cupa comes from, and I went over that in that podcast series. But Miyamoto thought he was naming Bowser after a meaty dish, a meaty Korean dish, but he actually got it wrong. He was not up on his Korean dishes, and he named Bowser after a rice gruel, a rice soup that doesn't necessarily have meat in it. So Cupa stuck, and Cupa is still his name in Japan to this very day. But we know him as Bowser and Drew.

What are the working theories here behind why Bowser is the way he is? And by the way, I think you're dead on with number three on my summation here. My theory. Thank you. Thank you for validating me in this. Number one, people think that he was named after Bowser from Shanana, which is not true because we didn't start naming Mario characters after musicians and musical acts until Super Mario Brothers 3. It would be an outlier and kind of inexplicable to start this way back in Super Mario Brothers 1.

So I say that one's out. Number two, there is a Bowser style of tank that people assume makes sense because tanks spit fire in a sense. And so does Bowser. But the actual Bowser tank is a water tank, not the fire spitting tank. So I really don't think that one makes much sense either. I think as someone who grew up in the 80s and early 90s in America, I think it is a reference to the fact that a Bowser was an ugly person. like a Bowser like if like you were that type of boy you'd talk about a girl you didn't like as being a real Bowser which means she looks like a dog and there's these ideas of it being like a snarling angry thing which Bowser is and I would be shocked if that's not the origin of his name especially because it came from someone in the Nintendo of America office. You know, until collecting my thoughts, I didn't think that I ever met a dog named Bowser, but that's not true because I met a friend who told me the name of a dog he used to have, and he got this dog in 1990. The dog's name, Dugie Bowser. So Bowser was still in play, and he was not referencing the video game character. And I'm sure that reference was just more delightful as the 90s went on and everyone forgot what Dugie Hauser MD was. But yeah, Bowser, I think it went out with like the boomer generation, but at least up until the late 80s, early 90s, dogs were still being

called Bowser as a semi-common name. Maybe the existence of the character made it less popular or maybe just people moved on from Bowser, Spot, Fido, things like that. I honestly thought that Cooper, which I realize isn't the question here, I thought he was called Cooper because he looks a tiny bit like a kappa because he's got the shell and he's like green and scaly and everything. But he's not green is he anymore. But, and he's called like the Demon King, right?

He's like called Great Demon King Cooper. That's like a yokey. That's a demon or something. I don't know. I'm actually being just assailed from all sides by knowledge today. No, based on the Ox King, correct, Drew? Originally not envisioned as a dragon-style creature.

Based on the Ox King and then he sort of got blended with the shell creepers from Mario Brothers and was going to be a snapping turtle at one point. It's a whole evolution where he got ended up getting pretty far from the Ox King. Although the fact that he was originally supposed to be the Ox King,

Miyamoto has never said this, but I believe that that is the reason that he wanted to name him after a beef dish, which, like, he had, like, he talks about, like, the different beef dishes he was considering naming Bowser after, but he never explained, like, why are you focused on beef dishes? I think it was because Bowser was initially the Ox King. That's the only explanation I could think of. But, you're not wrong.

Kupa is a lot like Kappa, and I think the existence of Kappa in Japanese folklore have, especially with the Kupatrupas, shaped how they act and the way they, especially when they started walking upright on their hind-lawful. legs like Kappa Soft do. So it's hard to get away from that, but it just is not the origin of that name at all. What is what is Bowser's stance on cucumber? I don't think cucumbers have ever come up. I don't know if he's pro or anti.

Wart does not like cucumbers. We can't really use that. No. Okay. That's true. There are vegetables. Yeah. But we can't use that to determine his kappa-ness.

I don't believe so. I have learned they really scare cats, though, but you probably shouldn't do that. Don't try that at home. And Drew, I want to go over this real quick before we move on. In your research, you have found that potentially a lot of these early Mario namings came about through a third-party agency. But there's some, you know, discord over that, whether or not that really happened. I mean, it probably did happen, but tracking this down has been one of my many

white whales in this whole process. It initially started with Gail. What's Gail's last name? Gail Tilden? Right, yes. So Gail Tilden was the first person I asked you. about this. And I was like, okay, I'm trying to find who might have been the people that came up with these names. Can you give me any suggestions? And she gave me some names. And then I find those people.

And when they invariably said it was not them, I'd be like, who do you think did it? And I would just keep calling everyone who's ever worked for Nintendo of America between 1985 and 1995, asking them if they had any awareness of who might have come up with these names. I have nothing to show for this other than the fact that I've annoyed all these like elder Gen Xers and young boomers who have done 100 creative things with their lives and don't want to talk about Mario. Why not? I need to know where this came from. Why Blueber?

Why cheap, cheap? We need answers here. So we're going to move on to a shorter entry here. The Cupa Kingdom doesn't really exist in the games. And yes, Drew, you are correct here. Although we tend to think like, well, Bowser's got to come from somewhere, right? But no, it sounds like this was imagined up by Super Mario Brothers 3 based on the final level of the game. sorry, the cartoon version of Mario 3.

I'm not sure if I said that. So that is what's going on in the cartoon version of that game, possibly based on the fact that the eighth world seems to be where Kupa lives, or Bowser rather. Yeah, it's called Dark World in most versions of the localized game. It is called Bowser Castle or Kupa Castle in some versions of the game, but I'm not sure, I can't remember exactly what the reason is for that split in the way those things are named.

but even though it's called Coupa Castle, it's not clear that that's actually supposed to be like a Coupa Kingdom. The Coupa Kingdom is just something that like every adaptation thinks should exist and it shaped the way Western players view that last world. But it's just a space that we've never seen. The Coupa seem to be a conquering horde that just go from one place to another. Yeah, yeah. And you point out that in the Coupa Kingdom area of Mario 3 or Darkland or whatever it's called,

There are mushrooms present in the walk up to the final castle. And to me, it does feel like whatever space is the designated Bowser level of a Mario game, it's whatever he has conquered. So there's like a Mario World level with Bowser in it. And like his little clown car is floating around. It's like he has taken over that area. It doesn't feel like this is where Bowser and his children live together. And Mario just happens to invade that territory. Right.

Like in Mario World, it's called the Valley of Bowser, but he just arrived there fairly recently. I think he named it after himself. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, again, I don't want to be like hyperbodantic. I know that there's a place literally called Bowser's Kingdom in Super Mario Odyssey, but, like, isn't there? Am I insane? I thought that, like, one of the final areas was Bowser's Kingdom. Is this just made up nonsense?

Let's see. Oh, you know what? There is Bowser's Kingdom. But, again, it's not clear. This is, we're talking about something that's like eight years old versus. Yes. Actually, I think it's closer to, like, a decade old of this point. Oh, wow.

I'm old. Bowser's kingdom is that feudal Japan area. Yeah. Yeah. So this could potentially be like a past kingdom or, but this does not really fit Bowser's image for me. So I feel like he did invade this. I'm still going to stick to my gun. He decided it was his kingdom.

Yeah, that does sing like the sort of thing he would do. He's a dick. He really is. So up next we're going to talk about Toad and gender. So get ready for that. Here's our next fact. So Toad wasn't meant to be female, rumors notwithstanding. Apparently, they were depicting.

as female in the first Mario anime movie, thanks to people misinterpreting the sprites. They saw the vest and the belt as a bikini. So when Mario and Luigi meet the mushroom retainers in that anime movie that we covered on retronauts, they are bodacious mushroom babes. Perfect way to describe them. And was before this or possibly caused by this, Drew,

was there an idea that the mushroom people were all female? That I don't know. I don't know how to answer that. I can only answer what the, games depict, and the game only depicts the mushroom retainers and the first Super Mario Brothers, and if that's all we had to go on, maybe we thought they were all

female. I don't really know. It is interesting that in that Mario anime, you only see regular-looking toads in like what is amounts to like a cutscene showing Bowser attacking and like none of them in the actual story proper. Hmm. Okay. And it's important

to note that female toads don't appear until Mario RPG and I guess the sexual dimorphism is they have like toady braids hanging from their mushroom caps. And then Toadette appears in Mario Kart Double Dash in 2003. So it takes a very long time for, I guess, female toads to become canon. And even then, Todette's sort of like a Smurfette character where she's the only one. Like we don't get a whole lot of, there are some other female characters.

But in general, it's a bunch of male looking toads and then Toadette off on her own, doing her own thing. Which is just an odd choice. I never parsed Toad in Super Mario Brothers as female. It always just seemed like a weird little dude to me. So it's interesting that that was kind of like spun into some people's minds. And there is like an alternate version of Mario canon in which he is basically why the last man. It's more popular in Japan, though, because of the anime. So the ambiguousness of the pixels in the mushroom retainer sprites made a lot of Japanese

gamers think that they were supposed to be female because that's what the anime did without realizing if the anime was just like being like, we don't know, like looks like girls to me. I got a shitty RF connection on my Famicom and this is kind of what I'm guessing on my 7-inch TV. Basically, yeah. And yes, we're going to move on to another Toad gender item here. So Toad laughs at your quaint notions of gender. So official Nintendo sources have yet to gendered. In fact, they refuse to.

By Toad, I mean the Toad, the Toad that we play as in the Mario games. There are lots of Toads. Frankly, there are too many Toads in the Mario RPG games, thanks to Nintendo's mandate. No original characters that aren't Toads. But the Toad that we know and love, unclear. Gender unclear on that. They use He Him pronouns, just to be clear. Okay.

They do use He Him pronouns. Okay. They do, but they also have a background with Toad where they're like, well, it's a little bit more complicated than that. Yeah, I guess maybe if you're thinking of a gender binary, If Toadet implies that Toad is male, but you know, we all know a life can be more complicated, right? Agreed. Yes. But thanks to a quote from a Captain Toad producer, this got spun into the idea that Toads can choose their own gender at some point in their lives.

So the actual quote from this producer says, quote, this is maybe a little bit of a strange story, but we never really went out of our way to decide on the sex of these characters, even though they have somewhat gendered appearances. And for whatever reason, the person reporting on this, the subheading of the subheading of. of their article said, Mario World's Toads choose their own gender characteristics, according to Captain Toad's producer. So that's quite a game of telephone that that quote turns into, no, the Toads decide. He just is remarking, isn't it funny how we never thought about this? And yet they seem to be gendered in some way. So yes, no real answers here.

What I assume happened is that maybe someone who wasn't the writer of that, the conductor of that interview wrote the headline based on what they were interpreting in the text. And I've actually reached out to the bylined person on that piece more than it wants to be like, hey, do you remember what happened here? And I've never gotten a response back. So I wish I could tell you what was going on there. But I would like to know if it was like background info that they were paraphrasing that actually did come from the Nintendo employee or if it was just like a supposition they threw in after the fact, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, often if you're working at a big site, I think this from IGN or something like that, Drew, something like that. You often are not in control of your heading or subheading.

They often are going in, touching those up before they get published, edited heavily. And often the person who wrote the article is not responsible for some of the things that get blowback or some of the things that attract attention in those big sites. So, yeah, I have thrown this out here too because I assumed it was the truth. I never saw the original quote until I read it in your item here. So yes, as far as we know, there's no chodes. Like the chodes don't choose their own gender as far as I know. But Drew, you went into a lot about toad and gender in a separate article that's independent of the Mario 101.

Yeah, there's just a lot there. And they do actually, I mean, there is a quote from someone saying that the toads do actually choose their own gender. Like the implications that they're all sort of non-binary and then decide if they want to be male or female. But even then, that is a Western audience taking a Japanese Nintendo employee's quote and pushing it in direction that may not be exactly what that person meant it to mean when they said. that it? It's... I see. But some people need to know before they finish their fan fiction. I mean, I say follow your heart

on this one, people. Make the art anyway. It'll be good. It'll be sexy. Everyone will love it. And in the wild, the way mushrooms are produced is disgusting. We don't want to replicate that in the Mario universe. We want it to be like, how humans have sex, yes. Yes, exactly. That's what we're looking for.

So we're going to move on to another entirely different topic. The localized English games have a peculiar aversion to the princess's name. And yes, Drew, you have discovered that they rarely ever use Toadstool within the game. So you, like the two instances of the Mario Brothers plumbing, you found two instances of Toadstool within the in-game text. One is in a letter in Super Mario Brothers 3. The other is when she is called Toadstool in Super Mario RPG. But it seems like based on your research and based on the quotes you're able to find, Miyamoto did never like Toadstool.

And in retrospect, it's a crappy name, I'll say. Because you just think of a thing a Toad puts its butt on when you think of Toadstool. Toadstools are like grosser mushrooms, just like toads are like grosser frogs. It's got the word stool in there. It's disgusting. Thank you, Stuart. I was wondering what was disgusting me in particular about that. Yeah, I mean, I think that not to get ahead.

You know, it's mentioned obviously in Mario 64 and then is immediately followed by Peach. And I think that's like in Sonic Adventure where Robotnik calls himself Robotnik, but Sonic calls him Eggman and then that becomes his de facto name. Sorry for bringing up Sonic and Mario 101. No, I think it's actually a great parallel talking about like long-running properties where characters have two names and Eggman, Robotnik, Peach, Toadstall, and Bowser, Kupa are three different ways they've evolved over time. It's actually surprising that they allowed Bowser to still be Bowser, even when they decided to make Toadstool be peach.

But apparently, yeah, Miyamoto just hated the name Toadstall and rightfully requested that be changed back. You know, he has some things right. And Stuart, can you clarify here? I've always been curious about this because, yes, there was a line in the sand drawn at some point when Robotnik transitioned to Egg man officially in both regions. But then the movies came out with Jim Carrey as Dr. Robotnik. So it was weird that they walked that back after, I don't know, 20 years of trying to teach us. No, his name is Eggman.

Call him Eggman. I don't really know the exact reasoning for it. I would just speculate that obviously it was Eggman in Japan the whole time. And obviously in a similar vein to the Mario cartoon, they went, that's stupid. Let's call him Robotnik. It's a really cool name. It is. It is a cool name.

And then, of course, the transition happens in Sonic Adventure, and then he's just Eggman from then on pretty much. Sonic fans, I know I'm probably wrong about some minor thing. Please don't message me. And then, of course, it doesn't come up again until Sonic Generations, where they have little robotic as well as Eggman because of the whole history thing. And there's even a joke in there where he says, like,

nobody calls me that anymore. And then I guess when the movies came around, they reverted to type because they went, no, we're not having him called Eggman. that's stupid. It's refused. I've never seen these films, but I'm looking at screenshots now in Jim Carrey,

even in his Eggman makeup, or sorry, Robotic makeup. He's not an egg-shaped man. They made him a rather svelts, Dr. Robotnik. He becomes progressively more egg-like as the series goes on. You know, unless you revile Loath Sonic, which I suspect you may, which is fine.

He's a loathsome creator. I would recommend those films. They are better than the Mario films. that's not saying a lot but yeah even though Galaxy wasn't it wasn't a terrible time

I enjoyed doing it for this podcast we were all kind of okay with it yeah yeah so yeah that is the story about Toad so let's move on to talk about some enemies in the Mario world here

so the gumba is in fact a mushroom another mind blower so their name in Japanese means chestnut guy so kudibu is the name of the gumba in the Japanese version of the Mario games.

But they originally were intended to be walking Shitake mushrooms. But I guess whoever was drawing these, perhaps it was Miyamoto, perhaps it was Koji Kondo, who knows who it was? Not Koji Kondo, but Tezico. Maybe they drew it and somebody said, well, that's a chestnut and that's what stuck. Is this the story you were developing

there, Drew? Like, you're working theory for this. No, that makes sense to me. I'm not quite sure how someone could see like a little guy with like a stem and be like chestnut because it looks like a mushroom to me. But yeah, there were people on staff who misread the pixels because pixels back then were very hard to parse, apparently, and decided it was a chestnut, and that's how it got its Japanese name. And then there's been a whole spinoff of, like, further Gumba biology that has sort of made it canon that there is a chestnut version of these guys as well.

Yeah, the original Gumba Sprite is kind of hard to parse, at least for me it was, because to me as a kid, before I even knew what it was, it was clarified with like Mario 3 and Mario World, I thought it was a walking birdhead. There was a birdhead marching across the screen, facing the screen with little feet growing out of its base. Did you go on to create great Gianna sisters? No, is that what

they rolled with? They have owls. Okay. Yeah, maybe this is a common misinterpretation of the graphics, but not until Mario 3 when they were able to give them more definition that I realized, okay, this is what this is supposed to be. Interesting, because, you know, it's a game where there's mushroom imagery everywhere and I saw these little guys that look kind of like mushrooms walking around and I just assumed

like, oh, it's a mushroom but it's bad. And it never struck me that it might have been something else. I did mention one time in a conversation back when I was at OneUp.com with Bill Trinin from the treehouse who frequently acts as Mr. Miyamoto's translator. I mentioned something about, you know, just kind of a glib remark about coupas, you know, or sorry, Gumbas, are they, are they, Are they mushrooms or chestnuts? And he just like quietly and very, very seriously said their, they're, they're mushrooms. And in a way that seemed like he'd have been asked that before. Is that what's going on?

I don't know. I feel like it's one of those things he sees floating around in the either and it's just like, oh, not this again. So even though I was just kind of like making an off the cup joke. He was just like, we're not doing that. We're not certain eating this. This is making my head spin again because look, I'm sorry. I feel like I'm putting a dunce cap on every time.

when I bring anything up here. I apologize for that. That's my role I'm playing today. We brought you it as the goofus of the show. Thank you. Yeah. It's generally the same as usual. But,

walking shatake mushrooms, okay, or a chestnut, right, I get that. But chestnut mushrooms exist. And they look kind of like gumbas, right? So why they just split the diff and say it's a chestnut mushroom, and then everyone's happy? I think it's too late. Wait.

So in Super Mario World, there's the stemless gumbas where it's just like, it's a round ball with feet. and those are they're just called Gumbas in the initial release but in Japan they've always been Kuri Bon

instead of Kuri Bo and they literally are supposed to be chestnuts So that was their way of fixing it Yeah to me it feels like they were leaning into the chestnut design where After the first game the Gumbas became more mushroom-like Just because they were able to define that more and more

But then they realized they were stuck with the chestnut name in Japan so then they decided let's make a really chestnut like Gumba and lean into our original mistake or our original choice to call it Cudibu. There's also persimmon Gumbas. They're the ones that have like, they look like a fu-you persimmon and they're new. And I can only, I feel like there's a mad scientist somewhere in the basement of Nintendo who's like brewing up like new unholy concoctions that like combine mushrooms with other

produce for evil. I don't know. It's a very strange process they have there. Interesting. Okay. Well, yes, who knows what future, who knows what new Gumba's the future will bring us? Let's talk about the actual name Gumba, though, with their next facts. So the Gumba's Western name may not be a reference to Italian culture. I'm putting on my dunce cap now and my head is exploding because this was truly shocking, Drew.

I assume, like many people, Gumba is related to the kind of New York flavor of Mario Brothers. And of course, gumba means like friend, pal, but you only hear it in negative context like mafia. Like, oh, there are a couple of gumbas and they're hanging outside of a club and flipping coins in the air or something. So, but this is not apparently where Gumba probably comes from. Well, so Gumba in Italian-American culture could be a positive thing where you would use it for someone if you are of that culture. But you might take offense to it if someone outside your culture calls you that. It's something like that, if that makes sense. but there is

Gomba is a word that's used throughout Eastern Europe for mushroom. So like the kind of mushrooms that are like the white mushrooms that you put on a pizza, if you're in various Eastern European language zones, there's just called gomba. And that seems like a much more likely origin of where this word comes from than anywhere else. But you might think it's a double pun, Bob.

Yeah, my own theory is they were working way too hard on this and they discovered a double pun where it's both gamba and gumba where it is a kind of like a mushroom thug in a way and I feel like that's probably one of the most inventive names if that's the origin story to this character. I think that

I mean they're called gumbas yes in the first game I think they're called little gumbas specifically which to me really sounds like this guy in his little gumbas you know I am going to stand by the Gulag story that it really is just this gumba

but it just seems too good for it to be correct the pun I don't think they're that good at it yet I do want to give them I really want to give them credit because the fact that like gomba some version of gamba it means mushroom in many different languages is very to me that's a big smoking gun for this origin story. It would be the cleverest name anyone in the Redmond office came up with

anything for like these early games, honestly. Maybe, yeah, because most of the time they're like, I don't know, spiny, that's fine, right? Wouldn't they have called them like Italian for whatever chestnut is then? Hmm. Well, they're still mushrooms. They are still mushrooms.

Ultimately, they're still mushrooms. So, yeah. So we do have to move on before there's even more arguing about this. Let's move on to So the P on the P wing comes from the original Super Mario Brothers enemy. And Drew, this is in line with how in Mario 3 a lot of the abilities are based on enemies and what they can do and Mario can co-op those.

But also it's based on how in Mario 3 there are a few instances in which the enemy name was not translated in the item, and this is one of them. It wasn't translated, although you think it would have been translated, it still would have been P. So the Japanese name for the paratrooper is Pata. It's the noise of flapping wings. So yeah, it's the same letter no matter what. So this is actually just one they didn't have to translate. But the reason the P's on a P wing is that it is the wing of the paratroopa.

It is as if Mario has ripped the wing off the paratroopa. Put it on his own back and use it to fly himself. It's pretty gory, but it happens in the game. Yeah. And even though the enemy is called paratroopa and you use like the shoe of the gumba in the Hammer Brother suit, I never associated this wing with the paratrooper turtle until you revealed what this item is called in Japanese. It's just like the wing of the paratrooper, is that correct?

Yeah. Or the wing of the patapata? That's, I can't remember what the Japanese word for wing is, but yeah, that's how it's listed in the Japanese instruction manual. And it makes sense because there are so many enemy items in that game. And we wouldn't have to think about it if we're dealing with the English version of the game because there's so many P things in Mario. There's like P switches and the pow boxes.

There's just a bunch. P can stand for, there's even the P meter. in Mario 3, which is the thing that you charge up to allow Mario to run. So it would just be another P without necessarily think it stood for anything in particular. I always thought it was directly connected to the meter, because whenever you have it, the meter is permanently flashing. I always thought it was like power or something. This is a Galaxy Brain podcast.

Is that what the P stands for in the power meter? It's actually Pada Pada Pada. No, I think it is power meter. I think even in Japanese, it's power meter. What a flawed game. I think they need to find a little, a little, Some other Roman letters, I think, are in order here. Yeah, I never made that association.

But I will say that Mario is much better at using their wings than the actual turtles are. Because he just like takes off and he flies over the stage and he's gone. They can only like fly in little back and forth patterns or balance a little higher than usual. You think they would just leave. It's kind of gruesome. Like he steals, he rips their wings bloodily from their bodies and then uses them to better effect than they do with their own. their own anatomy. That's pretty brutal. He's got a job to do, dude.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe Marys Marrior Aerodynamic. Maybe he can get more velocity for takeoff with those big, strong legs of his. The turtles can't really do that. Okay, we're going to move on to another item here based on an enemy, and Nintendo may have lost track of which fish enemy was supposed to be called Cheap Cheap. So in Japan initially, it seems like there was a distinction between the two kinds of cheap, cheap enemies. Universally for us, it was just cheap cheap. But in Japan, there is Puku Puku, which are the original Mario Brothers guys that, you know, swim underwater, jump out of the water. And then

in Mario World, we have Buku Buku with a B. And these are the little guys who are green. They wear masks and patrol back and forth between areas. So they are the ones wearing the little scuba masks. And things get messy from here in a way that was hard for me to summarize without essentially just rewriting the entire article. So maybe Drew, I will, I will put this on you unfairly as the host of this podcast. Can you explain what's going on with the Buku Buku and the Puku Puckoo and the Cheap Cheeps and the various mishmashing of all of these different terms in animals and creatures? I, okay, so I have the piece open in front of me right now, and it is a really hard thing to summarize because it's a lot of very pedantic

distinctions between enemy behaviors that are not made in the U.S. And I guess the easiest way to explain what's going on is whoever is doing the localization was just like, we're going to flatten all of this. They're all cheap, cheap, so we're not going to make a difference with this. But in Mario 3, the cheap cheap gets placed, the name cheap cheap cheap gets placed onto a different fish. And we get through a period where the fish that look like the Mario 1 cheap cheaps don't act like them anymore and vice versa. And it's something it takes the game years to go get around to fixing. By the time we get to Mario World where we have playable cheap sheep's driving go carts for some reason, they finally fixed it. And they look like the beautiful orange

globular fish that we all come to know and love. Does that work? It does work. Do we want to speculate on the cheap, cheap name? I mean, I guess they are kind of bird-like in some ways. I mean, they fly. They're bird fish, right? They fly, yeah. They can sort of have beaks because that's how they draw their mouths.

I, yeah, that's the only explanation I could possibly think of for why they decided to name that. Also, it preserves the repetitiveness of the Japanese name, Puku Puku. They have wings, like rather than fins, right? They pretty much look like wings to me. And a mohawk, if that's relevant. They don't draw them with wings. They just fly. Yeah.

Yeah. That's as, as clear as I can make it. I mean, that's how flying fish do in the real world. So it's within bounds. It is an accurate portrayal of flying fish, as Jeremy points out. Yeah. And it's like, what if a puffer fish was a bird? And that's the answer is the cheap cheap.

They're supposed to be pufferfish. Oh, puffer fish, yeah. Fugu? Fugu. Maybe it's just the eaten version. I'm not sure on that one. But the only other thing I would point out is that there's another version of this in Super Mario's 3 where you have like the big version of the Cheap Sheep.

And there's that level where like he can eat you. Like you can be big Mario and you're standing on lion and the fish just jumps out and swallows you hole and you lose a life. And you're like, oh, I didn't know they could do that. And then there's a different version of it who exists in underwater and it spits like baby fish at you. and it's an identical sprite, but in the West,

we separate those into Boss Bass, the boy version, and Big Bertha, the female version. And in Japan, they don't make any gender distinction at all. They're just the big,

cheap, and I think it's really interesting the way that, like, interpretations go a lot of, a long ways to push us into understanding these characters in specific ways

that they necessarily weren't meant to. And then the live action Mario movie, they said, what if Big Bertha was a large woman in a tight-fitting red dress in this inappropriately erotic scene in this film. In a cheap, cheap red red dress, however. Oh, yes, yes, cheap, cheap red. It's the right color.

Yep, yep. They did their homework and then they decided to do other research. Throw away their homework as soon as they did it. Yeah. Okay, we're going to move on to more enemy facts here. Blooper's Japanese name came as a result of Bowser's, and you were pointing out throughout these articles, Drew, that Miyamoto had certain categorizations when it came to naming enemies. There's like a food series, a repetition series, and Bluebird belongs in the food series along with Kupa, his original name for Bowser.

And it's a play on guesso, which means squid, so I guess it's guesso with a little bit of a glottal stop paws in there. And it does feel like even in the original Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers, a lot of this is steeped in like Japanese pop culture, Japanese culture, because in Japan, especially then compared to America, they are eating pufferfish. They are eating squid. I feel like it's still hard to get squid in a grocery store here, like, especially the snack kind. But these are more familiar food items for people living in the East compared to living in the West. Yeah. And that's all there really is on this one is that you're getting, you were getting a tiny bit of Japanese culture without really realizing it because we wouldn't have the context. And in doing my own work on this, I did notice like, oh, I always thought it was blooper.

But I guess there was a blooper, blooper discrepancy for a very long time until something happened. But it still feels like it's not quite. settled yet. But on the Japanese or on the wiki, it is blue per with a P. Yeah. Yeah. I remember the way you did as well until I read this and I was like, oh, I guess I just remembered it wrong.

But clearly, people didn't do it as well. I'm positive that they were called blooper in the Super Mario Brothers manual for NES. Yeah. So now the, I guess the blooper is the one that makes horror games and the blooper is the one that swims around. Yeah. And I guess, I mean, to me,

a bluber with a B feels more like anamotapia for like blooping up and down in water. Sure. And blue per with a pea, like I already know what a blue purr is. So it just makes a little less sense to me. I don't know. Yeah. And, you know, it's kind of like blubber and squid have that sort of rubbery, blubbery

texture. So to me that makes perfect sense. But what do I know? I am curious, though, how much influence do you think the Mario team and maybe it was Miyamoto took from Dragon Ball in terms of naming? because Dragon Ball, you know, Toriyama really loved to name his characters after food. And also around the same time that Super Mario Brothers came out, Goku met the Ox King in Dragon Ball in the manga.

I'm just curious if you think there's a correlation there or if it was just one of those like, oh, yeah, it's just like, you know, Japanese culture and mythology. It's just in the air and it's going to show up no matter what. As far as stuff that Super Mario Brothers lifted directly, from Dragon Ball. The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is that the best explanation for the origin of the clown car, which debuted in Super Mario World,

is that it's Vegeta, is it, Vegeta or Vigida? I'm not a Dragon Ball person. I believe it's Vigida. Like vegetable. Yeah. Okay. His flying vehicle that he rides in that series allegedly inspired the one that Bowser uses.

As far as the food name thing, I would love to do a history of like food names in Japanese pop culture and find out, like, is this something that Dragon Ball invented? Or is this something that just became one of the more popular examples that we also came to know of in the United States? And I want to write that piece. That is going to take a lot of research. And I will write that one day. But, yeah, like food names is something we just think of as being a frequent Japanese thing,

even though some Western places do it as well. I would love to know where that actually started. off the top of the head, I don't know. It's a chicken egg thing because I've noticed that in Japanese stories, Japanese media, especially for children, they're really big on theming more than Western works. When it comes

to naming characters or when it comes to giving character certain colors or signs or designation. So I feel like that could be just more of a focus on storytelling in the West, but it could also be heavily inspired by the popularity of Dragon Ball. So I'm not sure which came first in that case. And then there's Lakitu.

Now, Drew, this makes me go insane. because potentially there is no origin for this name. It just seems like nonsense. It does not indicate what this enemy is, but you have an interesting theory that I think is possibly true. Can you talk about Lakitu in his Japanese origins and where you think his American name came from?

So I don't think this is my theory. I believe this came from Legends of Localization, or at least that's where I found it. I'll have to double check his post to see if he might have been the one who came up with it or if he's just repeating it. But the idea behind who you call Lakit, and I still call Lacketoo because that's how I pronounced in my head and I can't quite make sense of it,

is that his name is a sort of anagram for Tukwila. So if you take the letters of Tukwilla Washington, which is where the warehouse was, and which is very close to a lot of the Nintendo of America action, you can basically spell Lackatoo. You have to take one of the letters out. And that sort of anagram is actually very popular in Japanese names, the names of Japanese characters where you're taking the syllables and rearranging them because that's how it works in Japanese.

I think it makes sense. And I think a lot of people who play Super Mario Brothers just assume that Lakitu is the Japanese name for this character and he's the one Super Mario Brothers enemy whose name wasn't localized. He retained his Japanese name. That's not true. He has a different name in Japan. It is an American invention.

But for the life of me, I've not been able to get anyone to even say like, yeah, I have heard that. Usually when I'm explaining this to them, it is as if they're hearing it for the first And they're like, that makes sense. And I'm like, but you didn't hear it before this. They're like, no. I'm like, I've never heard it before this. And to me, that is the only theory that could make sense.

Otherwise, it is just picking letters randomly or just drawing scrabble tiles and seeing what you can do with this enemy's name. And none of the other enemy names in Super Mario Brothers are just like made up random letters. There seems like there's a plausible reason for all of them. And sometimes it's a very obvious reason. I always pronounced it Lakitu because around the time Super Mario Brothers came out. this is really stupid, but Elton John's Nikita was very popular. So he was always singing Nikita is it cold.

And I kept like interjecting Lakitu in there. But I think it's supposed to be Lockheedoo because in Paper Mario the thousand year door, there's the henchment or like the companion character you can get. The Lakitu or Lockheetu whose name is Lockheed Lester, which I think is supposed to be like a pun on lackluster. So that only works if you pronounce it Lacketka. Lester. Yeah.

I never thought that his name sounds like Lachlester until right now. I just thought it was an embarrassing, dumb name, and that's why he goes by Spike. He's like, everyone calls me Spike instead. I never thought about that. But, uh, okay, yeah. Okay, Bob, sorry, go ahead. I forget, like, I feel like I've heard it recently in some Mario Media where it was Lockheedoo, uh, maybe the movies or something.

But yeah, it does feel like, Lakitu could be wrong. I think you're right. I think there's some announcer who's like, LeKito wins. And I was like, what? All right. Hmm. I've looked into this before on a very sort of casual basis, and I wondered if Racky 2 with an R might be something because of reasons.

It's a great shopping site. There is an island called that in New Zealand. It's probably not that. But also it's a name that means of the sky, apparently. But I have no idea to what extent that is made up by people on the internet. If you go there and there are turtle people in clouds throwing things at you, then we have a winner. We have an origin story. So the original name for Lakitu is Jujemu, which is based on a Japanese folktale about a boy with a very long name.

And Jujemu is the beginning of the boy's name. And it goes on for like eight different lines. And then one element of that name is what he throws from his cloud. I think it's Pipeau. So it's all part of referencing this folk story. But I'm not sure if you came up with this, Drew. I've heard someone posit that a good localization for this guy would be Jinkleheimer because John Jacob Jiglheimer Schmidt is our one Western kind of folk song about a guy with a really long name.

It's not quite as long as this Jujemu thing, which again goes on for eight lines. And I wanted to paste it in my notes, but honestly, it's way too long. That is not me. I hadn't thought about to write down, but you're not wrong. I do know that, like, I can't remember what Lackalester's Japanese name is, but that is also pulled from that same Japanese policy. poem? Is it a poem? Is it just a name? It's a story, but you have to recite the name. So I think the skill of the storyteller is being able to remember the name. Right. And repeat it over and

over again. So there's been multiple occasions where they have to have like a special, particular lackitude character who gets a name. And they go back to that and pull a different set of syllables. And they've used it many times. Well, I'm going to pitch Nintendo on Jingleheimer and he throws Schmitz at people. I like it. Better than Spineys. Yeah, I think so. As far as I'm concerned, the enemy is called Independence Day.

That's another working theory. Drew, can you add that to your article? Sure. I'll put it in right now. Please, too. We're going to move on. We have a feud left to cover here. So the Mushroom Kingdom has a complicated relationship with Alice in Wonderland.

So initially, Miyamoto was not really shy with his inspirations when it comes to Alice in Wonderland. Yes, of course. We've all read the Alice in Wonderland. We've seen the Disney movie. We know what happens in it. And yes, it's no coincidence that things in Mario are relating to things in Alice in Wonderland. But he gets a lot more sheepish about it over the years.

And you have a few quotes in your piece, Drew, where the first quote early on, Mima was like, yes. Then later, it has some coincidental similarities to this story is what he eventually lands on later. He sort of just keeps pulling out of it. And if you read the first thing, he never actually quite says it. as explicitly as you'd think. It's sort of stated elliptically, and I don't know if that's a result of the translation or what, but I'm pulling up the quote right now.

We thought, what if he can grow and shrink? How would he do that? It would have to be a magic mushroom, where the mushroom grow in a forest. We thought of giving Mario a girlfriend, and then we started talking about Allison Wonderland. That's the quote that is in Businessweek. And that is not actually saying

that he's basing the mushroom on, the one in Alison Wonderland, but there's no other pop culture precedent for a mushroom that makes you grow and shrink. And there's not another, like, it has to be from that. And then every subsequent interview, he's stepped it back a little bit further where he's like, no, no, no. It actually didn't come from Alice to Wonderland. But there's not any reason why a mushroom would change your size, honestly. Yeah, and it feels like, I mean, I was incorrectly paraphrasing. Sorry about that.

But when he said, and then we started talking about Alice in Wonderland, I feel like the implication is. And then we decided, like, what else is in this story that we can draw from? That feels like what is being said there without, just implicitly to me. That, I think you're correct. But it is interesting when you actually look at it. It's like, he's actually not saying that. And I actually kind of wonder why the translator would have translated in that fashion because it is so unclear. It's a, I think it's a clunky translation, if I'm being honest.

So we're going to move on to a related fact here. Let's hear it. No, the Super Mario Mushrooms are probably not inspired by real life psychedelic one. So I'm going to say obviously, but I'm glad, Drew, you're laying it out here because we have to keep repeating this to people because I feel like, what were you guys smoking when you came up with that? They were eating rotisserie chicken. They were not actually doing the drugs that you think this game is referencing. But eventually, it's weirdly enough, Nintendo changes the design of the mushrooms to appear more like the quote unquote magic mushrooms we might be familiar with through pop culture. Not those, actually.

So the magic mushrooms are psilocybin, which look like brown little pieces of bark. that's how we I actually, I've never seen them growing. I've only seen them in dried edible form. But there's the Aminita mushroom, which is a different kind of mushroom that will fuck you up, but it's a different sort of hallucination

that you get with psilocybin mushrooms and the way that the mushrooms have been drawn basically from Mario 3 on look almost exactly like those. But it is probably just because that is a charming way to draw mushrooms. Like it's a very cute mushroom. It's like your grandma's stereotypical idea

of what like a cute forest mushroom would look like. Yes. And I guess if you're not old enough to remember this, it must be stated that mushrooms were like a very popular element of design in the 70s and 80s. If you have a grandma that would be a grandma of someone our age, you probably wander through a kitchen with mushroom designs on everything on like the cutlery, on the plates, on the oven perhaps. Yeah, my sister-in-law is obsessed with 1970s kitschy designs.

You know, she's 40-something. but her her kitchen is just full of that kind of woodland mushroom stuff. And then she's got just cabinets of it in her, in her basement. So yeah, that was very much a thing at the time. It was probably, you know, embroidered on some sort of brown canvas. Yeah. Brown canvas being the primary medium of the 70s.

As we're experiencing like stagflation in that era of America, we're looking to Europe and looking at the more rural things happening in the past. and envisioning, like, what if there were giant mushrooms and little gnomes? And wouldn't that be great? I think that's the, were that, why that was so appealing in that time period. That and just, you know, the whole Earth Day hippie Mother Earth obsession. Yeah. Like, that was just very on trend, very much part of the collective consciousness.

Can I ask about the others in Wonderland thing? Because we're on a related question. Oh, yes. I mean, the white rabbits, they're not originally white, but you chase the white rabbits. Right? That's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, uh, Wonderland thing, isn't it? Unless I'm misremembering this story quite disgustingly. You were talking Mario 64? Yeah.

They're yellow in that, but then they become white rabbits. And I just wonder why is Miyamoto denying this? Which even more associated with Ellis and Wonderland than the mushrooms are. Well, so my guess, and this is just purely a guess, so like don't update a Wikipedia page based on what I'm about to say, is that I feel like, um, there's a certain seediness to a lot of more modern takes on Alice in Wonderland, where we think of it as being like a headbook. Like it's a like everything's a drug analogy.

And that is very much not Nintendo's style. It's very much not, it's not something that would fly as well in Japan as it would in America. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why Miyamoto and maybe Nintendo in general want to put a little bit more distance between themselves and Alice and Wonderland because they don't want to encourage the drug metaphor. What do you guys think? I sort of, I mean, I get it. And I feel like I'm being bandic and I'm sorry.

But like Mario Wonder is the most drugs of all of the Mario games. It is. It is. Well, the interviews I have with Miyamoto's trying to step away from Alice in Wonderland, those are a while ago. He hasn't talked about it. Right. So like we're talking about the span of like 20 years or maybe we can get back towards something. But also, I mean, you have the touch fuzzy get dizzy levels in Yoshi's Island, which are very much

druggy, but at least then it's supposed to be in a negative context. I don't I don't really know. Someone who knows more about drug culture in Japan would have to talk about it, I guess. My own take, obviously drugs are a lot more forbidden in Japan than in America, but I also feel that people in Japan aren't naive.

But so much of the imagery associated with drugs is not as associated with drugs in Japan. Right. That's my own take, just based on what I've seen. There's like lots of psychedelic kid stuff and lots of media for kids. where it's like, oh, the character ate the mushroom that makes them laugh.

And that's, that's, like, innocent and not considered, like, a seedy bad thing. Because touch fuzzy get dizzy. That, to me, that is locked in. I mean, that, that, that Yoshi, he's tripping. Like, you could look at his face. This staggering around. Like, is it, alcohol, maybe? He's literally tripping balls.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I just find that really interesting. We need to get that Yoshi in the chillout tent immediately. He's having a bad time here. But, yes, yeah, I do like the discussion that's happening here. Let's move on to the second, the last. item.

Super Mario changed the meaning of the phrase warp zone. And yes, this is surprising. This changed the use of the term, which primarily before this drew was, I guess, a geological term. Yeah. It is a synonym for escarpment, which is also a word you may not know, but it is like a slope or a cliff existing between two chunks of land with different elevations. So basically, you have point A and point B.

one's higher than the other. And in order to get from one to the other, you either have a cliff jutting up drastically or like a gentle slope. And the warp zone is the difference between those two points. And, you know, not cool enough to be called a warp zone. I'll say that. No, it's a very boring.

I mean, it's hard to get exciting in geological studies, I have to say. It is kind of by nature a little bit of a quieter science. But as a result of science fiction in the mid-sense, century, you start having words like warp drive, which would be popularized by Star Trek. And that essentially changes the word warp to mean from change, which is what like the warp zone geological sense means to teleport. And by the time you get to Super Mario Brothers, you have what as far as I know is a completely original construction, I don't think warp zone on its own had ever been used in its own context before. But that's what they call

the area that allows you to teleport to another level as if I'm magic. And as a result of that, Warp Zone sort of takes off in American English having this new meaning. And almost immediately you see like very mainstream, I think it's a Newsweek article that I cite using Warp Zone. There's clearly not the geological sense. It's the Super Mario Brothers sense. And we had to make the geologists call their Warp Zone something else. And they're all fuming. the community hates Mario

in the way that they can you know in the very polite feeling I mean I was like seven when I saw this for the first time but I had never heard of Warpson but I think maybe we're all just struck by like what an enigmatic term it was and how it was like just a little clunky but in a charming way I don't know I think

in my piece I pointed out that it's an example of Bob you can tell me if I'm pronouncing this correctly Wasai ego is that sounds correct okay so that is when Japanese takes American words and put send it together in a way that don't exist in English. So power up, level up, and one up are all examples of this sort of construction, where those are our words, but they use them in an original way that was then popularized by the games

and then entered English with a new meaning. And Warp Zone might have been one of these. So it's kind of like the linguistic equivalent in reverse of us putting cream cheese in a sushi roll. Exactly. Something Japan would never do. But ours is kind of delicious, I have to say. It is.

I've seen them put cheddar cheese on a sushi roll, Jeremy, in Japan. What do you think about that? And what? You know, once they put cheese on curry, I feel like all bets were off. And corn on pizza. Anything possible over there. It's true. Don't knock it until you tried it.

It's pretty good. Now we're the pro cheese and sushi podcast at this point, although we're split now, 50-50 split. Stewart, what do you think? I mean, that sounds good. I would eat that for sure. Yeah, I mean, you can put cheese on almost anything, and I'd be like, hell yeah, let's go. It just makes it better. Anything that's not sweet.

I don't know. Maybe we'll talk about this. It's going to be a separate podcast. Cheese and gaming. In year 30, we will eventually reach this topic. Okay, we're going to move on to our last item here. Contrary to popular belief, doki-doki panic actually began as a Super Mario game. And yes, through your research, Drew, you discovered that it was originally a prototype

for a Mario game that was not Mario enough for Miyamoto. So it came in, Bob, your day of the tentacle book. That was Boss Fight books, right? Right. It's from the same series. So John Irwin wrote one about Super Mario Brothers 2 a while ago. It's a great book. I encourage everyone to give it a read.

And he mentions that I think the language he picks is specifically a follow-up to Super Mario Brothers. And it involves stacking blocks and vertical, traveling, traveling vertically up, which is, yeah, that makes sense. The game was that it would be two players trying to stack blocks and basically you're building a fort against each other and trying to reach the end. to the stage, instead of traveling left or right, you're going up. And this was the initial model for what might have been a sequel to the Super Mario Brothers. And it was not used, but it eventually evolved in a dokey, dokey panic, which eventually evolved in Super Mario Bros. too.

And you can see examples of this sort of action in Mari Brothers, too. There's lots of block stacking. And I think in Level 7-1, you actually have the block stacking where you're trying to travel up. And it's a one-player game and not a two-player game. But I guess Nintendo didn't like it. They didn't think it was interesting enough as is. And to be honest, it kind of sounds like a less active version of ice climber.

Yeah, it doesn't sound especially that fun because, Drew, you pointed out in your article that there is a level in Mario Brothers 2, the USA version, where you are stacking mushroom blocks. I always find that to be very tedious. But still, like, on a technical level, very interesting that they could do that on the NES. But it's not the most fun part of Mario Brothers 2. Right. Correct. But yeah, so a lot of people think of Mario Brothers 2, the Western Mario 2 as being something that's not a real Mario game. And it may not be because it was a hacked version of dokey, dokey panic.

But the idea that even that dokey, dokey panic did begin as something it was considered to be a follow-up to Super Mario Bros. I think puts it more squarely in the family. And as a radical Super Mario Bros. 2 apologists, this means a lot to me. Awesome. So I guess you could kind of say that Super Mario Brothers. was finally making a full game out of Stackup. Yeah, there you go. It was an apology, basically.

What if this were fun? Long-awaited stack-up follow-up. Unfortunately, they made it into a Mario game, and we were stuck with it forever. Okay, let me close us out with one more playing of this song. And we have now explored 20 of the first 50 of Drew Mackey's Mario 101. And of course, there's a lot more going on at Thrilling Tales of Video Games, Drew's blog. Again, check out the text description of this podcast.

There'll be a link to it. And Drew, like we said up front, Jeremy and I agree. Drew has one of the few remaining video game blogs in existence. That's actively being updated. There is a new service, by the way. I linked to it on my blog, but someone's made an old-fashioned webring where it's all the people who are writing about video games in 2026. We're in there.

Yeah, I believe Wes, is it West Fenlin who was part of that? Or at least he reached out to me about it. Yeah, so there are other ones out there. And it warms my heart to see people trying to make old internet happen again. but yeah, check out the site as it exists right now. You can read all 101 of these items in the original context. And I'm actually working on a part eight as we speak. And Drew will be back in a few months to cover some more Mario 101 entries

because there's a lot out there. I don't want to cover them all on here because I want you to go to his blog, of course. But I like the discussions that these are generating about cheese and sushi and Toad's Gender and other things like that. but Drew, yes, thank you so much for being on the show. Let's go around and do some plugs here. This is an episode that will be on the free feed. So I will do Retronauts plugs after we go around the room here and talk about everybody and what they're up to.

Drew, yes, you have Thirling Tales of World Video Games. Anything else? Where can we find you online? Gayest episode ever is my podcast that will probably have concluded by the time this episode runs. But I have a lot of great episodes of that, including two with Bob as guest. So you can check that out. And otherwise, I'm on Blue Sky, mostly talking about video games at Drew G-G-M-M-A-C-K. i.e. the other way you spell maniky.

And Jeremy, how about you? You can find me here on Retronauts and also on my YouTube channel, which I'm going to rename because VideoWorks doesn't really sing to me. So just look for Jeremy Parrish on YouTube, 1R in Parrish. And I've just completed the first year of TurboGraphics 16 and CD releases in America, which has been a lot of fun. I've really, really enjoyed digging into the system for the first time. and now I'm on to Color Dream games.

So it's a real, it's quite a come down. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Most, most definitely. And hey, Stuart, how about you? You can hear me on Retronauts. You can find me on Blue Sky, Stuart Chip. Don't recommend that, though, because I do just try and know my people a lot of the time. And I started doing this thing called Oath, which is like a PDF magazine games writing thing.

Basically, I realized that I couldn't use enough swear words in things that clients wanted. I decided I had to make my own magazine, which is full to the brim with them. So definitely check that out. I think it's pretty good. I think you need to find better clients. Any response to that, Steward? I agree, but I can't talk about it. Okay, okay.

Well, as for us as a whole, we are Retronauts, and of course we are supported by listeners like you. And if you want to be a listener like you, please go to patreon.com slash Retronauts and sign up for five bucks a month. It supports the show, and it gets you a ton of bonuses like a weekly. column in podcasts from Diamond Fight. It gets you all of these podcasts ad-free. It also gets you access to the two podcasts a month we've been doing just for patrons since the beginning of 2020. So that's over six years worth of bonus podcasts that are just as long and in depth as this one. So please check it out at patreon.com slash retronauts. And as for me, I am Bob Mackey. You can find me on Blue Sky, Letterbox, et cetera, as Bob Serbo. My other podcasts are Talking Simpsons. What a

cartoon. You can find those where you find podcasts or go to patreon.com slash talking Simpsons and sign up there for a bunch of bonus stuff as well. But that is it for this episode of Retronauts. We will see you again very soon for another episode. Take care.