Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 311: Tales of Toad

Episode Date: July 13, 2020

Just in time for another Toadstravaganza in the form of Paper Mario: The Origami King, Jeremy Parish joins Bob Mackey and Henry Gilbert to talk about the history of Nintendo's pluckiest little demi-mascot, Toad. He's the best! (Or so he says.)

This is a call to all Canadians. Can we please stop being so nice and polite? It's exhausting. And to be honest, it takes a lot of energy. And you know what takes even more energy? Being nice to AI. That's right. Turns out pleases and thank yous to AI.

It uses a lot of energy. So Kit Kat is asking Canadians to have a break from being polite to AI. Have a break. Have a kick. You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network, a collective of creator-owned and fully independent podcasts, focused on pop culture and video gaming. To learn more and to catch up on all the other network shows, check out greenlitpodcasts.com.

This week in Retronauts, I'm the best. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts, episode 311. I am going to give you the 311 on toad. No, wait, the 411. What is 311, guys? Tell me who you are and what the 311 is. 311 is. It's all about how guns are for pussies. I thought it was about the code for naked in public, wasn't it? Or is that like 182? No, I mean when you dial 311. Oh, I don't know. 4-1-1 is information.

3-1-1, what is that? It's just, oh, it's also information. So, yeah, we're going to give you the 3-1-1 on Toad. That's right. We've talked about Super Mario. We've talked about, I don't know, that Zelda guy who, like, does the stuff with the swords and things like that. But I want to kind of step aside. And by the way, I'm Jeremy Parrish.

Yeah, I don't think I mentioned that. I want to step aside and instead of looking at, you know, the main characters of this legendary franchise we've talked about, to look at the secondary characters. And the first of these episodes is about Toad. And specifically, I am tackling Toad first here with my friends, Bob and Henry. Did you guys introduce yourself? This is all blur to me. No, this is Bob Mackey, and I'm pulling vegetables out of the ground at an alarming rate. Fantastic.

It's Henry Gilbert. and all right. Yeah, so that's up at the stage. There we go. There we go. Yes,

so Bob and Henry and I are going to be talking about Toad because next week, if you're listening to this on the public feed, actually I think it's just a few days from the public feed publication of this episode.

There's going to be a new paper Mario game, origami king. And Toad is basically the selling point of the paper Mario game. And I know a lot of people don't like that, but I do. And so I want to celebrate Toad and what a great little character is because I don't think

people really necessarily appreciate Toad as a character or as a race of characters. It's kind of hard to know exactly what he, it they are. But Toad has been a mainstay of the Mario games pretty much since the beginning, since Super Mario Brothers, and has had a role that has expanded, the race of Toad. has expanded. We've learned all kinds of things about how sex and gender work in their race, their species, without getting weird about it. There's just a lot of information about these characters out there.

And yet, I don't think Toad necessarily gets the credit that he, she, it they deserve. You know, Luigi had the year of Luigi. There was a super princess peach, but there has been one game with Toad in the title, one game. And that wasn't really about the original toad that was some other toad who is a captain i mean he got promoted but some people think his name is todd and that that aggression will not stand captain tide yeah i mean this is the 35th anniversary of toad if we're counting mario one so this could be a year of toad

unofficially yeah though i mean the the year of luigi was the darkest year in uh nintendo history or what one of the darkest i think uh so maybe they don't want to risk it by been naming a year of anything for any character. No, I feel that by putting out a new paper Mario game, they are basically celebrating all of this toad, the totality of Toad, the toadality.

Yes. Because, well, we'll talk about it. But at this point, Toad is pretty much synonymous with Paper Mario and vice versa. And Mario is, of course, the main character there. But those games have really become about the toads. And I appreciate that.

But yeah, like I said, Toad has been around since Super Mario Brothers, since the first time you've finished World One Four, there has been a tiny Toad in your heart and in your life. And it is just a part of the fabric of video gaming. And like I said, not a lot of respect necessarily given to Toad. Toad is not even a playable character in Super Smash Brothers. And everyone is a playable character in Super Smash Brothers. So really, that kind of speaks to the degree to which this character is taken for granted. But this episode, is about not taking Toad for granted

and about celebrating what a cute little guy he is even though he has a super annoying voice in Super Mario Advance. Well, and every game after that, yeah. Well, it was at its worst in Super Mario Advance because those characters would not shut up. And after that, immediately Nintendo said,

you know, we got to dial it back a little, and they did. That was their kind of learning experience. It's a difficult game to play with the sound on. I definitely have theories about the voice when we get to that discussion. All right. I will look forward to hearing them. But first, we're going to go back in time.

But first, we're going to go back in time to 1985 in Super Mario Brothers, where you had to rescue Princess Toadstool, who was called Princess Peach in America. I don't know why they changed her name. And we'll talk about that in an episode dedicated to the princess. But once you beat Bowser at the end of level four, you found out, oh, there's actually like 28 more levels to this game. And this is not the princess here that I'm saving.

It's a strange little creature that kind of looks like a mushroom. In the manual, it was called a mushroom retainer. In Japanese, the Japanese manual, it was called, Kinopio. And Bob, you have some notes here about Kinopio. So I'm going to let you run with it. So in Japan, Toad's name is Kinopio, which is an anagram of Pinocchio, the Japanese pronunciation

of the classic character. So Kinoco is a mushroom, and Pinocchio is the character. So if you mix up the syllables of Pinocchio, you have Kenopio, and that's where Toad comes from. So when you see Toad and you're Japanese, you think, oh, I I'm immediately thinking of a little wooden boy. Who has a vest?

Yeah, they're actually pretty. And his little hat is kind of similar to, you know, classic drawings of Pinocchio, like, as was in that very unpopular film starring the Roberto Benini. That was the type of hat he wore her. The toe stool hat's kind of similar to it. But, yeah, I always forget he's Kenopio. And though I looked up that, like, even in, they stuck with it, too, this day. Like Captain Toad in Japan is, you know, Kino Pio Taicho. So that's, they, all new toads are still Kino Pio.

So that apparently is a race. In Super Warrior Brothers, Toad is just the mushroom retainer. The character you see at the end of a World Four castle stage after you defeat one of the fake Bowser's that turns into a turtle or a buzzy beetle or whatever when you destroy it. And you don't actually rescue the princess. till world 84 when you defeat the real Bowser. So basically, the mushroom retainer is like a placeholder. Like literally just says, sorry, Mario, thank you, Mario. Our princess is in another castle.

So basically just there to say, you thought you beat the game, but you didn't. And that was kind of a big deal because, you know, 32 levels in a game was pretty unheard of, 32 different levels as opposed to like 32 identical single screen stages for you to pass. So, you know, it was kind of like a, whoa, who is this little story? strange mushroom person who is a mushroom person that was not turned into a brick or a horsehair hair plant. It was one of the special mushrooms that was not insorseled, merely captured in a castle. Yeah, those characters, like, they're, I think already the most famous, one of the most

famous characters of Mario because people saw them way more than they saw the princess. Like, not everybody who played the Super Mario Brothers was going to get to the end and see the princess, but they probably at least beat the first world and find out that the princess is in another castle. And that is also one of the all-time greatest, like most known quotes in video games. And it's said by A toad, one of many. And back then they symbolized... It said by seven of them.

That's true. And back then they symbolized disappointment or like a trick being played on you. Like I thought I was getting a princess. Though, you know, for Miamoto, his games like, you know, Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. Like four levels, you have finished the story and you have saved the princess. So having a character appear at the end of what would have been a satisfying amount of unique levels in an arcade game tell you like, oh, you're not even, you're not even close to done. You got to keep going, buddy.

Like that, that was big news to a player then. Yeah. And you know, it's funny because I always in that original game read, Towed, as maybe supposed to be like a girl like, you know, I think I read retainer like in my mind I got that mixed up with like lady in waiting or something or you know

a lady of the court. So I always I always parse Toad as female until Super Mario Brothers 2 came along USA and there Toad is definitely presented as more masculine so it was kind of a surprise like oh I guess I misread that but then again I mean

you look at the Princess Peach Sprite in Super Mario Brothers and it's easy to misread her as like some sort of strange lizard person or something. Yeah, I was following the grammar of like cartoon character design that determines gender where Toad did not have a bow, but he had pants. He didn't have a shirt, but he had a vest. But if a character has pants and not really a shirt, that's a man. That's a man, baby.

Ah, right. As Austin Powers would say. But yeah, so it's just like when I saw that on the screen, I was like, well, that's a boy as a little kid. And then when I was watching the cartoon very soon after that, it was a man, you know, doing like a screechy pitched up voice. Yeah, you know, I don't think I played Super Mario Brothers original until after the cartoon had started airing. It's hard for me to uncouple those two from each other because I probably, I didn't, I was four in 86, so I didn't play it then.

So I think I'd already known that Toad was presented as mail in that. So that's, I just saw him as a guy in those games too. well Nintendo has in recent years come out and said I think this is like officially stated that toads just decide their own gender when they feel like it they're just these amorphous plant people and they can decide hey I want to be boy toad or girl toad or boy toad dressed as girl toad

so you have you know toad and toadad and then like Professor Toadsworth he's got a bushy mustache and so forth but it's pretty much up to them and they just decide like I think this is the direction I want to go with my life so he's a very progressive they are a very progressive character collective character a collective of characters when did that come out that's kind of one of the weird things about toad is that toad is kind of presented as a character a specific individual but also as like an entire race that looks identical aside from like the color of their spots yeah well that's also yoshi

versus yoshe yeah there's like the one board queen yoshi and then the rest of them oh it's Sorry, Bob, you were going to say. Oh, I forgot, actually. Oh, about the toadette and... Oh, I was going to ask, like, when did the news of the gender come out? Was there, like, a press conference or something? Or it just felt like a cheeky response. They did not have a press conference to officially declare Toad's gender.

It was, um, I want to say it was like two years ago. And it might have been in response to Captain Toad. And maybe, maybe with the Bouset crown. So I, as I recall, it was when Captain Toad was coming out on, switch. I don't think it was for the Wii one because I think that it was like the three of us played it and no one else did on the Wii. But for the Switch release, I think that was when they were doing some interviews and someone asked like, well, what makes a toadette different from a toad? Like how does that happen? And that's when, you know, through a translator, they gave the

explanation that's accepted now. Right. Okay. That's correct. Yeah. I was pretty sure it was something along those lines. Thank you for clarifying. Yeah, so Super Mario Brothers, Toad is the mushroom retainer. We didn't get Super Mario Brothers to the lost levels in America for a long time after it was actually initially released in Japan, but Toad serves the same purpose there. But then in Super Mario Brothers 2, USA, which, of course, as you may know,

was based on a Japanese game called Yume Kojo Doki Doki Panuku. No way. Toad becomes one of the main characters of the cast. You had Mario and Luigi, who were already playable in Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Brothers, the Lost Level. And then Princess Peach became playable, but also the mushroom retainer became playable.

And of course, those characters replaced their analogs or some sort of analogs in the Japanese game. They were based on some Fuji TV characters, et cetera. We've talked about this. But Toad, interestingly, they did not take the father figure character and say, let's make Mario the equivalent of the father from the family that was in dokey, dokey panic. let's take his attributes and transfer those onto Toad.

So you have this differentiation between the four characters. Each of them have different strengths and weaknesses. And Toad's weakness is that he jumps like crap. He has a very tiny short hop. But his strength is that he's very, very fast at plucking things. So if you want to go farm coins to play in the casino slot machine, you want to play as Toad. If you are up against a boss that you need to pick up things,

and throw at the boss, you probably want to play his toad because he can just grab stuff and immediately pull it over his head and chuck it. So he's tiny and he's made of fungus, but he's also very strong. Yeah, looking back on it, I think it's interesting they made, they made Mario the all-around guy instead of the short guy because, you know, he does have a super Mario form, but in Mario Brothers, it's more presented as regular Mario is short. So he could have been the short guy, but like this was the game that defined Luigi is taller than Mario as well

and more slender. Like this, this set a lot of style guide rules that even if the next games kind of tried to go away from that, they stuck on because it was such a popular game. More so outside of Japan, I think. I think it also defined

Luigi as his shape and his size, almost. I don't know if there was existing art, but I feel like that really cemented like here, because if you look, at like Mario Brothers arcade, it's just like, well, they're the same guy, except they have different mustaches, I guess. But in here, it's like, well, this guy's taller and can jump higher. Yeah, in Super Mario Brothers 2, the lost levels, they are still the same sprite, Mario

and Luigi. It's just that Luigi has slightly different control physics, so he can jump and he's a little floatier when he jumps high. But yeah, this definitely defined their morphology relative to one another. And then, of course, you have Toad, who's like this little short dude in a vest. And he's the only character who really kind of carries forward the Middle Eastern vibe of the original characters. You have Mario Luigi and Princess Peach, all of whom look like they did pretty much in the previous Mario Brothers games. But then Toad, even though Toad more or less looks the same as the mushroom retainer in Super Mario Brothers, definitely has, you know, with the vest and the the mushroom crown, which is kind of like Turbin-esque.

and the kind of poofy pants like he carries forward that Middle Eastern like Arabian Knights theme that was actually it's pretty much everywhere else in doki dokey panic and Super Marvelers too so he's kind of the only one who really fits into that world everyone else kind of feels like an interloper like hey

it's me Mario what the hell am I doing here well I mean those ninjas are interlopers too into the Arabian Knights theme so but I also wonder with that retainer stuff like where they originally meant is more like kind of a surf class of the mushroom kingdom who've now, you know, they've grown into their own

people with homes and whatnot. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if they were, obviously, I don't think there was a lot of thought put into it, but basically they were just like the sort of workaday people who worked in the court of the, the mushroom princess. So yeah, at that point, though, you turn Toad into an individual character. You do not play as Toad. It's not like Yoshi's Island where you pass baby Mario from one toad toad, you are a toad, a specific toad who has blue spots, like purplish blue spots in a vest. And that kind of becomes the character that you see presented in Mario media, like, you know, ancillary media throughout the rest of the 80s. And even now, you still kind of see toad occasionally presented as this one character

as opposed to Toad as the collective, like the plural for the entire species. Yeah, well, I like to imagine in the Mario world, you talk to Toad, and he'd be like, yeah, I remember fighting Wart. I went on these adventures. I'm the one who goes in all of the cart racing. That's me and only me, not other toads. I feel like also the Toads are more, it's more permitted to give them different names than it is to give a Yoshi a different name. like, oh, that's just, that's Bill the Yoshi, but it's like, this is Toadsworth, and that's, uh, there was Boshi. Well, yeah, I mean, Boshi was awesome. So he's a, he stands out. But, uh, like,

if you look at all the Mario RPG games, it's just like, all the toads have different names and they're like distinct toads. Well, to a degree. I mean, there's still a lot that are just toad. Right. Especially in the Paper Mario games, there's so many toads. And they're all just toad. There aren't that many who actually have names or, you know, specialization. or look different, but they all, they all kind of individually have their own, I wouldn't say personality that might be going a little too far, but each one kind of has its own little narrative when you talk to them. And, you know, some of them can have side quests or you'll return to them and they'll have different things to say that kind of follows on from what they said before.

So it is, it is really weird. It's like, maybe it's like a collective. You mentioned the Borg earlier with Yoshi, but I feel like, I feel like that might be more in tune with Toad and how Toad operates. There is like just this collective mushroom mind, the myocilial network, if you want to go with the Star Trek. They are a, they are a fungus. Well, as we, I mean, as seen in the live action film, the fungus do act as a group instead of alone.

Trust the fungus, right? Is that how it goes? That's right. I didn't even think to include the movie in these notes. Is Toad in the Super Mario Brothers movie? That is a gap in my pop culture experience that I'm proud to have. I'm going to see how far into my life I can make it without watching that movie. Oh, you got to see it.

But he's played by Buster Poindexter, I think, correct? It's, oh, man, it is a famous musician with this is Google Time, I think. I cannot recall the name of the musician. It's, uh... It is Mojo Nixon. That's right. Yeah. Yes.

Thank you. That makes sense. Yes. So Mojo Nixon, the definitive toad, uh, looking just. like a guy. Yeah, he's like, basically he's the naked cowboy of the Times Square in the Mario World or the Mushroom Kingdom of that movie. So, yeah, I totally forgot that their toad is in that movie.

Oh, yeah. We should all forget. And instead of the mushroom hat, he's got just like this pompadour. Right. I got to give it to the actor. He like shaved his hair into interesting way. I think there's little spots in his hair as well. Yeah, I think so.

Yeah. Sounds terrible. I'll take you guys word on it that it's amazing. Wait, that's not. No, no. Please check out my other podcasts. I did on that movie. Well, you know, amazing for a certain value of the word.

Kind of like fantastic or terrible. So, yeah, okay. So we talked about Super Mario Brothers 2, which was different in every region. But then Super Bowlby Brothers 3, we get the kind of reunification. and Toad is back to being basically just like a collective for Super Mario Brothers 3. There is a toad kind of functioning as a mushroom retainer for every king in the kingdom.

It's not just the mushroom kingdom, but all the kingdoms. Basically you go to the palace and the king has been turned into some sort of animal. He's been insorseled and Toad, every Toad freaks out about it and says, Mario, you got to save the king. So then you go to the airship and you save the king and Toad's like, cool.

But Toad also runs a house, a mushroom house along the way where you can play a matching game. Yeah, I was going to say, so there were hints of it in two, but Mario 3, Toad was all about teaching children how to gamble. Yes. Yeah, it trained a whole generation of kids how to gamble. I can just hear the music in my head right now of being in that house. And I always loved going in that house because it would be different sizes based on how you were on the world map. And sometimes Toad would actually be taller than Mario or as tall, I think. Yeah.

And also just you got to see a Toad house. Like this was the first time you were seeing Toad, a Toad, outside of their being in a castle. This was them just live in life. And they live in houses shaped like their own heads. Yeah. Yeah. It turns out that they like killed off the Smurfs and lived in their homes. Yeah, you're right.

It is just they stole the smurf houses. And they run gambling out of it. do after they do that, which I guess is legal in each of those kingdoms, the gamblers. It must be. I don't know. Have we called the Mario Vice Squad? They're cops. Who cares?

I mean, every free-to-play app is just a form of gambling now, but I was just thinking upon how, like, as a child, every Japanese video game I played had some form of, some form of gambling in it. Was that, like, morally correct to show that to me? I'm not a gambling addict now, and I don't gamble on anything, but still, it seems kind weird. It's just a cultural disconnect between Japan and America, okay? Just accept that other cultures have different

mores than us. I would know I loved in those old games. Well, because Japan is, you know, they are stricter on gambling than some parts of America. Not, I mean, you can't gamble in every state, but there are places known for you can go there and gamble, but Japan

as an entire country, they are very strict on gambling and why I mean, and then they build up things like Pichinko to live in those loopholes for it. Right. And I guess this is like a

Pachinko. Actually, he's very much like Pichinko because you don't get money from Toad, you get items. True, that's true. You give valuable items. You can take them around to a little stand in the back and trade them for money, right? Oh, and you can go to the secret entrance to at least two of those

where he's holding like a frog suit or a warp whistle. So I'm trying to remember. Was Toad in Super Mario World? I don't remember coming across Toad in Mario. You're in Dinoland, so I think... Yeah, yeah, I think... Maybe is he on the thank you screen at the end with all the characters?

I think he might be absent from that game. I think it's just Mario Luigi Peach and the Yoshis. I think it is. Yeah, I think Yoshi was meant to be kind of like the Mumbas and Final Fantasy 8 where they're like, we don't need Mughals, we've got these other guys now. Remember them? Oh, no. Okay, back to Mughals.

Yoshi totally dropped. It was kind of the same thing. Yeah, I... Yeah, the Toad, I mean, also they're far away from Toads are everywhere in Mario 3 because they're working in every kingdom, but you're in the rough world of Dinoland and the cookie islands. Like there's no place for a Toad in these rough societies. Were they trying to phase out Toad? Maybe. I mean, if you look at the 2D Mario platformers of the 90s, I don't think Toad is in any of them. He's not in Mario World, which was 1990, 91.

If you look at Mario Land 2, Mario Land 3, he's not in there. He's not in any of the Wario games. You don't really see Toad in a platformer, a Mario 2D platformer again, until Super Mario Advance in 2001. That's true, yeah. So he basically just skipped the 90s. Maybe they were like, he's in a lot of other games, but I think he just kind of got the phased out of the 2D platformers. I think once they landed on Yoshi, they're like, we don't need new characters anymore. This is it.

This radical dinosaur is going to be it for us. Yep. I mean, Yoshi's cuter and more marketable than Toad. Like Toad, I love Toad, but if I'm going to sell some stuffed animals, I'm selling more Yoshi. Do you want a dinosaur or this half-naked boy? Decide. Yes, I've never really liked Yoshi. So, I've always liked Toad more. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I've always liked Toad more. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. That's the weird. I feel like some sort of weirdo. I also don't like Frog from Krono triggers. what the hell green characters man I don't know you are you are Toasty frog though I know that's the weird thing

I don't get it maybe it's just like a jealousy thing professional envy anyway Toad showed up again in Super Mario Brothers advance as a playable character it's exactly the same

as Super Mario Brothers 2 except weirder and screamier but then he kind of finally got his do again in 2009 that's a long time to wait almost that's actually more than 20 years

since the original Mario, too. And New Super Mario Brothers, We, where there were two playable toads, yellow toad and blue toad, because they decided you can't play as a girl. So instead of having Princess Peach is playable, we're going to just give you two completely identical

characters who are our palette swap. Not visually confusing at all. For four players. No, no, not at all. No, absolutely great. They kept that same thing for New Super Bowl brothers, you, although the reissue of it gives you all kinds of weird addition like the...

That's where the Bousat crown comes in, right? For the Switch version? Yes. Yeah, yeah. So, uh, for... There's also the fake rabid character. Oh, yeah, the rat... Yeah, I love that.

Nabbit, right? Nabbit. Yeah, he's cool. He's fun. I'm rabid. Nabit. I wanted to do kind of a sidebar in his voice because we brought it up before.

So like, like with some other characters, I think Mario Kart 64 defined a lot of the voices. But in that game, uh, I believe it was Leslie Swan who did Toad's voice, just like a Nintendo employee. a localization employee. She was also Princess Peach's voice for a few years. That's right.

And in that game, she was just sort of imitating the Toad in Japan, and the voice was just like, I'm the best. It wasn't like screechy like we know it today. But by 2001, it was the very screechy voice. And my theory is, whoever was asked to voice Toad

in the booth at that time or wherever they were recording, it was like, what does Toad sound like? And then they had a foggy memory of those Mario cartoons. And I think, I mean,

for as little as it, any of the adults at that time watch those cartoons, I think that did inform the voice of Toad. The, the scratchy, high-pitched, kind of like wise guy voice of the three Mario cartoons, that definitely was an influence on the current voice of Toad.

So you have the intersection of the gravelly dude voice of the cartoon, of the D-Cartunes, and you meet that with the feminine voice of 64, or Mario Card 64, and in between it, I mean, that kind of gets back to Toad as the purveyor of Weish, you know,

Hey, Mario, the underworld life's a dream. You can buy money. You can buy liquor. You can eat a turn at the gambling table. Toad is a heavy smoker, it sounds like. Basically, yes. But yeah, like, it took just one more game to define Toad. It's like, no, we're going to go back to screechy Toad.

And then he has haunted our dream since then. I also, I double-checked this just. now I wanted to confirm that in Mario advance, and I think it was the same for the All-Stars version of it, they did give him his red dots again because I would guess just for color choices. He had to have blue dots because he had a blue vest in the NES version. But yeah, you only had three colors for your NES sprites, you know, if you don't count transparency. So kind of limited things. So by advance he at least had his accurate red dots making him the toad, we all know, and not this weird blue dot toad, which is then what they make the one in new Mario Brothers Wee is blue dot and yellow dot toads. Yeah, I don't even know where a yellow dot toad came from. What's up of that? Zed, he just likes color yellow, I guess. Yeah, it's unappealing. All right, so there were just a couple of other Mario platformers, 2D platformers with Toad in them.

one is Super Mario Run which we always overlook whenever we talk about Mario games and we probably shouldn't because people seem to think it's good I didn't really like it that much but whatever I had a good weekend with it

Yeah it was fun there you know Toad is a collectible in the game He's basically like a paper Mario Sprite that you collect and pick up In the Toad Rally I don't know if he shows up other places than that but I do remember the Toad Rally Super Mario Run was before Nintendo realized

like gotcha games and wifoos like that's where you get the money. Yeah. Because they're like, we're going to make a real game for this platform and people were just like, $10. I'd rather pay you $500 over two years to get every wife. I want to pay for this JPEG of my wife. Oh, mobile games. And then finally, Super Mario Maker 1 and 3DS.

Well, he's present in 2 also, but he's technically playable in Super Mario Maker 1 through the retro skins that you can get for Mario. So you can play Mario Maker as an 8-bit version of Toad, but only the levels based on the Super Mario Brothers one sandbox, the palette. So it's kind of a limitation, but you know, technically he is there. You get way more Toad options and two, like, and Toadad. Like it's, I really love, one of my favorite things about the Mario Maker games is when they reimagine characters that are newer in the color palette. and design style of the 1980, like Toadette in that style is one of my favorites.

Oh, so you can play as other characters besides Mario and Mario Maker 2. I've honestly never dug into it because I realize it would just be a time suck that I can't afford, but. Oh, yeah, yeah. You can play as them also there in the campaign as it is in Super Mario Maker 2, you are helping Toads and Toadets rebuild the Mushroom Kingdom, yeah. That part I know, but I guess I didn't play far enough to unlock other characters. I mean, not as many people did either, so you're, but it was because you could make multiplayer stages in the new Mario style as well. So they wanted to open up those choices as well.

Right. Okay, so that is pretty much it for Toad in the 2D Mario games. But he's had many other appearances, and some of these have been very kind of defining in terms. in terms of what Toad as a character is or Toad as a race or whatever, we're still kind of undecided on that. But I do want to step away from the games briefly because I do feel, like we've kind of touched on this, Toad's appearances in external media, non-games media, have been pretty influential on how the character is presented and kind of perceived by people.

Although I don't have a lot of experience watching these cartoons, so I kind of have rely on you guys, the cartoon guy. The cartoon guy. I wasted my life watching these. You are the cartoon guys. I was a latchkey kid. I admire it. I used to like watching cartoons and then I ran out of time to do it. I just bought a collection of

multiple Mario cartoons on DVD because they were like they were literally a dollar on Amazon. Yeah, I turned to the right people. So there's the Super Mario Super Show. That was the one that had Captain Lou Albano, right? Yes. There were live action wraparound.

in about like 15 minutes of animation. Pretty smart on Deeks part. They're just like, if we can just film old pro wrestlers in the same digi set, that can count as a third of an episode. Not a bad idea. Yeah. So what was, what was Toad's role in the Super Mario Super Show? Well, the Super Mario Super Show was very odd and bad in that there was no consistent reality to the world.

It was basically like retellings of either popular movies or fables or public domain stories with Mario characters. But Toad was always like the friend who was always with them. Yeah, yeah. He was pretty much the sidekick. Well, honestly, he's like a double sidekick because Luigi's already a sidekick. But, yeah, Toad was the extra sidekick. And his main jobs in most episodes, I think he occasionally got a Toad-centric episode. but mainly it was just to go like,

I don't know about this, Mario. He learned the meaning of Christmas, remember? That's, yeah, that is one of the most classic ones of him. He's like, you can have my present theater. Oh, toad. Well, oh, yeah, we just did a podcast about the Super Mario Brothers Super Show show podcast for the hard drive guys.

And the one we did was about, it was the lone plumber, I believe it was. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, and in that, there was a taunt toad, or what was the name of the toad? No, he was like a fast toad. Pronto. Pronto, yeah.

I mean... So there was more than one toad in that world. The cartoon people were left, I mean, they had to come up short because there were three defined human characters, but also what else is in this world? Well, a bunch of mushroom people. So they really played with that idea. So it's just like, we can do things with these designs and make them different characters, but you're not going to see a lot of human beings outside of them.

when you do, it's weird. I think to you and Deke, the producers that it were handed a list of things they could do to source material to pull from. I think they much more were interested in Mario 2 than Mario 1 because Mario 1 really is more of a solo just, it's just Mario running through. Yeah, there's not really much happening in Mario 1. And diversity of locations too, much more in Mario 2. So they leaned on that a lot.

though no Wart. Wart isn't in it. No, but there is King Kupa. And they at least took, I think it's, three is much more, the Super Mario Bros. 3 show is much more true to the game. But I think for Mario show,

Super show, they're just like, well, you go to other worlds in these games, so they can go to Star Wars World or Sumo World. The Mario 3 show is better, but it is explicitly more of a commercial for the product because the name of the show is The Adventures of, Super Mario Brothers 3. The name of the product is in the title.

And since it's all set in the Mushroom Kingdom are predominantly set there, you get a lot more Toads in there, though there is still Our Toad. And plus there's the apocryphal screenshot we've all seen of Toad in the Deke cartoon taking off his head. Oh, right. Basically, like it's a guy with a hat in his hand like, oh boy, I don't know. Did Toad go to that Millie Vanilli concert with the Princess? He was there.

Yeah, everybody wants to the Milly Vanelli Conce. That was a real episode. It's great. One thing I did discover that I think is phenomenal in researching for this episode, when apparently in the super show, when Toad collects a power star, a superstar, he doesn't turn into like a, you know, invincible toad. He turns into the Toad Warrior who is like a futuristic post-apocalyptic punk riding a motorcycle. But then when the star wears off, the motorcycle turns into a tricycle. I think that is just amazing. I love this.

I think that might have been limited to their Mad Max parody episode, which is crazy. Yeah, it could be. That they made one of those. But I wish that would have applied to every episode, no matter what they were retelling. Those episodes, they had to make up. Those are some of the most challenging ones, I think, for the artist, because they had to go like, well, what happens if a toad gets a fireflower? Because that didn't happen in any game. What happens if a toad gets a raccoon power up?

Like, these answers would come officially in the new Super Mario games, but they had to make it up on the fly in these, you know, non-canonical cartoons. Right. They had to make up their own model sheets. It's at least half an hour of work. They didn't do the best job. You know, their character designs, not as good as Yoichi Kotabe, I'd say. I have to say, as a budding young artist, you know, when I was like very little, Toad was a very approach. triple character in terms of the ability to draw.

So it's just like, I can draw like five circles and that's Toad basically. Oh, also doing the coloring book. I had, uh, I had a beloved Super Mario Brothers 2 coloring book. I think I had the same one where I, I remember coloring in the red on Toad's head in each of the pages. And then when I got Super Mario Brothers 3, I was so excited. I pulled out my old coloring book and I drew raccoon tales on every character on the page. so you made your own model sheets is what you're saying they should have turned to you

i was about as good as the deacon no i don't want to be too mean to that they were doing the those things on like eight dollar budgets they had no money they they basically were like you've got 10 minutes to come up with an entire model sheet for this character go our our friend uh who in the a friend of ours the animation industry he mentioned seeing like he got to see old storyboards from japan made for this and he's like these storyboards for a super show were amazing and then they turned into junk

because they just went to the cheapest most available animators on the color production they could but I would love to see those storyboards of like amazing anime level production on Super Mario Bros. Super shows for a stupid story

about being chased by a Arnold Schwarzenegger parody of some sorts. All right. So that's it for the cartoons. There was also a little, around the same time, the Super Mario comic system, which again, I never really read, but there are some famous panels of like Princess Peach dressed as Luigi, that kind of thing. I know Toad was in that, but having not read it, I don't really know what role Toad had. Have you guys read those? Oh, as a kid, I was down for any kind of Nintendo propaganda. I bought a few of these and they were just bad. Like when I was eight, I was like, I am above this. Get these away from me. Well, if these were the Japanese-produced ones that were in Nintendo Power, they were a little better. Oh, right. Yes.

Oh, they were so much better. And now those have been collected. So, I mean, just the Mario and Zelda ones. But, man, those are so good. Fortunately, no one has to read the valiant comic ones. The U.S. produced ones, those are shit. And as I recall, because when I say they were bad, I say that from experience because I bought each one I could get my mommy to buy me at the grocery store. But they, as I recall, the toad in those pretty much was just the toad from Super Show, like the same kind of just sidekick.

But not a consistent sidekick. It's just, oh, this is the toad in this castle who is telling Mario, like, don't eat that big meatball before you go swimming, Mario. It does feel like my entire childhood was a long con for corporations that turned me into a weep, just like, we're going to get this kid in Japan big time, video games, comic books, cartoons. He wouldn't even know they're from Japan. That was the whole Japan scare back then was that they were. were insidious. They were taking over. They were conquering America through our children. They were right. You know what? Those racist guys were right. David Schiff was on top of it. Every morning I get up and I

salute the rising sun. And then of course, you know, from Japan, there was plenty of Mario manga, including Super Mario Koon, the longest running of the series. And I know TOT is in there, but I don't know any of the details. But I expect to find out later this year because Viz is going to publish some compilations or maybe just a compilation translated into English of Super Mario Coon. So you can look forward to that. That rules. I didn't know that. I'm so excited about that. You could play as Mario Coon in the first Mario Maker. He's one of like the several

skins. There's so many weird skins like baby metals, the skin and like there's a million weird skins. But you see a lot of these images on Tumblr are used to when you went to Tumblr where they would get away with like more risque stuff because it was a gag manga. One of them is like, one of them is like, one of I remember is like Luigi being crucified and like inside of a crystal cross. God, right. Yeah. I post that every Easter. Just like these fun, uh, inappropriate

gags. But I love, I love gag manga. I love how it's drawn and the characters look so appealing in this. Mario looks so great and I love that it, the comic lasted for so long that you can, uh, I just knew them for the cover images. I, I, I think I bought one, uh, like one collection when I was in Japan and I've lost it. Uh, but the covers, you just see Mario Coon's general design would be the same

but he'd have the new power up for each new game that was coming out like in you'd have one with him with a super scope on the cover and then one with him with the wing hat and it would it would grow with Mario's overtime and apparently it's

still running I don't know if this artist has taken any breaks but it's running from 91 until now I'm looking at the volumes the most recent one is a it's continuing a Mario Odyssey story and it's volume 55 so like that's that's half as many volumes as one piece yeah that's wild i remember picking up a volume of this when i first moved to san francisco in 2003 i was like oh wow kino kuniya bookstore i can buy all this manga so i picked up a super mario coon that was

based on super mario sunshine and realized hey i don't read enough japanese to make gag manga worth it if it's not translated so then i didn't buy any more but it has kind of a really i would say kind of a crude art style. I'm not really a big fan, but it's definitely energetic and really leans into the zaniness of gag manga. Like anything, like, it's pretty much

no hold barred. Anything is permissible. Which I'm now shocked that Nintendo finally is like, you know what? Have it out there. Like maybe, maybe they finally got the memo of like, look, if it's only in Japan, people are still going to find the silliest drawings of like

Mario's butt hanging out or something and they'll see it anyway so you may as well make some more money off it i mean they they've done full frontal mario genitalia haven't they uh in the dragon yeah i think you're right and like similar to how like goku's uh genitals will be visible every now and then uh in that same comedic style i think like we basically we still as popular as manga is we only get like 5% of what's released in japan and i think we rarely get gag manga because if you're reading manga, your attitude is like, they're not comics, all right? They're mature.

So you can't get the stuff. Graphic novels, Mom. Yeah. So the stuff that's goofier rarely comes over here. Hi, we're Ellen, Stephen, and Mark. Hosts of Nice Games Club, the show where Nice Game Devs talk gaming and game development. Topics include programming, design, tools, and more. We also do interviews and one of our game jams.

Listen to Nice Games Club, wherever you get to your podcast, you get there. Or at NiceGames.com. Hey, Lassie, what are you doing here? Timmy's in a well Sequelcast 2 and Friends is a podcast Looking at movies in a franchise One film at a time like Harry Potter Hellraiser and The Hobbit

And sometimes the host talk about video games And TV as well And now it's part of the Greenlit podcast network Oh lassie We don't need to rescue Timmy He likes the well well enough I guess Darth Vader is Luke's father Lassey I told you to play off the spoilers

How does crazy taxi stack up against, say, papers, please? And what's the one 3-D-O-FMD game that gives Mario Party a run for its money? Find out on Hardcore Gaming 101's Top Games, where we objectively, definitively, and scientifically ranked the games you nominated for our ever-growing list. HG 101's Top Games, twice a week, every week, right here on the Greenlit Podcast Network. All right. So that is it for the end up for the ancillary media. But we should go back to the video games and to the platformers and talk about kind of the effect that the 3D platformers have had on Toad's personality. Yeah, that's right.

We're still talking about Toad. Kind of got sidetracked there. But here we are talking about Toad again. Because I feel like Toad was kind of sidelined in the 3D platformers initially. But then they really kind of gave him a new life and sort of redefined the character or the race or whatever. So, you know, Super Mario 64, obviously the first 3D Mario platformer, kind of like a horrifying hellish limbo space for Toad. You don't see Toads initially, but then as you're inside Peach's Castle, and you come near a wall, like a Toad will materialize out of the wall and be like, Mario, ah, we're trapped in the walls, this is hell. So you have to go rescue them.

Pretty horrifying. It's grim. Yeah, I feel like a lot of the Toad stuff, which we didn't really mention, but I think it's apparent. that a lot of the Toad stuff is just like a production shortcut. Like, we can just clone this character everywhere. There's no need to model or create a new character. And with that, it's just like, well, we don't want to have this character appear until you get close to him because of technical reasons. So I think that was another reason why they sort of just faded into existence as you approach them.

Well, because the castle is such in, you know, a big resource just building this castle that a character like Mario can explore. You can't have another free-form character just walking around. like Toad or Multiple Toads. Like he needs to basically just be a signpost who can appear and disappear within like three feet of where you walk by him. But at the same time, it was wholly appropriate because Toad was the mushroom retainer. So it makes sense that there would be a whole lot of these little mushroom dudes retaining, being retained, I guess, by the castle. It totally, yeah, I feel like it was a pretty clever workaround, you know, within the limitations, what's something. that actually ties back to the original

Super Mario Brothers. You look back in time 10 years and you have this little mushroom thing like hanging out in the castle being trapped, so let's do that. So next you had, oh, sorry. I was going to say he wasn't in the Mario 64 DS version because he

could have been a playable character, but I think because he already existed in the game as like a captive character. In that game, it was what, Mario, Yoshi, Wario, and Luigi. So, okay, yeah. So no playable toad in that game. I mean, by size standards, it makes more sense, too, of like, they're all kind of around the same size toad. You'd either have to have a tall toad or he'd

have a different hitbox and size ratio. So, though, looking back on that, I am shocked they picked Wario, because again, he is not an, he's not an EAD creation. He is an R&D2 creation, right? So that kind of inclusion of warrior shows how big warrior got. Yep. All right. So next up we have Super Mario Sunshine, where you have more diversification for the toads happening than you typically see in the Mario platformers. There were several toads kind of doing their mushroom retainer thing.

They were going on vacation with Princess Peach and Mario to basically carry their luggage or whatever. There's also a character named Professor Toadsworth, who I think appears here for the first time and doesn't really appear too often afterwards, but he's basically an elderly toad with a bushy mustache and basically provides narrative for the game. But they don't really have an active role in the game. They're just kind of around to talk and basically be part of the scenery.

Yeah, Toadsworth was invented in this game, and I think it was to give the Toad we know the more active role in the story, not in this game, but to free him up to be a hero, because now Toad's worth, even in the Paper Mario games, is like the Chancellor or whatever, right? Well, and like, or a good vizier. Yeah. Not like all those evil viziers we know, but a good vizier. Yeah, he's, I think, you know, Toad, if I, well, as we know about Super Mario Sunshine, like,

they wanted to tell the most story they ever told before. And so maybe they were feeling like, well, it can't just be any old Toad who's telling Princess Peach do this or do that or don't do this. Like, you need, you need somebody who has, you know, a level of respect and also who seems like an elder to Princess Peach, who's telling her to do things. And so they invent Toad Worse, which does free up classic Toad to have a much more like, but he's more divested from the monarchy, I guess you'd say. Is the proletariat toad.

Oh, yeah, they are the working class of the Toad. this this professor toad he's some fancy pants uh technocrat i say some some egghead yeah these eggheads bossing around guys like mario telling him to not bother the princess and eat eater cake but i also the toadsworth revealed that toads can grow mustaches if they if they so choose it's kind of horrified or maybe he just wears a fake mustache maybe yeah i you know that's his business So the next Mario 3D platformer was really, I think, kind of the big breakout moment for the Toad character and or race in modern Mario games, and that's Super Mario Galaxy and two, where you get the introduction of the Toad Brigade and Captain Toad, or Captain Todd, if you prefer.

And these are characters who basically have their own adventure. You don't play as them, and they don't intersect with your adventure really in a meaningful way. But as you're exploring all these different galaxies, you constantly encounter the Toad Brigade, led by Captain Toad, who are out exploring and basically doing the same thing that Mario does, but kind of on their own. And so they play this role in the story where they're just sort of out there and, you know, you kind of have a few encounters with them in terms of dialogue back on the platform, the main hub.

But then when you're out exploring, especially in like a Bowser stage, you'll come across one and they'll give you a star or coins or something or one up. So they're kind of doing their own thing and then just helping you along in the adventure. And it kind of gives you an excuse to, you know, have some other characters out there, familiar characters in the galaxy and also. a little bit of a, you know, a little boost for your gameplay. And it's a great concept and would, you know, would become kind of a mainstay of the Mario series. The Toad Brigade appears also in Super Mario 3D world where you have playable levels, like the first time

in a 3D Mario game, you can play as a Toad. And instead of being an action hero, Captain Toad solves puzzle stages. He doesn't jump. They kind of took that element of Super Mario Brothers two where Toad sucked at jumping and we're like, you know, we're going all in on this. He is the worst of jumping to the point that he does not even have a jump button. We're going to break his knees. Solving puzzles.

I like to think that mushroom cap he wears is very heavy. Well, I like to think Captain Toad's backpack is just so heavy that he can't jump with it on. I think that's like the end game like lore reason. But yeah, Captain Toad, that's on Switch now, right? And like 3DS? Is that a

thing too? Yeah. Wow. I think they're trying to shut. They're like, you can get this for like nine bucks on three days now. It was like one of the really fun, like little cute highlights of the Wii. I have a soft spot for the Wii. And I've just loved that game so much. It's just so satisfying and the perfect length, too. Just like, by the time you're done with it, you're done with it.

You're not just like, come on to, get on with it. I've seen, you know, the full expression of this concept. I don't necessarily need a sequel. I definitely don't need a ton of other stages. This was good, compact, very fulfilling. Yeah. It's one of the highlights of the platform. Well, and the visual motifs of 3D world are so strong, just like shiny, colorful, beautiful to look at building more stuff in that, you know, environment with that kind of art style.

And these are now these kind of, you know, diaramas, basically, that you walk around in and let you appreciate the visuals even more as as a little old Captain Toad wad waddles around. And while Nintendo was so invested. in 3D screens and stuff the entire game's premise was like you're trying to read a 3D world using a 2D screen and the difficulties involved in doing that as the challenge of the game. God, what a good

game. I got to crack back open my switch version of it and get to play in those new levels. Man, what a fun game. But yeah, the Toad's in Galaxy as well. Like Captain Toad you got to get so much more personality from them which you would get in

the side games but in the core game you didn't get all that much but when you would meet Captain Toad to the other Toad Brigade they're like I wanted to explore the world but I got scared oh yeah it's there's so much fun to them and they'd they would grow

over time this Toad Brigade of like these uh it also like the cute design of having the flashlight over one of the dots in his little head thing is is really cute too yeah the I I'm very happy they made it I actually told

them the developers when I interviewed them when they announced that that E3 I was like I was hoping you guys would make a solo game for this and they were nice and said like well we made it for you well yeah that was the thing about Storm Mario 3D world is that unlike the other

Mario 3D games I guess there was land also but unlike the others it didn't have kind of a free floating camera it was more fixed and everything did have this kind of isometric feel to it so the isometric puzzle design the 3D isometric puzzle design of the Captain Toad concept is just a natural extension of what they did

in 3D world overall, but it's taking it and saying, like, let's, you know, let's kind of put some boundaries on it and some limitations and use this visual style to take kind of the technology we have and the design we have, the physics we have, and use them in a different way. And it's really creative, you know, it's just a few, in 3D world, it's just a few bonus stages. But there was a enough there, enough meat there to support an entire game. And, you know, for the first time the character Todette, who first appeared in Mario Kart Double Dash, nearly a decade earlier, actually more than a decade earlier, finally got to be, you know, kind of a meaningful character besides just like a skin that you can play as a Mario sports game. So it's just a good, wholesome kind

of video game and really speaks to everything that is great about Toad. And, you know, you go on to Mario Odyssey and the the Toad Brigade and Captain Toad again have a role to play, kind of similar to what they do in Mario Galaxy, but with more defined roles for the individual characters, like Toadette has a role, the Purple Toad has a

role. There's a male Toad who gives you messages. And so each of this little Toad Brigade, each character, even though they're all basically pallet swaps plus Toadette, they are individual distinct characters. It's really great. Well, Odyssey's embracing a fully

embracing the real open world again for Mario, it meant that Toads now could operate even more as a goalpost as a thing to collect. You wouldn't have to meet a Toad at the beginning of the one star you picked and find the Toad like it would be more like you explore all around this dinosaur island and you'd find other Toads. And same with like the search for Captain Toad in each Mario Odyssey stage. One of my favorite bits of each New stage. Like, I would be the second I get to a new world in Odyssey, I'd be like, I got to find this Captain Toad.

It's killing me. So if you look beyond the Mario platformers, Toad has also had a huge presence in some of the other games. I think probably we should start with like the sports and other similar games along those lines, which of course begins with, you know, there was the golf game on NES, NES Open Tournament Golf. I don't think Toad had a real role in those. It's been a while since I've messed with them.

But Mario Kart, I think, Super Mario Card for Super Nies, is where a lot of the Mario characters finally started to get some definition beyond what you'd seen in the platformers. And Toad is, you know, was one of the major beneficiaries. And as far as I know, has been in every single Mario Kart game because they don't really drop characters aside from like Donkey Kong Jr. They killed my boy, Kupa, he wasn't back until I think Double Dash. Or maybe it was a super circuit. That's not a real Mario Kart game. Get it out of here. Yeah, no, boo.

But Toad, I think, is very appropriate. He is a, it is a lightweight character who has great acceleration, a kind of middling top speed. So he's great for beginning players to play as, because, you know, when you are taking a lot of tight turns, you tend to slow down a lot, especially if you're not familiar with the mechanics of the series. So he really kind of gives you a leg up if you are not used to handling on corners,

and turning. But the downside to Toad is that, again, his max speed is not very high. So once you get onto a straightaway, someone like Bowser or Donkey Kong Jr. is just going to barrel past you. And also, Toad is a lightweight character. So if one of those big characters runs into you, you're going to

go spinning off the road, and they're going to be like, you know, not even feel it. It's fitting for a... Basically Ben Toad's kind of role in the Mario racing games ever since. Yeah, no, I mean, that's fitting for Toad. that he'd get smashed around like that.

I do recall at a one event for Mario Kart 7 where I was playing against Nintendo people, they took it as a point of pride to play as either Toad and Toadette, and if they beat you, they'd be like, I'd beat you with Toad, take that. I guess he was always considered, him and Kupa Trooper were considered like the tier of beginner characters. So if you're like new to the game and they have the best handling, but like the lowest top speed.

Yeah, yeah, I got to say, I don't think many of my friends would play as Toad, like that, because he just seemed too blank of a slate, like you would pick, it would be the battle for Mario, usually, or if you wanted one of the heavy guys, then it would be one of them, but usually Toad was pretty low on the list of characters people would pick in my, in my Mario Kart 64 play time. See, I usually played as Toad, and it's not because I suck at Mario Card, although that's probably, probably true, but it's because, you know, I really identified with the character a lot in Super Mario Brothers 2. Like, I really used Toad all the time in Mario 2. So when it came to translating that into another game where Toad became an option, because you saw Toad as a playable character so rarely, I was like, well, hell yeah, this is my guy. Plus, you know, the way he celebrated by winning a race by saying, I'm the best. Like, that's great. It's so charming. Okay.

Yeah, Mario Kart, the whole Mario Kart series that opened up so much for Toad for the other games because, like, there's, for the same reason in Mario 2 slash USA was that they just needed more playable spots and he's usually like the fourth or fifth down the list of characters you're going to have after, I would think it probably goes Mario Luigi, Bowser, Peach, and then Toad's the next one there until Yoshi came along that shoved him down a slot. But, yeah, so it opened up a lot of possibilities for Toad. And then in the later, even in the cart games, when you need bystanders to watch stuff, like, you're going to surround them with Toads, or you're going to drive by Toads in, you know, the malls or the courts everywhere. Like, you need Toads just to fill out the space of the worlds they're building. And Toad has his own turnpike, remember? Yeah. Oh, yeah, he does. He's making money that way.

It's really interesting. Like, of all the characters, why is Toad the one who has like this advanced, you know, modern day Metropolis as his stage? Well, this has to be one very successful Toad of the many Toads who bought his own turnpike. So he's in the mafia. He's, you know, there's a lot of Italian talk from Toad in the Deke cartoon. So perhaps it fits. So Toad has also been in the Mario's Tennis series from the very. beginning. I know the, you know,

there were the Camelot games that kind of changed things up a little bit and were less about the Mario Pantheon and more about kind of like putting a role playing spin on it like with the golf games. But even back on Virtual Boy, that was the one time Toad was playable on Virtual Boy. Because Virtual Boy only

had five games. And that was the first Mario Tennis. The N64 one was the next one I think. It wasn't until the Game Boy Color one where they would do the RPG mode and that only lasted until the Game Boy Advance iteration. Yeah, every time they announce a new Mario tennis game, I'm like, you guys are still employing Camelot. Can't you just do this? But like, they only did those two because Pokemon was so big that they made the portable ones of Pokemon, basically, which is too bad. I mean,

the newer tennis games are still really fun. I had a lot of fun with the Switch tennis game they made. But I do miss the leveling up and also just going to tennis school. You have fun school storylines there the well I also in tennis and also the another I think other sports games Toad I consider him

not as a playable character because again I rarely played as him but as the rule maisters they would be the ones telling you like you in tennis that you would go out of bounds or that the game was over like or they'd be the the ball attendance

in some cases so they're like the judges in Final Fantasy tactics advance sure Not as... Rackets are outlawed in this match. Go. No hitting balls.

There's also Mario Golf I mentioned. What surprised me in reading about Toad's role in Mario Golf is that he was not playable until Mario Golf World Tour on 3DS. I had assumed that he was playable before that, but no. No, he was just a bystander, just a duffer, not a duffer, a caddy. I don't know. The person standing on the side, whatever you call those. Now, that's the one I really think of what I think of.

when I think of Toad being a Rulmeister, because whenever I'd hit out of bounds of that, it'd go like, oh, B, oh, B, oh, B. Like, yeah, it was very annoying. You wouldn't want to hit out of bounds or else you'd have to hear it from Toad. So basically, they're the guys who, they're the retainers of a golf course in the Marvel golf games. Right. So kind of similarly to Mario Golf, Mario and Sonic at the Olympics series, Toad was only a host in 2012 and was not playable until 2016.

Well, there was the doping scandal in 2012, so he was disqualified. And the only 2020 Olympics is Mario and Sonics, and I think, I believe Toad is pretty active in there, too. Yeah, I kind of skip all those, so I will take your word for it. If Cream the Rabbit is playable in those, then Toad better be. Yeah. You know, he's also appeared in games like Mario Strikers, Mario Baseball, of course he's a major presence in the Mario Party games oh yeah I just I just cannot

care at all about well they are for children yeah but well I got who like other humans yeah that's that's two strikes I played I played a lot of the first three yeah my friends like we we were right at the end of the honestly we at 17 were too old for it but the prankishness of it and the ability to be so mean to other players was actually very appealing to older teens like we were. This final mini game is worth a million stars.

It's like, oh, none of it mattered. Uh, oh, you hit the Bowser space. Everyone trades stars. And of course, at the end of the game, you get five extra stars for getting the most stars. So you won. Oh, but this person got 10 stars because they have the least stars.

It's more efficient to just sit down with a random number generator and whoever gets the biggest one wins. There, now there are some fun mini games than in Mario Party games. They're not, I've, I've never truly regretted playing a Mario Party game and there's worse games that try to be Mario Party. Like I, uh, I also want to shout out like the, our Pals of the Giant Bomb website. Oh yeah.

Their 50 turn, four hour, five hour marathons of playing a Mario party are some of my favorite videos they've ever done. And that's, that's how I remember like, oh yeah, toads are everywhere in that because anytime, usually a toad is a host. of something, or he'll say, like, welcome to this stage. It's this. Like they, they're very utilitarian roles in the Mario Party, uh, stages. Yes, and speaking of games that kind of try to be Mario Party, there's Fortune Street, which I guess has been around longer, than Mario Party, but it's all kind of like this highly randomized board game. I think only

one or two of those have come to the US, but there are Mario variants of it, and Toad is a playable character in those Toad appears in Super Mario Pinball Land, which is widely regarded as the worst Nintendo pinball game. But he does appear

on tables, and if you hit Toad with the ball, the being Mario, you can gain access to like special house, where you collect goodies. Tote appears in DDR Mario Mix, where he's basically like your accompanying dancer, I guess the equivalent of a dancing retainer,

like he does all your moves with you and shadows your actions. Oh, right, yeah. I think in the baseball and soccer games, like that was basically, they were just filler guys. Like, you can't have nine unique players on one Mario team because Donkey Kong has his own team,

Mario has his own team. So instead, it's like Mario and a bunch of toads. Like, they fill out the other nine spaces in the field. And there's one final sports style game that I want to give a special call out to, even though it's never come to America. And that is Excite Bike, Boon Boon Battle Mario Stadium, which is a four-part series of downloads for the Satellaview system in Japan. And during the Super Ania Super Famicom era, this actually came out very late in the era, 1997.

So they used Mario Kart 64 voices, voice samples, on Super Famicom. But the initial pack of playable characters was Mario, Luigi, and Toad. And then each pack would add new characters, Wario, Princess Peach, et cetera, et cetera. But it is basically just excite bike, but with Mario graphics, obviously, obviously, 16-bit graphics, a really kind of cool little weird thing that was only released digitally in Japan by Nintendo, that I feel, you know, if they reissued it here in some form, would probably do pretty okay. But because we didn't get this to tell of you, we didn't get the download services, we never saw it. So it's, as far as I know, there are no differences in

the handling and playability of the characters, they are just skins. But still, it's excite bike with the Mario characters and what's not the like about that? I think as of this recording how many months has it been since Nintendo dropped anything new on the SNES channel on Switch?

Wasn't it just like a month ago? Oh no, I guess the most recent one was all NES games with RIGAR and yeah, they're probably due for a new one pretty soon.

Yeah, I think it was like at the time of this recording like a few months ago that they put panel de pawn on there. Oh, right. That was the last super April. I mean like I just bought

the most recent like itchitch.io humble bundle with 8,000 games in it. Just like as a gift during the quarantine, just like here, here's a million games. Just give me one game on that channel, please. Yeah, I think especially like they're doing more games as a service stuff on there like Tetris 99.

So why not just bring this one back for it? But I can see they'd have other priorities. Excite bike has never been the most valued brand among the Nintendo company. Yeah, at one point they were like, why not trucks? Why just mess with bikes? We should do trucks instead. And that game sold so poorly that they'd stop doing it after that. Yes, they said, oh, the entire Excite bike series is clearly bad. I thought let's never do that again.

Excite bots did well. Was that the Wii one? Oh, no, that was the one that did the worst actually. That was the one that like sold. I remember doing an article about it of like, this was the lowest selling Nintendo game published like in a long time. It was like 90,000 copies or something. I think it had a lot of critical praise, but nobody cared. Well, that was late. I mean, who was playing? You had to work really hard in 2010 to sell anybody on buying a new Wii game.

I was buying them. So I want to call it a couple more playable roles for Toad. These are kind of miscellaneous games. Toad appears a lot in the Game and Watch Gallery series. There were four games on. Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance that were both compilations of sorts of the Game and Watch series, and then also they included special remix modes where they updated the gameplay mechanics of these, you know, the Game and Watch handhelds with new graphics and new challenges and, you know, alternate modes and so forth. Tote, of course, shows up frequently throughout these, but usually is just kind of like a background character. But he is playable in one Game and Watch gallery game on Game and Watch. Gallery 3, he is the playable character in the Turtle Bridge remake, where he is carrying, I think, eggs back and forth across a bridge between Mario and Princess Peach.

So that's a very small role, but nevertheless, a distinguished rule. I love those Game and Watch. It is tying back into Nintendo's very important history. I love those Game and Watch Gallery games, like, quite a lot. like there's just something about the game and watch games like it's nostalgia for me because I I was one of the lucky kids who had like a couple game and watches in my youth and they so replaying them with Mario characters pasted all over them especially like in games like fire that's the one I really think of with the toads is that they had to replace dudes like

just stick figure characters with bystanders and so of course the characters jumping out of the building that's on fire in the Mario version are Toads and so you're just like bouncing between each Toad trying to catch them. And yet Mr. Gamein Watch is a Smash Brothers character and Toad is not. Yes, yeah. Oh, you're reading it ahead in the syllabus. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I just thought of it now. Also, maybe one of Toad's biggest, I guess, yeah, his biggest role between Super Mario Brothers 2 and Captain Toad Treasure Tracker was Wario's Woods which despite the character

the name, Wario is actually a pretty minor character in Wario's Woods. You play as Toad, who is, you know, it's a match three type falling block puzzler where you are, it's kind of in the same vein as Magical Drop, except before Magical Drop, where you're picking up objects of different colors and trying to create stacks of colored objects and then land a bomb on top of them. so Toad is basically your on-screen avatar who's picking things up which of course goes back to his you know Super Mario where there's two ability where he was so good at pulling plants out of the ground picking up shells and things like that

so they basically said okay so we've got this puzzler where you're picking up stuff clearly it should be about Toad and also the fairy who would later show up in Mario and Wario right localized over here for Super NES she's in there too as like the just kind of floating around the top and I guess determining the order in which blocks fall. It's a very strange little corner of Mario history. I begrudgingly learned to play this game because

of S-NES or S, because of NES remix too. And it is I mean, I admire them for trying to like, you know, innovate in the puzzle space or whatever, but it is such an awkward game. It's like just doesn't feel right or satisfying ever to play. And it's, it speaks to Toad's

Loserdom that even in his, a game where he is the playable character, it's named after a different guy who's more popular than him. They should have called it Toad Tris. What were they doing? Toad Tris. Yeah, Nintendo first-party puzzle games are rarely good. Panel Depone was kind of the big breakout for them.

It was like, wow, you actually did a good one. But up until then you had, you know, Yoshi's Cookie, you had just Yoshi. They know. Yoshi's Cookie was a good puzzle game, but it was because they bought someone else's puzzle game concept. The game Yoshi is awful. And they just give it to you for free on every platform now. It just comes in the mail.

Like, oh, I got Yoshi. Even Dr. Mario was not that great. I don't like Dr. Mario. Well, it's all our mom's favorite games, but I know. They're all pill poppers. But that doesn't mean it's good. And then finally, another kind of major role for Toad that we've never seen in the U.S. was called Satelli Q, which was another Satellaview game.

It's a quiz game. And Toad was the host. He was your, I guess, Bob Barker. for the Showcase Showdown or whatever. I love... Through the quiz game. I love that very Japanese style of a game show host with his, you know, loud suit and big bow tie. It's similar like in the golden version of Persona 4, like Teddy took on that same kind of role in it.

All right. So finally to wrap up, we should talk about Toad's role in the Mario RPGs, because more and more, Toad's role in the Mario RPGs, because more, Toad, code is a major factor in the Mario RPGs. He's always, they've always been there in some capacity, but the longer the series evolves, the more you see of him.

And now that now that Alva Dream is gone, closed down, I don't know if we'll ever see another Mario and Luigi. So it's pretty much just Paper Mario from this point on. You made me sad. And starting with Paper Mario Sticker Star,

Nintendo really said, let's just go in on bare bones, Mario lore, get rid of all these like wacky, zany side characters we're creating and stick a lot of toads in there, which a lot of people really hate. But the toads are all so well written. Like their dialogue is always just either quirky or weird or funny or kind of like melancholy. Like there's just a lot of personality in these toads that I just can't bring myself to hate it because they do so much to give personality to basically this one sprite that is stamped, you know, just populated all through the world that it never bothers me that it's just like, oh, all the NPCs look exactly

alike because all of them, they all have something different to say. They all express different personalities, different thoughts. So like the visuals of it don't really upset me that much. I don't know where you guys stand on it. Well, with previous games, just like the cartoon people, their hands were tied because it's like, what do we have? like what can we make into townspeople? So for the first Mario RPG, there it's like, well, yeah, there are mushroom people, but we can't just have mushroom people. So here are some invented races for this game, like the mole people and the cloud people.

Yeah. Even Mario and Luigi would have like, okay, we can't just have mushrooms. So here are some... Got to go to the Bean Bean, Kingdom. Some tomato adventure rejects are going to join the party. And I did like that, but they just always felt like they didn't belong. Yeah, though in Mario Luigi, you know, we got to see Mario and Luigi, too, Toads get a case of the Bloorbs, which led to some inflation stuff for our beloved Toads.

So you'd get a little Toad comedy in those, but not as much as in the Paper Mario games. Yeah. Actually, Paper Jam was the first one that I remember where it was like there are so many Toads and like a big part of this is like this Toad mini game that I can barely recall. That game was interesting. but that's the first time I remember like the toad overflow happening in that series because it was a mix of both series. It was definitely a big part of why people hated Sticker Star so much

because that was really... I hated it because it's a bad game. Okay. Boy, oh boy. But yeah, that was really the game where, you know, in addition to the controversial mechanics, they basically were just like every character in this game is going to be a toad.

So it was a big, big sea change for the series in a lot of ways and really turned off a lot of people. So that's kind of where, you know, whenever Nintendo announces a New Paper Mario, there's just this kind of collective in taking a breath, like sucking your air through your teeth. Like, is it going to be good? Is there going to be more toads? You know, that origami stuff we've seen so far, it at least feels like they let Miyamoto step away just a little bit and let them make it a goddamn RPG for once. but I say this is somebody who loves the Paper Mario games

like the first Paper Mario and Thousand Year Door two of my like all-time favorite games and after that like they it felt like they were running away from what a Paper Mario game could be like they're like ah do we want to be just an RPG this is too like so Super Paper Mario was you know a lot of fun but it wasn't an RPG they it was more of a spin-off from the series. And then, uh, and yeah, and sticker star, I wanted to love

sticker star so much. That's why I bought a 3DS. There's, and there's a lot. I do love about sticker star. Like, there's so much personality and humor in it. But especially like the boss fights just made me so disappointed. Like they, they weren't boss fight. They were just tricks. They're like, did you come here with that one sticker? Okay, then this is not a boss fight. It's just use that one sticker twice and then you want it, you know? But, But the toads in it, they are the best part of Sticker Star. I agree with you, Jeremy, that like the Toads, finding Toads in the Nox and Cramies. The Toad Mummies and the Pyramid?

Yeah. I had no beef with the Toads in that game. I welcome them into my life. There's lots of great stuff with the Toads in there. And I do know from like one of the demos I went to of I believe it was Sticker Star and not Color Splash. But at that, it was being presented by one of Nintendo's top localized. Nate Bildorf, who is the lead writer on pretty much every Mario RPG for the last 20 years. And he gets to this funny interaction of Toads, of one Toad fearing another Toad has died.

And he's like, oh, I love writing for these guys. It's so fun. And I think you get to, because Toads aren't as important as a brand to Nintendo, I think it's where you can be a lot more creative and silly and even dark with jokes, with, toads, then you can put words, well, you can't even put words in paper Mario's mouth. Like, he's not allowed to talk. So the toads are just a great place for comedy in those games. I wish, I'm glad they're putting it out of origami, but I kind of wish they would just dump color splash on the switch because it was so late on the Wii U, nobody, even I didn't play that. And I, and I was ready to suffer for more Mario games.

yeah at this point color splash is one of just a handful of games that are trapped on we you and deserve to be played there's also obviously Mario 3D world but I feel like you know there are a lot of rumors that that'll come to switch eventually oh yeah by the time of color splash yeah was color splash was good I enjoyed it there was some parts that kind of were annoying but I guess that's always the case you know that there was that big rumor about a bunch of Mario remakes in the pipeline come in and perhaps if If I know my Nintendo, and maybe I'm already a fool by the time you're listening to this, they've already been announced. But if I know my Nintendo, once Origami comes out, they will feel they don't, a new Mario announcement won't get in the way of the pre-order sales of that game. And that's when they announce those games. And I really feel like some remakes would be good for them right now because, you know, productions have been so impacted by the pandemic that, you know, relatively speaking, ports from one system to another are, way, way easier than creating brand new games. So, yeah, I thought. I feel like that would be, you know,

kind of like the smart choice for them. I thought we'd see the new Zelda by now. That's not going to happen. No, yeah, that's right. They announced a new Zelda. Yeah, there was a trailer last year. Yeah, boy, well, you know, we just, I hope everyone is staying safe and I don't want anybody to work in on.

They should work for me. I do wish we had an E3 Nintendo thing. I was really sad seeing like EAs and Sony, I just felt, and Microsoft had one too. I just felt a little empty that there wasn't any Nintendo thing. There was a Pokemon one, but no Nintendo. Yeah, I mean, they basically have said, we don't know when we're going to be announcing stuff.

It's been kind of pushed back, but they definitely have stuff in the pipeline. It's just a question of, you know, what's the timing going to be on it? But, you know, because Nintendo's entire business is basically making video games, they can't sit on their hands too long. I bet they have a new logo for Metroid Prime 4.

Oh, yeah. We've developed a new logo. And there's a new developer to it as well. A third one's been hired. All right. So that is the story of Toad, the tale of Toad Toad Tales. Woo. And yes, that's right.

So we'll look at some other side characters in the Mario franchise over time. But because Origami King is coming out so soon and Toad will inevitably have a huge role in the game, just seemed like a good appropriate time to tie. on the history of the character and kind of how it's developed, even though, you know, it is a character of so many people overlook. But, you know, looking forward into the future, what would you guys like to see, you know, happen for Toad? Where would you like for his personal legacy to go? I'll start. I want Toad to become a playable character in Smash Brothers. I cannot believe that Smash Brothers has been around for more than two decades, and you cannot

play as a Toad. You can only use Toad when you are playing. playing as Princess Peach and only to physically abuse the Toad. It's terrible. It's pretty funny. Yeah. It's a funny screenshot. I feel like someone on that team hates Toad, which is why he's not a playable character because the Peach move as you pull out Toad, he's like wriggling.

Like, no, put me down. Well, it's just also like how he's like, oh, Waluigi is still not a character in here. Sorry, not sorry. Yeah, but Waluigi sucks and is not a real character. Whereas Toad has a 25, 35 year legacy. Hey, we're in your... Peter Griff is better. We're in year 20 of Waluigi, sticking around.

It's pretty old now, yeah. The kids love him. But, you know, but he's never been in a real Mario game. That's the important thing. Sakurai has to make space for another character with a sword. Like, yeah, that's true. The 18th character with a sword.

How about this arms man? He's rather interesting. All right. So, yeah. So, Henry, what would you like to see for Toad going down into the future? Well, mine is kind of specific because I, just last night watched a video of like leaks from Nintendo World at Universal but I was seeing like Toad is kind of lightly featured in the leaks from Nintendo World I see which I won't

spoil for listeners who want to you know go there without knowing but I hope that at Nintendo World I can at the very least stand next to a mascot costume of Toad and get a picture taken with him if not Captain Toad also he'll be the one most abused by children, that toad. It'll just be like the stories of the three pigs who get beat up at Disneyland. It'll be the same. My answer is... If I nibble your cap, will I hallucinate?

Ooh, don't like those toads, everybody. They're disgusting. I will say my wish is that we get another Captain Toad game and not just like a warmed over Wii U port that was the Wii U game as much as I like it and as like perfect as it is in terms of content in the size. It does feel like, okay, we got 10 months to make a game. The door is closing on Wii. let's get it out there.

I want a game with more time and care put into it and not just a port. So I'm hoping it's been like, I think, six years maybe or seven years since the original Captain Toad came out. So, yeah, it's time for another one of those because it's like a very fun, interesting puzzle game. I wonder what diversity of content they'd need to make it be worth a $60 Captain Toad game. How much would they have to make for it? Was the original download only like $30 game? I believe it was still physical.

But it was also like a $30 thing, too. All right. So that is our look back at the history of Toad and our dreams for the future. So that's about it. That's probably more conversation time than anyone has given Toad in years, maybe ever. So good job us. Way to respect a little guy who is made out of fungus. So for Retronauts, I am Jeremy Parrish.

Retronauts is a podcast that happens every Monday and every other Friday, exclusively for Patreon. So if you enjoyed this conversation, you can hear more of it by listening to us on iTunes and other pod catchers or you can subscribe to us on Patreon, patreon.com slash

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tunes in my heart. That's where you go to download our podcast and also complain that we're too political and give one star. And now you complain and we'll laugh. Now you complain and say, they want money? So yes, we are entirely crowdfunded and listener supported. So your subscriptions and monthly support for us makes this podcast possible and also makes my lunches possible. So thanks for that. I really appreciate it. So again, check us out. And of course, you can find me personally on the internet as GameSpite on Twitter and you can find a bunch of

videos that I make usually on Nintendo related games on YouTube look for my name Jeremy Parrish and I think oh yeah I do like a music podcast once a month called Alexander's ragtime band oh right and I work at limited run games so you can find me there I'm doing too much stuff

I'm tired someone else talk Hey I am not as tired but I have other things going on in my life outside of Retronauts like the Talking Simpsons Network I'm Bob Mackey, of course. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. But my other podcasts are Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon. Talking Simpsons are chronological exploration of The Simpsons. And what a cartoon is us going over a different cartoon from a different series every week.

And those are all wherever you find podcasts. But if you go to our Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons, you can sign up there, get early access and also access to over 100, probably even more at this point, bonus podcast that we've done behind the paywall. Lots of limited miniseries. Jeremy's been on a bunch of them. What a cartoon, of course, things like The Max and Bubblegum Crisis and G.I. Joe. So check those out. What am I forgetting, Henry. Sorry.

I know I'm leaving some stuff out. Yeah, well, and hey, I'm Henry Gilbert. Follow me on Twitter, H-E-N-E-R-A-Y-G. I co-host all those things with Bob at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. You can hear our many, mini-series. We just, probably by the time you're hearing this, we have just finished our one for Mission Hill, the cult series you maybe saw on Adult Swim that was created by Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein the two Simpsons Legends

It's an underappreciated show Me and Bob have had a lot of fun Going back to the late 90s there There's even some video game talk There's I think one of the first sitcoms to ever make fun of Ultima online I think was And that's why I feel miserably

Yes yeah I was their mistake But so please listen to Talking Simpsons What a cartoon and check out all the exclusives we've got At patreon.com slash talking Simpsons All right And as promised before, we'll be back next week, next Monday with another episode and the Friday immediately following that with a bonus episode. It's going to be very exciting. So check us out and listen to us.

In the meantime, go play some Mario games and give Toad a little punch on the arm to say, we love you, little guy. Keep up the great work. You know,