Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 393: Perils of Peach

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

We finish our series of Mario series character deep-dives with a look at the Mushroom Kingdom's loyal, royal leader, Princess Peach. Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Kat Bailey, and Nadia Oxford all agree: Peach has got it! Art by Greg Melo.

You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To hear more great shows or to learn how you could become part of our consortium of independently owned podcasts, check out Greenlit Podcasts.com. This week in Retronauts, let them eat cake. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. I believe, if my numbers are correct and nothing changes, which is always possible. This is episode 393, and it's taken us this long to finally have a podcast about a girl. No, that's not entirely true. But, you know, we've been we've been journeying through the Mario series looking very granularly at the games. and at the characters. And we would be remiss not to give one of the most prominent and iconic women characters in video games, her own episode. So we are talking about Princess Peach this episode, or if you are an old-timer, Princess Toadstool.

But we're going to call her Peach, because that's a weird name. So, you know, she's kind of the main female protagonist of the Mario series, I would say. And, you know, this kind of continues our, and actually, I guess, kind of wraps up our look at Nintendo, you know, Mario characters. We've got Mario, Mario, Toad, Yoshi, now Princess Peach, that's it. That's everyone. So I'm glad we're finally wrapping up these kind of character-specific discussions of the important characters of the Mario series. Anyway, I'm Jeremy Parrish, and I have got it. Who else is here talking with us?

Actually, let's start with the ladies. There's a lady from Canada on the show talking about the lady character from the mushroom kingdom. Hello, I am Nadia Oxford, the lady from Canada, and not necessarily the lady from the mushroom kingdom, as far as you know. And I'm glad to be here. And also over on the West Coast of America. Hello, it's Kat Bailey, and my podcast isn't another castle. Just kidding. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

All right. you are a married japster. Anyway, finally, who else is here bringing up the caboose of this podcast, but not necessarily the, anyway, yes, who is it? It's Bob Mackey, and formerly there was a stack of toads here, but I had to usher them away. Okay. Excellent. So, anyway, yes, Princess Peach has not been a part of the Mario franchise for as long as

Mario, but she was, you know, kind of the second character introduced in the series. You know, you had Mario in 1981 with Donkey Kong, but the person he was rescuing there was not Princess Peach. It was a lady whose name was either Lady or Pauline, depending on which canon source and which fan wiki you choose to believe. Mario then kind of goofed around and, you know, a bunch of different roles throughout the next half decade, especially in Game and Watch, but also in arcades on Famicom and N. Yes. He was a villain in Donkey Kong Jr. He was a soldier in Mario's bombs away for Game and Watch. He was a carpenter in wrecking crew. He was a line judge in tennis. He played golf in the game golf. So he was kind of all over the place. But he finally returned to his Lady Savan Roots with Super Mario Brothers 1985, a big, epic, extraordinarily popular, extraordinarily influential game in which he traveled through a bunch of different castles until he finally found the one. where the captive princess was contained. And then he saved her. And she said, thank you for saving me.

Your reward is to do it all again, but harder. And because that game was so popular, so influential, everyone who was in that game, all the characters, Bowser, the Toads, and Princess Peach, they all became part of the Mario Canon. And, you know, basically everything that happened with the Mario series from that point really built on the the kind of the dynamics and the visuals and the characters of Super Mario Brothers.

And there are, you know, there's some outliers. There were a few times where Nintendo R&D one got a hold of Mario instead of Nintendo EAD. They were like, hey, let's make it something more like, you know, wrecking crew or Mario Brothers. So you'd have, you know, kind of the little odd regressions to the previous style and form. But mostly you had Mario games building on the legacy of Super Mario Brothers. And so, as such, Princess Peach has become a mainstay of the series and just an iconic element of Mario and almost recognizable in her way as Mario himself and Bowser. And so, as a result, you know, she's very iconic. She's shown up in a lot of games.

And now I will put the question to you, what are your thoughts on Princess Peach, like her role? What was, you know, when did you first encounter the character, that sort of thing, et cetera, et cetera. etc. Bob, we'll start with you since you went last before. I think I didn't think very much about her until Mario 2 because it was a novel idea to play as a girl in a video game and it still is over

30 years later. And I was just thinking, I think I might know too much about Princess Peach because I was recently on something for the found footage festival in which we were watching one of the old cartoons which I'm sure we'll talk about in this podcast and in the cartoon they call her Princess Toadstle because that's what she

was called then. And the guys on the on the show were like Princess Toadstool, I thought she was Princess Peach. And in that moment, I thought I know too much about the split in time when she was Peach, when she was Toadstool, the weird game in the middle when she was referred to as Peach when she was still Toadstool. So, yes, I am just full of Peach lore. But I love whenever she's playable, which is still pretty rare outside of sports games. Which one was she referred to as Peach in before they officially changed it over? I believe in Yoshi Safari, they accidentally forgot to localize her name into Toadstool. So there is a reference to Princess Peach in Yoshi Safari.

That is your super deep trivia for this episode. Wow, that's like the Mega Man game where they accidentally referred to Mega Man as Rock. And any number of X games were they accidentally referred to Mavericks as irregulars. Nadia, what about you? What are your thoughts on just in general, your kind of historic thoughts on Princess Peach? Well, I didn't really pay much attention to her at first because when you're a girl and there's a girl in a video game or any sort of media, including books or TV, movie, whatever, their role is usually the game. get kidnapped. So I thought, okay, Princess Peach, she's the kidnapped, like, Cypher at the end of the game. That's fine. I thought it was fascinating in the way that a video game was telling a story

the way a book would or a television show would, but I didn't really think much of her as a character. Like Bob, I guess it was Super Mario Brothers 2, where the playground, you know, buzz around the playground, was about being able to play as Princess Peach and how she could jump really far. And that actually was kind of important to me because I was not the greatest video game character, a video game player as a kid. So she was not exactly easy mode, but she can make things a lot easier for someone like me who had, did not have great dexterity and really needed that extra little push to, you know, help with the platform elements of the game. So I really kind of thought it was cool that number one, you play as Peach in Mario

two, and number two, she was kind of there to help people who needed that extra bit of help. So beyond that, I can't say I gave her much thought, except, like, I thought it was actually pretty funny in Mario 3 when she pulled that little troll about Princess being in another castle. I thought that was like the joke of the year. It was funny. It was kind of funny. I don't think that was in the Japanese version either. I think they added that in the localization, which was, you know, kind of the first instance of Nintendo of America really saying, or one of the first instances of them saying, hey, let's put some personality into our localizations, which of course we all know is. terrible. You can't allow that. It has to be faithful

to the original Japanese absolutely one. One. Your family. Cat. There are a few key moments over the years that I have thought a lot about Peach. I think the first one was maybe Super Mario 64 when I found out that her name was Peach, not

Toadstool, and that bugged me for a long time. I did not realize that originally she was Peach and that it had been localized that wave. So, it just goes to show how localization can really change. your opinion on a character. Another time that I remember really thinking about Peach was in

Mario RPG, where she takes control of her own destiny for kind of the first time it felt like when they were trying to keep her safe after being kidnapped. And she's like, no, I'm going on an adventure. And she jumps out the window with her little umbrella. And I thought A little parasol. Yeah, no. I was like,

that's one of my favorite moments. It's really cute. That's she turns it away. She just paused over her shoulder. It was great. She's very OP in that game, too. She's a superpower. character. And then of course in Smash Brothers Melee, I did not play as Peach. I was not a Peach Main, but I knew people who did play

as her and she was deadly. And she has to this day one of the most enjoyable moves sets out of anybody in melee between being able to deflect attacks with Toad and then pulling up the turnups and throwing them at people. And then, of course,

that insanely annoying up attack that can just completely destroy you. And finally, I think that over time she's grown on me. I did not like her originally. She was kind of an 80s Barbie type character originally, but she's really seized control of her own destiny in many ways in recent years, especially in Super Mario Odyssey.

And I've just enjoyed her kind of becoming this wonderful, optimistic, effervescent character who kind of is the smartest one in the room compared to Mario and Bowser. I have to say in Odyssey, one of my favorite parts of the game was going around the world seeing her little outfits. That was adorable. Oh, I love it. Yeah. No, the outfits so she's wearing an Odyssey are great. Yeah, for myself, I, you know, I don't think anyone really thought too much of the character

with Super Mario Brothers because it was just, you know, like here's some person you have to rescue, big deal. But Super Mario Brothers, too, obviously, was really remarkable. You know, at that point, because Metroid was the first game I bought for my NES, the idea of playing as a girl in a video game was totally normalized for me. I was like, yeah, it's a reward. I get to play as a girl, because I have, It's so well beating the game.

So, like she, you know, became much more interesting to play as than Mario, you know, because she had this kind of unusual skill set. And even though she couldn't pull up turnpices quickly, that was really mainly detrimental for gaming the casino, a machine at the end of the stages for extra lives. So she was pretty useful and interesting. And it was kind of a disappointment to me when she went back to just being like, hey, I'm abducted in future games. So, yeah, I think.

I think it was maybe with Paper Mario the Thousand-Year Door that I was like, you know, they're actually, when they, when they bother to do anything with Peach, she's actually pretty interesting. And, you know, around that time, you also had things like Super Mario Strikers where they have this really dynamic art style for the promotional art. Her illustrations there are very energetic and give her a lot of personality. And that's also about the time Super Princess Peach came out, which had, you know, issues. But, I think at that point I was just like, oh, you know, actually she's kind of a cool character. She's not just some bit of background scenery that's just there as an excuse to go out and have an adventure. Sometimes she actually is a character and it's cool to see, you know, someone who's basically just like wearing a pretty dress and gloves and a tiara go out and kick some ass occasionally. So I've come around on Princess Peach for sure. And she's become a much more interesting character. I would say almost sometimes in spite of her creator's intentions. and limitations on her.

But, you know, when they do let her shine and be something more than just an objective for Mario, a prize, she's pretty great. So, with that being said, with that being said, let's look back at the history of Princess Peach, a.k.a. Princess Toadstool, which of course begins with Super Mario Brothers,

and I'm kind of lumping the lost levels and All Night Nepon Super Mario Brothers into this because they're all kind of the same thing. But, you know, again, this was a game where Mario set out to save a girl. And that was kind of the motivation. I mean, there was a story in the manual about, like, you know, the evil sorcerer Bowser

turned the toads of the kingdom them into hair horse or horsehair plants and bricks and you smash them up and it's terrible. But really, like, within the game, you were just trying to save the girl. And, you know, in Donkey Kong, the girl was just a girl. She was just like apparently Mario's girlfriend or some friend of his, his sweetheart, whatever. But here, you know, to say like, this is a bigger, bigger, grander quest, there's a scale to this epic adventure across 32 stages.

They had to kind of upgrade the ranking of the person. being rescued. And so they made her a princess because that was also very, you know, kind of 80s cliche, like, Go Save the Princess. So that is, that is kind of her origin. And she only appears at the very end of the game. She's evidently meant to be 15 or 16 years old in this game. Really? I guess that makes sense. It depends on your sources. But yeah, if you, if you look around, they've talked about like the relative ages of Mario characters. And they've all aged about a decade over the past 30 years, 35 years. But she started out as, you know, a teenager,

and now she's kind of in her early to mid-20s. And, you know, that was also the point where Mario was revealed to be not like a 40-year-old dude, but actually, like, he was supposed to be 25. And, you know, they've de-aged him visually over time and turned him into a much younger-looking man, whereas Peach pretty much looks the same. Actually, she looks a lot better than she did in her sprite in Super Mario Brothers, which is a pretty horrifying caricature of a human being.

I remember when I first completed Super Mario Brothers, we had the neighbor kid to come over because he could do the 100-man trick. And we got to the end of the game and we saw it peach. And we all just kind of yelled in horror just at that spite. It was so bad. She's a little gouty. I love when they have to make merch of that sprite design or at least reference it in other works because it's there.

They made it. They can't back away from it. They have to present it as it appeared. If you look at her character art for like the, like, say the first Super Mario Brothers box and stuff like that and like the really early merchandise, she looks like a horrible, like stunted like Popeye character or something. She does not look like a human being in any regard. That's true. She's not that bad in Super Mario Brothers box art. No, but there was like a nice.

I thought she looked kind of similar to how she looks now in the instruction manual. Like I correct me if I'm wrong. I feel like there's a real contrast between the instruction manual art. and how she looks in the game. I mean, there's a real contrast between how any human looks and her split in the game. That is true. But with Submary Brothers at the lost level,

Swamory Brothers 2 for Japan, Famicom Disc System, even though it's more or less the same game engine using a lot of the same graphical elements, Mario looks the same. Peach, she looks different. They redrew her sprite at the end and actually looks a lot like Princess Zelda, partially from the direction she's facing, but also, like, if you beat the Legend of Zelda while you're wearing,

I think the blue ring, she'll have a white, Zelda will have a white dress. And Princess Peach in, in Super Mario 2 for Japan, looks a lot like that. But then interestingly, when they reworked that into All Night Nepon Super Mario Brothers, they totally re-drew Princess Peach. They took that lost level sprite and put her in a kimono with her hair up been, you know, the sticks in her hair and everything. I don't know what those are technically

called. But if you, if you check the link here, it's a really nice little, little sprite. And, like, they go back to that occasionally and stuff like Hana Futakar. They'll go back to this kind of kimono design and draw Princess Peach, you know, and kind of like traditional Japanese garb. And so this, you know, even though this is like based on a ROM hack of Super Mario Brothers, which I know we've talked about on here, right? Oh, the lost levels, Mario 2, Japan? No, all night Nippon. Oh, yeah, I think that came up in the weird Mario episode, while the, like, weirdo games. Yeah.

Yeah. So even though, even though this is a ROM hack of Mario 2, it's still kind of, this one element is sort of entered canon. Like the really nice redrawn sprite of Princess Peach became a thing that has become pervasive within the Mario series. So that's great. Any other thoughts on Princess Peach in the first couple of games? Or are we content to say, like, we're happy that she no longer has that Sprite? I think we're all on board with the human sprite element now. That's where I am.

She was mostly just defined by being in another castle in the original game. Basically, yeah, she was defined by her absence. Yeah, pretty much. And I guess we talked about her age. I guess at one point when, and during her creation, it's implied that because she's a princess, naturally, there are other royal members of this family and we were only seeing her. but no, there are no other humans that we see. So that would explain why she started as a very young person because, you know, presumably there's a king and a queen.

And we only see the king in the Mario Brothers Live Action movie. And that's Lance Hendrickson. That's right. Wow. I remember reading somewhere that he just happened to be on set and they're like, hey, you want to be in the movie? And he's like, hell yeah. So he's got that cameo. He does.

He says the immortal line trust the fungus, I believe. I have to stay, Peach has good taste for not appearing in the Super Mario movie. It was Princess Daisy instead, so good honor. She knows a bad movie when she sees one. I'm a Daisy Stan, so I kind of feel bad for Daisy. I'm like, I'm totally like Daisy Luigi. Daisy is such an interesting artifact from Mario Land. The fact that she's become, she's like the last thing remaining from that particular game.

Anyway, that's not, that's off topic, but anyway. Yeah, there's probably an episode in here of like minor Mario characters. We could talk about Daisy and, I don't know. Spike. When are we going to talk about Waluigi? Never. We have to clear that with Masahira Sakurai. He's very opposed to it.

Anyway, so Super Mario Brothers was huge. I've read that the Super Mario Brothers strategy guide was the number one bestselling book in Japan for 1986. I don't know if that's true. I might be conflating some things, but I believe it. It was a huge game, massive. And naturally, it was adapted into manga, but also into an anime. And the anime came out the following year, actually. So they must have jumped right into it.

That's Peach Himay Kyushitsu Dai Sakusen, the big rescue of peach or something. I can't remember Princess Peach. Anyway, I have never actually watched this. I'm always, I don't know, I have a hard time watching video game-based media, but it seems okay, you know, just from having skimmed it and reading plot synopsies. Has anyone here, I feel like someone here has got to have seen the great adventure of rescuing Princess Peach or whatever it's called. Oh, I've seen it. All right, Bob, why don't you walk us through, like, what her role is in this? and it's one of those like kid video type things where Mario is a real person playing

Famicom and then he gets whisked into the video game world. Yeah, it's very weird in that Mario and Luigi like run a grocery store in this movie for some reason. And who? Mario and Luigi. Luigi. Oh, yes.

He is in this. They run a grocery store. And yeah, in this movie, Super Mario Brothers is a Famicom game. Although it's not really Super Mario Brothers, but they're playing this Famicom game and that's when Princess Peach comes out of the TV and asks Mario for help and then she gets pulled back in so

they essentially have to go into the world of a Nintendo game it's a very tortured origin story you can tell no one was on the same page about all of this in terms of like how Mario ends up in the mushroom kingdom so yeah outside of the weird plot stuff it's just like a fairly competent 80s anime kids movie it's not like amazing

but it is cool to see like oh here's Mario's first voice and here's like, you know, what the Toad sound like. It's a fun exploration of Mario Mania at that time. I seem to remember the Prince in that in that video looking very, very, because there was a Prince or King or something like that. And he looked extremely 80s anime and I really appreciate that. Yeah, the Prince is by all the ancillary media surrounding Peach in general.

There's way more than we've seen in the West, it seems like. And then of course, in Nintendo Power, They had the manga for Super Mario World some years later, but, well, I'm sure we might get there, get to that point a little bit later. But, yeah, lots of ancillary media around Princess Peach. Yeah, so the whole idea of Peach being married is really big in these early, well, actually, that's kind of something that's pervasive around her. Like, everyone wants to make her a child bride. Bowser keeps kidnapping her so that she can marry him. but then in the anime

she gets rescued from Bowser from a wedding and her reward is that she gets to marry some other prince instead. So, you know, it's just her life is prescribed, basically. She doesn't have a choice. I think it's a princess who just currency in that system, right? Yeah. Yep, pretty much. Like, hey, you're going to make our kingdoms happy together. So go do your duty. Give us some little

hybrid babies. I mean, Peach and Zelda both defined the kidnapped princess meme in the entirety of the 8-bit generation. So when your entire personality is being kidnapped, that does kind of make you currency as a character.

Yeah, I feel like Nintendo has done a better job of giving more life to Peach beyond, like, abductee than they have DeZalda. Like, she's just barely, Zolda's just barely broken out of that. But the peach is, yeah, she's got it. And she started to get it in 1988 with Super Mario Bros. There's two for America, where she was a playable character. And, you know, her being enshrined as a playable character really kind of is a matter of happenstance. It actually just kind of happened by accident. We all know the story of dokey, dokey panic and, you know, the Dream Festival or Dream Factory Festival or whatever it was called.

There's a great video on YouTube by Gagillionaire. Go watch that. It's very detailed. It tells you all about the origins of dokey, dokey panic. But anyway, Nintendo wanted to bring that game to the U.S. because it was very good. They also wanted to give us a Mario sequel that was very, very good as opposed to the loss levels. So they said, why don't we hack our own ROM and put Mario sprites in here,

kind of do a reverse of the All Night Neapone and Super Mario Brothers thing, and take this game based on Fuji television characters that we don't own and turn them into Mario characters. And that made perfect sense. And at the time, there were only a few Mario characters. So they all kind of mapped neatly onto the dokey dokey panic characters. So, you know, Mario, Princess Peach, Toad, just a great kind of translation. And so, yeah, it worked out really well.

But again, I think that if there had been more characters in Mario Canon for them to work from, then maybe Peach wouldn't have made it into the game. But, you know, she did show up. And that's kind of become a defining trait of the character. This was a, you know, a landmark moment for her that, as Kat mentioned, carries into the Smash Brother series and carried forward into Super Mario 3D world when they finally decided to revisit the dynamic of this game. So, yeah, I don't know.

Does anyone treat Peach as their main in Super Mario 2? Oh, definitely. She's the most enjoyable character to play in that game. And I think that just being able to float further with her skirt just makes her feel a lot different compared to Toad and Mario and Luigi. And Mario, too, is so interesting just because it's where the the characteristics of all of the, all four of the characters started to really come into play.

The sprites were so much more detailed than this one. This is where Peach starts to really truly look like Peach, even though her hair is kind of brown or strawberry brown or something like that instead of actually pull on. The Nias didn't really have good yellows. So, like, its color palette is really weird. So light brown is kind of what you get in terms of blonde. I just find it really interesting how so much of Peach's move set and her personality and her design were defined in this game, which, as you already mentioned, Jeremy, was in effect a glorified ROM hack.

I mean, there's a whole complicated history around Mario 2 and doki-doki panic and how it kind of started as an experiment using Mario assets. and, you know, just can we make a Mario-style game where you scroll vertically also? So, you know, it's reductive to say that it's a ROM hack, and I was being glib. But, you know, it is an integral part of the Mario series and was not just like, oh, why don't we turn this into a Mario game? There's more to it than that. Like, please understand listeners, we are not disrespecting Mario 2. It's super no, never. My husband would divorce me if I had disrespected Mario 2.

Mario 2 is great. And I think that there was a weird time where Mario 2 was very much disrespected. I remember there was a screw attack top 10 that named it one of the worst Mario games. But I think a lot of people have really come around on it in a big way and have decided that, yes, it is a top tier Mario game for sure. Yeah, I mean, there's this whole discussion to be had about how people perceived games at the time versus how they looked back on them versus how they've kind of been reconsidered. over time. It's almost like, you know, like with bands or, you know, musicians who are around a long time, they'll be really popular. And then there's like a drop off where people decide, oh, well, you know, they're overplayed. They're cheesy. They're stupid. They're bad. But then after a while, people stop and reconsider and say, oh, you know, either I'm listening ironically, I'm listening ironically, but I kind of like it or maybe just say like, hey, wait, this actually is the conventional wisdom is not correct. So I think you get that with video games a lot too, especially. with these NES sequels that did so many things different from the games surrounding them. Simon's Quest.

Simon's Quest is another great example. There are a few others where it's like Zelda 2. Yeah. You know, they were kind of experimenting and trying to see what worked. And, you know, as I've talked about before, like, at the time, there was no firm definition of what Mario meant. Like the Mario concept that we kind of have today, it until Super Mario Brothers 3 took things back and was like, hey, let's make a game that's like Super Mario Brothers, but just way better and cooler in every respect.

And that kind of became established as this is what Mario is. But in 1988, 89, this was as valid an interpretation of Mario as anything else. And, you know, the next year we got Super Mario Land, which is also weird. We got that before Sporey Brothers 3. So we had a very different relationship with the Mario series growing up than I think our Japanese counterparts did because they got Mario, Mario 2. Super Mario Brothers 3, Mario Land, Super Mario World, and then they got the Super Mario USA

like a year and a half, almost two years after Super Mario World. So, you know, for us, this was kind of like establishing the Canada of Mario. For them, it was like, oh, here's like this, you know, game from five years ago, but now it's got Mario characters in it. So, yeah, just a different experience. But I don't think Mario should be, or Mario 2 should be diminished in any way because of that. And, you know, again, it did give us kind of the canon interpretations of how Toad plays, how Princess Peach plays. It's great. And as I already mentioned in Smash Brothers Melee, so much of her moveset is defined by her appearance in Mario 2.

So that just tells you all you really need to know. So another kind of sign of how important Mario 2 was here, how big it was, you know, and how much of their chips Nintendo put behind it for the U.S. market is the fact that we basically got a TV series derived from Super Mario Brothers 2, the Super Mario Brothers 2. The Super Show. And again, I'm just, I'm too old to have seen this when it was a new thing. so I can't really speak much to this but I have a feeling that everyone here

has a lot more experience with the super show than I do so I'm gonna let you take it away from here Yeah, I watch the hell of that stupid thing I'm actually amazed now looking back at it at how many Canadian celebrities were on it and I say celebrities and quotes What's hilarious is King Cooper's voice actor

See when you live in southern Ontario You have this furniture store called Leons and you have the Leon's commercials which are extremely iconic for the narrator And they're all all these like kind of humorous and funny and the narrator for that was King Cooper and I can hear it so clearly now but back then

even though I was absolutely obsessed with the Mario cartoon and heard like Leon's commercials 25 billion times a day I did not make that connection and to this day I look at myself and say what is wrong with you Nadia how did that let you how do that slide you by and I knew it was kind of a crummy series except for the live action bits

which are actually a lot smarter than I gave them credit for when I was a kid but that and the Super Mario 3 cartoon which we'll also get into those were the reasons why I ultimately wrote my Super Mario 3 fan fiction in grade 6 and it was just like full of swearing and Princess Rusping herself and I wrote about it for you as gamer if you want to go back and read that because I still have it unfortunately so yeah I watched it I've podcasted about this a few times and it's an interesting series in that

it's a mix of both Mario 1 and 2 but it's heavier on the 2 it is interesting to go back and look at this because going back to look at the original anime Mario in that one he does have a high-pitched voice

so from the beginning people were looking in Mario and saying like oh he's got a high-pitch voice voice he's a squeaky voice character

but when America had to define him up until you know his voice actor would define his character in Mario 64 he was always

like this he was like a big rough guy yeah and not even not even like an Italian accent or anything like that

it was just like a gruff-voiced man He's a sharp fat guy That probably explains why So how did the series treat Princess Peach or Tootsule I guess I get the impression she was kind of a minor character here She was always with them Like solving adventures and things like that

The Mario Bros Super Bowl was basically like Let's just do a bunch of public domain stories And some movie parodies But put these characters in the roles And have everything be like a Kupa pun or a pasta pun or whatever And with both this one in the Zelda cartoon, I think it was more like late 80s feminism creeping into cartoons because it was like, no, the girl will fight alongside the guy,

but also get kidnapped in the third act so we can have some sort of, you know, complication. Zelda's very much an action girl in the Zelda cartoon. Yeah, I did like Zelda cartoon a lot more than the Super Mario Brothers Super show. But it's funny, even though I watched the cartoon Super Mario Bros. Super show and I remember it quite well. I don't remember any people. teaching anything's particularly special

other than tagging along. I don't even remember she got kidnapped often by Cuba. It just is not in my mind. It doesn't register to me at all. So in this era of Princess Peach's history, she was very much an adherent of the Smurfette principle, where every ensemble

has a girl, and that's kind of their defining trait is that they're the girl. Yeah, it was a bit like that. She was there, period. The Susan Richards of the team. Exactly. But they have to write letters occasionally or write to letter writers occasionally and say, no, no, she is valuable. Just because she doesn't do anything in our stories.

That doesn't mean she's a bad character. It just means we suck. I remember in the Super Mario Brothers three show, she was a little bit more proactive. I seem to remember an episode where she takes a vacation and goes to the human world and goes to Hawaii. And I like that episode as a kid. But yeah, I don't know. Oh, I was going to say, we all know, she loves Millie Vanilli in the concerts. Oh, my God.

We've all seen it. I've had blank that out. Thank you, Bob. Thank you very much. I do feel like parents' groups were keeping a closer eye on kids' TV around the late 80s as it was being reformed. And if they weren't, it would be every episode would be saving the princess. But instead, it's usually King Cooper menacing a new toad civilization in every episode. So in that sense, I guess you could say Super Bowl Brothers 3 and World kind of represent a step back for Peach in terms of her agency and self-determination.

I will say Super Bowl Brothers 3, even though you do save her in the end, that is not the initial premise of the game. The initial premise is that a bunch of kings all throughout the kingdom, I don't know how this works exactly. It's like a mushroom empire maybe. but a bunch of the kings throughout the lands have been transformed under a curse and so Princess Peaches like Mario go help save these kings from their curse get the magic wand back and turn them back

from their cursed forms and she'll occasionally send you like jewels and stuff you know the pee-wings to give you a little perk a little boost through some of the harder stages and it's only when you rescue the seventh king and you think I'm done that it turns out this has all been a distraction

and Bowser was using his children's schemes to distract Mario so he could snag Princess Peach and whisk her back to the hellish place where he lives. Dark World is so metal. I still love Dark World. Like, I still go over the bridge with the hands and it still freaks me out because you don't know what's going to come up and grab you. And whose hand is that? That's what I want to know.

I know that Mario 3 is supposed to be a play or something to that effect. Yeah, yeah. In my own interpretation, I've always seen. seen it as the one time that Bowser got extremely serious about trying to take over that particular world. And so brought up all the stops. His entire fleet is Navy, his Air Force, his everything. And then he was finally defeated. He's like, ah, screw it. I'm going into retirement. I'm going on vacation. I'm going to buy a clone car. Fly around. The question I have about Mario 3 is I reference the joke at the end, which is fairly famous in English. But I'm wondering, was that joke in the Japanese version? Because I'm pretty sure it wasn't. Was there a joke in the Japanese version? I think it was just a very straightforward message in the Japanese version. Like I said, that was the first time I think you really saw Nintendo's localizers say, Nintendo of America's localizers say, you know what, we can have fun with us. We can give our games some personality. They don't have to be, you know, just straight-laced translations. So, yeah, that's a small edition they made, but it's one that really makes the game memorable.

It also gives Peach a little bit of personalities because she told a joke. So that was pretty good. And I have to say for Super Mario Brothers 3, even though the princess kind of receded back into her, oh, no, save me mode, we did get Wendy O. And so we got a female villain. And I thought that was really good as a kid. The one female in the ensemble. So, yeah, the Mario Advance games actually add a little bit of context, a little, like a tiny little bit of sort of preview cinematic to all the games. and in this case, Mario 3, which was Super Mario Advance 4,

you actually see her send Mario off to help the various kings before she's abducted herself. And, you know, that actually carries forward into Super Mario World, where in that game, she was just abducted. But in Super Mario Advance 2, she actually ends up on the dinosaur island because she's hot air ballooning and she drifts off course and she lands and then Mario's like,

oh, we've got to go find her. So that sets the adventure in motion. So, you know, at least there she's doing something interesting. She's like, hey, I'm, I'm going to sail the world in a hot air balloon. Not the best idea to do that without any kind of guidance or assistance if you're, you know, the leader of an entire country. But, you know, everyone makes their crazy mistakes. That's right. So these games did inspire more cartoons, The Adventures of Scorrior Brothers 3 and Super Mario World, which were not the exact same as the Super Show, but kind of have always struck me as having a similar kind of character. Am I wrong there? Well, no. Oh, sorry, Bob. Yeah. Oh, sorry. We're both stumbling over to them to say, no, Jeremy, they're different.

No. Okay. In that, so two, so Mario Super Show is a mix of live action stuff and then a cartoon that's a mix of Mario 1 and 2. The Mario 3 cartoon is just straight up Mario 3 stuff to the point where every episode begins with, like, video of a world map from the game. And then Mario World is just basically them writing worse versions of the Flintstones. And I think they took a look at, like, oh, dinosaur world. Yes, they interact with cavemen in this cartoon. There are no cavemen in the game. And the entire series, there's a new breakout character, like a poochie-style character named Uttar.

And a lot of the episodes are about, like, teaching Uttar how to be a human. in the modern world. They already had Yoshi. Why did they need to? I don't understand that. But yeah, Super Mario Bros. 3 compared to the Super Show, the main difference is that Super Mario Bros. 3 really adhered more to the game lore,

if you could call it that, versus making a movie and book parodies like they did in the first one. Okay. So I don't feel bad about missing those, but I am happy that I did follow the greatest kind of contemporary interpretation of the Mario series.

series, which was Super Mario Adventures in Nintendo Power, written by Kentaro Takakuma and illustrated by Charlie Nozawa. And that was a serialized adventure across, like, I don't know, a year and a half worth of comics or of Nintendo Power issues and had a kind of finite story from start to finish. And there, in that version, the princess is kind of a badass. The princess is like two seconds away from committing murder in every panel. in that comic like she is unhinged very memorable yeah a lot of a lot of kids had their sexual awakening when she dressed up as luigi oh absolutely uh but yeah in addition to cross-dressing

she also uh basically his things with bob bombs and is constantly like kind of standing aggressively and saying i'm not going to put up with this crap she does eventually get hypnotized into marrying bowser and is you know saved from that at the last second by mario but on the whole, she's a very proactive character and has it much more together than Mario and crew. So a really great interpretation of her. I believe that was reprinted a couple of years ago. Yeah.

It is. Yeah, I haven't. Viz. And it's still in print so you can buy for like 10 bucks. So highly recommended. It's great. A timeless and classic and extremely well-illust. and very funny interpretation of the Mario series

that really adds a lot, I think, to the character of Peach. I just want to observe that this particular, like these comics and such show how effortlessly Mario can lend itself to a really entertaining animated series, which makes the decision to turn it into a live action movie that has like cyberpunk elements all the more baffling. Yeah, but man, those sets still wait. bass. They do.

Looking back at that movie. Yeah, apparently that was that was filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina, which is an hour and a half. It's like an hour and a half, two hours from where I live. And there are still, I think there's like a bar that has chunks of the set. I haven't actually been there. But my understanding is that you can like go to a bar and and see hunks of the Mario movie set.

You can get your photo taken with Big Bertha. I would do that. I would go on that polka image. I honestly would. All right. Next time I'm in Wilmington, I'll look that up. Please do. All right. So we move back into the video game realm with NES Open Tournament Golf, which is a greatly improved version of NES golf. It's kind of based on, it's got kind of a weird, like,

semi-localized heritage. It started out as like an expansion of NES golf for Famicom Disc System and then didn't come to the U.S. for like four years. And they totally overhauled it. And, you know, in addition to adding Mario as the duffer there, both Peach and Daisy show up as caddies. And I think it's really bold of Mario to take a, you know, teenage girl royalty and say, okay, you carry my clubs around. But, you know, that's that's golf for. yeah. I'm looking at the art for this game, and I like how they gave Peach and Daisy, like, shorter skirts for the summer, presumably summer antics of this golf tournament. And also, I do enjoy Mario and Luigi's hideous, like, American flag themed overall. Yeah, the stripes. I think it's a super cute outfit. Well, you know, it was based on a golf USA course in Japan. So that explains the, uh, the Stars and Stripes themeing. Anyway, that was kind of a minor sidebar for Peach,

but she finally got to return as a playable character taking the wheel of her own destiny in Super Mario Kart from the Super NES onward. She's always been one of the primary playable characters in Super Mario Kart. And this has also done a lot to kind of canonize her and define her in future sports titles and other games where you have characters

with different attributes. So she was one of eight characters, I believe, in Mario Kart, and was classified as a light character alongside, I want to say, Toad and Yoshi? Cupa. Cupa. Cupa. Well, was Yoshi in that one? Could you call it Yoshi? She was a medium.

It was pairs of characters with similar ability. So it was Peach and Yoshi and Coupa and Toad, Cupa Troopa and Toad. And then it was Bowser and Donkey Kong and Mario Luigi. Those were all like the pairs of characters with similar abilities. Got it. Got it. Okay. I didn't realize it worked quite that way, but yes, that makes sense. So as a light character, she has great acceleration, very good at, you know, cornering with good handling, great at getting kind of like a running start at the beginning of a race, but kind of sucks on long straightaways because her top speed is pretty low.

So, you know, against a character who has the heavyweight class and a more powerful engine, she's at a disadvantage in the long straightaways, the sort of straightforward courses. And she's also at a disadvantage against the stronger characters because they can easily bump her out of the way. Or flattener. I write flattener. Yes.

So you don't want to get into a scuffle with Donkey Kong is what I'm saying. Donkey Kong Jr. Mario Kart is where she started to get her best outfits. Like I'm looking at a shot of her from Mario Kart Wii, where she's riding a motorcycle and she has her hair up. And I really like her hair back in the ponytail. She's wearing like a jumpsuit, a racing jumpsuit for maximum airfloor being streamlined or something like that. And I love when we were alluding to this earlier with Mario Odyssey, but I love when Peach has a chance to get out of her traditional outfit and have a little bit of fun.

Yeah, yeah. She has like a motorcycle outfit because thinking of that, like what a nightmare would be if she's riding with that big flowy dress and it just kind of got. cut up in the ears. That would just be something else. So Mario Kart Wii is interesting because not only did that add the motorcycles and give her the cool motorcycle outfit, kind of evil-knebel looking. It also is the game where her weight class was changed. I guess maybe this is the point where she went from teenager to adult. She went from being lightweight class to medium weight class. I think they did that because they added the baby characters. Kill me now. One thing we're all, you know, super lightweight class.

Baby Peach is kind of cute All the babies need to go into a dumpster in the dumps down Niagara Falls. Not a fan, not a fan. The Republican of you named, Nadia. Once they're born, toss them in the dumpster. And they have to go down Niagara Falls. You're getting that part.

Well, that just makes it fun for everybody, right? Everybody watching. Well, see, the thing about this game is the first Super Nintendo game, Peach has been censored because her winning animation when you're on the little platforms with the champagne. She's chugging that. She's chugging that champagne.

She slams it back. And her face is all right, too. So I like that little joke about her that is not ever brought over here. She's a bit of a lush. Mario Card is a monument to Peach's secret drinking problem. Yes, yes. Absolutely. Peach the teen alcoholic.

I mean, she's got the burden of running that whole kingdom on her shoulders. And the toads don't really seem like you can count on them for much. So I kind of feel like she has to do everything herself. Is she running the kingdom? She always struck me as a kind of a rich, spoiled kid who has a lot of retainers waiting on her hand and foot and then sometimes she goes on adventures. I don't think she's, you know, setting the tax rate

or the mushroom kingdom or whatever. No, there's probably like one toad who can do math, probably Toad's worth. He can do math and he sets the taxes. But I mean, I feel like when you look at the Toads, they're not the most reliable. I mean, it's possible that the mushroom kingdom doesn't actually have infrastructure at all and that, you know, the houses they live in are actually just mushrooms, like a big mushroom grows

and they sort of hollow out the inside by eating mushroom, you know, omelets or something for a few weeks, and then they've got a place to live. I don't know. What you're saying is the mushroom kingdom is an autonomous collective? Maybe. But then what do they, what need do they have for a princess? Well, sometimes they have spears. sometimes they just kind of run around screaming and waving those spears, like when a cupa invades.

That's all they do. Are you secretly a toad, Nadia? Oh, yeah. How long you know me, Jeremy? I think there's some sort of democracy we don't know about, and the royal family is allowed to exist for, like, tourism reasons. Okay. Like the royal family in Canada, they aren't our money, and it's like, that's about it. Princess Marvin is a party in Toronto.

No, that's it. All right. So in any case, the figurehead ruler of the kingdom occasionally gets into potentially dangerous situations racing cars against her nemesis who constantly kidnaps her. I guess that makes sense to someone. But yes, Mario Kart, great series. And Peach is always, you know, I always prefer the lighter way characters. So I do play racist Peach a lot.

I have to admit that once Daisy started to become kind of a regular I tended to gravitate more toward her just because she constantly reminds you what her name is and that's it's really annoying to other people when you win with Daisy and

you just remind them that you are Daisy when she passes by you never mind that on the core she's like hi I'm Daisy and her voice just kind of phased out as she goes off on the horizon she's such a great troll character whereas Peach is much more you know straightforward like Princess Daisy is the one

who gets, you know, dethroned and probably executed in an uprising. Whereas I think the people tend to love, you know, the benevolent Princess Peach. How would she would not go down fighting? She would not go down without fight, though. How would you rank the princesses like in tears?

In terms of like racing quality? No, just in general. Like one, two, three. I want to hear it. So what princesses are there? There's Rosalina, Daisy. Oh, right, Rosalina. Rosalina is my number one

She's not even a princess She's a god She's an evangelian god Like you do not see the end of Super Mario Galaxy I still don't get it All I know is I'm watching Something real screwed up

The Nintendo never let happen again I think Nintendo likes Rosalina Better than Peach these days I like Rosalina better than Peach She has a better design Well I mean you know They got to start fresh 20 years After the creation of Peach

So sure They could you know bring that into the whole thing. She's also got her little star kids or whatever. Yeah, little Lomas. They're cute. I don't know. I like Rosalina a lot.

But like I said, I've, I don't know. You know, why must we always pit women against one another? Why can't we appreciate all of them as great characters who all have worthwhile roles in the video games? I will play Mario Kart with any of the princesses at any time. Also, Isabel. Look, Jeremy, I work for IGN now, so I have to rank everything. my ranking days are done I shower now

I'm no longer rank now that I'm out of the press I even I even wash my clothes too so yeah anyway the Mario Kart series has been kind of a very prominent place for Peach to compete against just to kind of hold her own

against other characters and to have her kind of personality to find even if it is mostly just saying Peach has got it and I like you to drink a lot. So the next video game appearance of Princess Peach is not a Mario game. It is a Zelda game.

The Legend of Zelda, Link's Awakening. She does not actually appear in the game, but she is a tool for catfishing. It's very tragic. Right. Yeah, poor Will Wright. Her name is Christine. And she doesn't eat paper, not at all.

She was playable in Yoshi's cookie, which unfortunately, that's the least. Is that the least or the best of the Yoshi puzzle games? I can't remember. Oh, that's the best one by far. It's because they took an existing game and just put Yoshi things in it. That's always a good idea, yeah. Okay, so she's playable in multiplayer, but this is not a multiplayer game like, what do you call it, Puyo Poohio, or I don't know, one of those type games where every character has their own unique stats and traits.

So she's just like a different character to play as, but doesn't confer any special abilities onto you. But she does have unique traits in the game Mario and Wario, which never came to the U.S. It was a super Famicom game played ideally with the Super Famicom Super EniS. mouse and was very heavily inspired by Limnings. I don't know if any of you have experience with this one, but it's, It's an interesting one. I'm happy that I was able to pick up a complete copy of it a few years back. I played a few levels of it emulated with a mouse, and I don't know why they didn't bring it over here because if anything, we needed more Super NES mouse games, and it's a fairly

high-quality game made by, I think, is Game Freak make this? Game Freak, yeah, I thought so. Oh, really? Mm-hmm. Interesting. It's a good game. It's failure to make it here. It was like 94-95.

And, like, you know, the Super S was still kind of in need of good support at that point. against Saturn, PlayStation 32X, I guess. So, yeah, I really, I don't understand why they didn't bring this over. There's nothing in it that's, you know, controversial or inappropriate. There's nothing in it that it's like too weird for Americans. It's just, you know, the premise is Mario or Wario being the totally rotten dude that he is decides to wreak havoc on Mario by dropping a bucket on his head. So Mario is wandering around aimlessly. because he can't see because he has a bucket on his head

and I guess lacks the ability to pull the bucket off of his head. So you control a little fairy that kind of protects Mario by creating blocks or moving blocks basically changing the layout of the level while Mario stumbles through and you try to get him to safety. You can also have Peach play as your playable character with a bucket on her head

and despite her proven competence in other realms, she is also not able to remove the bucket from her own head and therefore you have to protect her she plays differently because she moves more slowly than Mario which gives you more time to kind of look at the layouts of the level say I need to put blocks here to kind of get ahead of her and guide her to safety

but it also means that when there are timed elements you know like traps and things like that her timing is a lot tighter because she moves through them more slowly So there's kind of a give and take with her But it's one of her least known rules Maybe the bucket is filled with rubber cement And you're taking her to the hospital

Because that's the only answer I can think of here Okay, rubber cement It does posit the characters are Helding that of her hair It does posit that the characters are too stupid To remove a bucket from their own heads That's true Yeah, I mean, that's not the best look

But it's video games So, and Wario couldn't do anything to actually kill them. So I guess they had to come up with something. Anyway, after Mario and Mario, Peach made her sporting debut in Mario's tennis for Virtual Boy, which I believe is her only Virtual Boy appearance. It's also one of her best character sprites because Virtual Boy had such large resolution, high resolution, pixel resolution, but it used Bitmap graphics for the most part.

So a lot of the games on Virtual Boy have really great sprites better than like games. Boy sprites and sometimes even Super NES sprites, like just really nice looking sprites. And her sprite in Mario Tennis, Mario's Tennis for Virtual Boy is very kind of definitive. But as far as I can tell from having played the game, characters don't really seem to have any appreciable differences. Maybe they're supposed to. But I kind of feel like they all play the same in this one. But in future Mario Tennis games, the ones that, you know, where you play as Mario characters

and not like, you know, the Camelot ones where you create your own generic character and play against Mario opponents. She tends to be physically weaker than the other tennis players, you know, the Marios and the Donkey Kongs and the Bowser's. But she's what is called a technique player, technique character, where she's very good, very precise with landing her shots and her special moves. So you can, you know, very accurately shoot across the court and send your opponent diving for the ball or, you know, pull off a special move that you land right, you know, just grazing the line to get it in bounds, whereas other characters would be out of bounds.

So for those who have, you know, a certain amount of skill and precision with characters, she's a great choice. In the instruction manual I'm looking at, she is trying very hard. She's smacking the ball very hard. And right next to her is Yoshi, who is seemingly confused by the concept of tennis and is trying to eat the racket. It's a very funny drawing. That's why I never play as Yoshi in Mario in sports games.

He'll see the ball and just think, oh, it's another apple. Time to eat it. Matt, I've got a great idea for a podcast. You and me, we watch movies, right? And some of them are kind of bad, and so we make fun of them. But maybe some of them are good. Chris, that's a great idea. Let's do it.

And eat snacks. Movie fighters, an original idea on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Take a time machine back to before the world went to hell around the year 2000. The 80s and 90s were so rad. The movies, the music, the TV, the games? That's what I want to talk about. If you're cool enough, join us and listen to less than 2000, because that's all we talk about. Adam and Chad live less than 2000.

All right. So from here, we get into a new era for Princess Peach, which is the one where she got to be named Princess Peach. Yes, this is Super Mario 64, where Peach introduces you. to the game and they do the little Hunfer Red October subtitle trick to kind of change her name. You remember in Hunfer Red October everyone's speaking in Russian.

All the Russians are speaking in Russian and they're subtitled but then they start speaking in English and the subtitles carry forward and the subtitle stop. So you kind of get that transition into like you understand they're speaking Russian

but you're hearing English on screen. They kind of did the same thing with her name here where she's like come to the castle. I'm going to make you a cake. Princess Toadstool, Peach. And from that point on, they just call her Peach. That kind of confused me when I was playing this game at first as like a 14-year-old because I thought, is Peach like a way to sign off on a letter?

Does she mean peace? That's what I thought, too. Peach out, bro. Yeah, when she said Peach, I thought that was just a nice message to Mario question mark. I don't know. I had read somewhere that her name was being changed to Peach, so I knew what to anticipate. That was Leslie Swan, too. That was the, she used to voice Princess Peach.

Yep. Now she does more like localization and stuff. She was the editor, I believe, on the Mario Adventures compilation from a few years ago. Yeah, she's been with Nintendo for a very long time. I think she was originally with Nintendo Power. Yep. And yeah, I guess you could have said, oh, Peach, it's going to be a Peach cake. That makes sense.

But yeah, I think also I had read that Princess Peach's name was always Peach, and they were finally changing it away from To. toadstool in the U.S. So for whatever reason, I totally understood what they were going for there because I'm so media savvy, by God. Anyway, this one is pretty much Princess Peach is kidnapped right from the start, and that's pretty much it. The notable additions to Canon are that her name is Peach, and she likes to bake.

This is a new facet of her personality that had not been explored, not even in Yoshi's cookie. Oh, good point. That was a missed opportunity right there. And that actually kind of carries through, I guess, to Game and Watch Gallery 2, which is a collection of remakes, Game Boy Remakes of Game and Watch games. Peach appears throughout a few of the different Game and Watches, but usually you play as Mario or a Toad. But in one of the games on Game and Watch Gallery 2, Chef, she is the playable character because naturally, as a woman, she should be in the one in the kitchen, slaving away, flipping. Sausages for Yoshi flipping eggs.

It was very introspective of Nintendo developers to be like, what do women do? Well, they get kidnapped. What else? Let's think. They cook things for us. Yes. Right. Beautiful.

Got it. I mean, I love the game as much galleries, but it does, it is a little galling that the only time in all four of those galleries that Peach is playable is for the one where she's in the kitchen. You can do better than that Nintendo. Come on. Come on. Yeah, that's pretty bad.

Well, there are multiple moments when Nintendo could do better with Peach, but. Yeah, that's true. I don't mind that she's super into cooking cakes because it just means that she should be the next host of cake boss or something like that. I'd watch that. That'd be cool. Princess Peach, I love that guy. I did forget to mention another playable role for Peach. Only in Japan, only for Super Famicom for Satellaview, Excite Bike, Boon Boon Stadium, which was basically just a kind of an upgraded remake of

Excite Bike, I think based on ExciteBike Verses for Famicom Disc System, another one that didn't come over here for years. And because it's a re-skin of Excite Bike, all the racers are the same. But beginning in episode three and carrying forward into the final episode, episode four, you could play as Princess Peach. And, you know, I say episodes because that's what they were called, but it's not like there was a storyline. It was just like, hey, here's a new set of tracks for you to play on your Satellaview. So I feel like this is one that at some point they could reissue, you know, and publish in the U.S. They could probably give a name besides Boon Boon Stadium because that sounds kind of weird in English. Nintendo will put this on Switch Online instead of like Earthbound or Mario RPG.

I mean, I'd take it. Like put this in, what is it, Sute Hakun, you know, some of those other Famicom or Satellaview exclusive games. Get those on Nintendo Switch online. That would actually be worth it. Yeah, I think that'd be pretty cool. I mean, I can play Earthbound and Super Mario RPG on a million other places. Give me Bon Bon, Super Mario, X-Pike, whatever's going on here. All right, so we have moved into the, left behind the Super Famicom era altogether,

moved on to the N64 for good, which is kind of short. But we do have the Mario Party series where, of course, Princess Peach is playable, but does anyone care? Not really. Nah, nah. I still have lasting resentment to Mario Party because it meant that people wanted to play that instead of Smash Brothers back in 64 days.

Oh, I feel that. Yeah, I feel that. Well, on speaking of Smash Brothers, I always forget that she was not in the original. Like, I feel like she's such an iconic character. How can you not have a Princess Peach? But no, they did not have a Princess Peach until Malay for GameCube. Like, that's scandalous to me.

I remember thinking when melee came out, they were like, Peach is going to be in it. And I'm like, how the heck are they going to translate Pete to a melee? And the answer is brilliantly. Yeah. Yes. She uses her subjects as terrified, screaming, living meat shields.

There we go. That's what the Toge are useful for. We had this whole conversation a while about that. She is a tyrant. It's unacceptable. Absolutely. Yeah. So she entered the Smash Brothers series with melee and has become a mainstay of the series because that is an additive

series, it is not subtractive. It just piles on more and more stuff. And now I think there's like three versions of Peach you can play as. Is that right? Or is it just two? You can play as baby peach now, right? No. I mean, Can you not smash as the babies? You can play. So you can play as Daisy

but it's just a palette swap. She's pretty much the same. Got it. Yeah, you know, I don't play Smash Brothers. So I get it kind of conflated with Mario. Let the babies in there so they can get punted across the stage. That'd be fantastic. Why aren't we doing this? on top of each other in an overcoat as one character.

That'd be pretty funny, actually. They could launch each other out of the overcoat as a projectile attack. That's brilliant. Yeah. Someone right to Sagarii. Her ultimate smash puts everybody to sleep, right? I think so. I think it's derived in part from Super Princess Peach, but I could be wrong.

I think it's derived from, there's a song. Yeah, there's a song. Yeah, there's like a lullaby that Peach sings. And I can't remember when that debuted, but I feel like that's all kind of tied up into the same thing. Isn't the lullaby, like, based on the sleeping piranha plant flower in Mario 64? I'm probably just making stuff up at this point, but my canon sounds really good. I'm going to say it's a canon. Yeah, that's great.

Fantastic. Thanks to Nintendo. I will accept my consulting fee and Bitcoin. I'm going to start coming right away. Yeah, right. Nick and Ben movie. So now we're now we move on to what might be Princess Peach's greatest role. Oh, you know what? I skip Mario RPG

because I always do that because I hate that game. It's a good, Jeremy. It's a good game. Okay, sure. It's a great RPG. We did an episode about it. You guys can talk about Mario RPG and then we'll go into the 1,000-year-door. There's nothing but, Jeremy, there's nothing better than a 15-hour RPG. Wouldn't you just give your life for that at this point

in your life? Just like a RPG you can finish? I just finished the epilogue of Dragon Quest 11 at 150 hours. I want another 15-hour RPG now. It's a host of Acts of the Blood God. I have to agree. I love a good 15-hour RPG that I can finish and talk about. I actually like Mario RPG except when he gets to seaside town.

I usually give up because it really slows down. Like, I hate that submerged ship level. It just can't stand it. I do love the curveballs that the game throws you in that Bowser joins your party. And also, once you save Peach, the game is half over. She's toadstool in that game, of course. But then she joins your party, and she is one of the most overpowered characters in that she can heal everyone.

and she also has a very strong final weapon and it's not too hard to get. Yeah, she can really slap characters around quite literally. Okay, I don't actually hate the game. I'm just extremely unexcited by it. It's just, I don't know. I played it, I powered through it back in the day, but never really connected with it.

And I've gone back and tried to revisit it and just can't get into it. But I do like the way they treated Princess Peach for sure. And it's full of, you know, some fun details. The battle system, I like in theory, but I think it worked better in some of the kind of subsequent games. But with Paper Mario the Thousand-Year Door, Peach becomes an integral part of the adventure. And it shows what happens when Princess Peach is abducted. And it turns out she's not just sitting there wringing your hands saying, oh, help me.

She's actually very proactive and does her part to kind of thwart the villains. And you play as Peach throughout the Thousand Year Door in these little sort of interstitial chapters between the main chapters of the game. And they're so good. There's there's always some sort of different mechanic to mess with. There's stealth. There's like dance games. There's quiz games. And the whole time you're interacting with this computer that slowly falls in love with Princess Peach.

Yeah. It betrays its creators because she's just the best. And yeah, it's really fun. And then in the end, she's possessed by the villain. It's very X-Men, very Chris Claremont, body horror kind of thing. But you're forced to fight as Princess Peach because she's been possessed by the shadow queen. But, you know, even then, Peach overcomes her mystical enslavement or whatever you want to call it, her mind control and helps Mario overcome the final boss by sharing her power with him.

So it's just a fantastic role. I really, like, every time the perspective shifted to Princess Peach, I was just like, yes, it's another Peach chapter. This rules. She also has... She also has a lot of fun. And she also has her own solo stuff in the first paper Mario as well. Oh, wow.

It's been so long. I don't remember that. Yep. In fact, she teams up with a character named Twink. And even when I was an innocent 19-year-old, I was like, you can't just name a character, Twink. That means something else. Sorry.

Okay. I, you know, it's been 20 years since I last played that. I played it when it was brand new and loved it and have not revisited it. So maybe that's a thing to do for this year. It's also a fairly tidy RPG, like 20, 25 hours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I feel like Paper Mario, like, got all the stuff that I thought was interesting about Mario RPG and really brought it together in a game that I just found much more satisfying

and interesting. I don't know. It's all perspective. It's fine if, you know, people can like different things. It's all good. but Paper Mario the 1,000-year door was really the one that

stuck with me and I remember reviewing that for OneUp back in the early days of OneUp.com and just, you know, just loved the damn thing. It was so good. 2004 was a great year for Nintendo.

And I will say, so many good games at here. You know, it's been 17 years. You've had your fun with your sticker stars and your color splashes and your origami kings. Just make another regular game. I'm sick of it.

I really liked origami king. I thought that was really great. It's been almost 20 years. You can make, you've already made, election on on switch yes please and make it available for four days of course i mean anyone who doesn't buy that day one like what's what what what's your problem that's a good point too all right so from there we move on to the one game that was actually a starring role for princess

peach no no mario no toads they're all in they're all kidnapped and abducted she that the you know The worm has turned, and now it's time for Princess Peach to come into Roan as Super Princess Peach. And they almost, they almost did a good thing here, but they kind of whiffed it. Kind of, yeah. People have kind of come around on Super Princess Peach in recent years. I've always liked it, but I just feel like the presentation of it, the premise of her emotion powers. Yes. Could have been a little more thoughtfully rendered. I don't know.

like to say the least yeah yeah you're right but wasn't the whole premise like everybody is overly emotional in it is but but the fact remains that they said okay so we've got a game it's not it's you know it's a mario game but mario is not the hero now it's princess peach so what's her defining trait well she's a princess okay so how do you turn that into a power you you really don't uh but she can float we'll give her an umbrella so she can float and she can use the umbrella a whack stuff. That's cool. But also, you know, she's a girl. And you know, you know, dames are just so emotional. We got, we got, the problem with these skirts is they're, they're just so emotional. You just can't let them do anything without them just flying off the handle,

getting angry, just bawling. So that's a, you know, a real 1950s carry Grant kind of approach to game design right there. Yeah, the main power up. I'm honestly surprised that at some point, you know, Carrie Grant doesn't show up and bread to spank her. Like, that's, that's the kind of premise we're talking about here. The main power-up in this game should be Lexa Pro. So, you know, it is a very well-made platformer. It's developed by Tose. And it's one of those examples of like, hey, if you give Tosei guidance and money and support, they will make very good games for you. It's one of the last really nicely crafted, two-d sprite-based Nintendo games. And, you know, the structure is a little bit Yoshi's Island, where the levels are not just

you know, left right, you get to the end, you're done. But you have to kind of explore around a little bit, activate switches and things like that. And, you know, sometimes use your powers. It's just that the powers happen to be crying, being angry, being gloomy, or being really happy. And, you know, when Princess Peach experiences these emotions through the power of the vibe,

and it causes everyone to feel these emotions and can affect the environment around her. Hey, she has her vibe scepter and she's very happy about it, say no. Oh, right. All right, well, yeah, that's her sidekick, that's her sidekick Atachi in this game. Yeah, so I don't know. I've always been fond of this game. It's just, you know, it has kind of the the very obvious upfront problems, but a very nicely made platformer. And I would love to see Nintendo revisit the concept, just in a less sort of, sort of.

of stereotypical way. I never got to play it now. I was always interested in it because even though, yeah, it is a little bit problematic. The artwork and the premise, like just the, not necessarily the emotional woman part of it, but just like the whole design seemed like it was pretty

good for a Mario game. Yeah, I'd like to see... I always like to see games made in the Yoshi's Island style that aren't bad Yoshi's Island sequels. Oh, no kidding. Yes, and unfortunately, Peach's next playable, technically not playable, but playable role was in exactly that.

Oh, that's the worst. Yoshi's Island sequel, Yoshi's Island DS, which they were going to call Yoshi's Island 2. And at some point, the marketing team was like, this is probably not the one we want to hang our sequel number on to. So it's Yoshi's Island 2.

And this one combines all the things you love. Really awkward double screen mechanics with a gap in the middle. So there's like dead space that you can't see what's happening. Also the baby characters. Yay.

So, you know, the original Yoshi's island, Yoshi was carrying Mario around, and you had to protect Mario, baby Mario, get him to safety. And if he was knocked off, he would cry, float around until you grab him again. So here it takes that premise and gives you lots of babies, including, I want to say, is there a baby Mario in here? Maybe not. Baby Donkey Kong. I think there is a baby warrior in this game. Yeah, I think so. I think those are the four characters.

How does he cry? Wah, wah. Probably. Probably sounds just like his real sound. There have been better, there's better Yoshi's Island sequels than this, but I feel like Yoshi's Island one was basically everyone who wasn't making Mario 64, making what they thought would be the last 2D platformer ever. You can't make a better game than that. You can't make a game as good as that. So I feel like every one of these games, I just say, why bother? Even the 3DS one, which is way better, I just was like, oh, I could just be playing Yoshi's Island one. What, you knew Yoshi's Island? Yeah. That that game doesn't have a reason to exist. Exactly, exactly. It has really big eggs sometimes. And that's it. That's what it offers. I do like the kind of crafted games. The crafty ones are cute.

I actually did enjoy Woolly World quite a bit. It doesn't try to be Yoshi's Island part two or anything like that, which is to its credit for sure. Yeah, they take those mechanics and they turn it into something different. But Yoshi's Island DS does not. No. And it's a really busted kind of unfun game. And it shouldn't be. It should be really good.

So the thing about the characters here is that, depending on which baby you have and you go to you go to changing stations which is cute like you don't change their diaper you change the baby so you put a different baby on yoshi's back and that gives yoshi different abilities well actually i guess the baby's doing stuff but in any case like you know donkey con baby donkey con can climb vines but baby peach gives yoshi the hover jump like extend his hover jump and to ride updrafts so you can get to higher platforms so there is like this kind of built-in puzzle element to a lot of the stages

and, you know, Peach is integral to solving those puzzles, like having her as one, as Yoshi's cargo, I guess. But it just doesn't work. It's so disappointing. Heartbreaking. I never played Yoshi's Island DS, which people were

shortening as Yids. And I said, do you really want to do that? Oh, Jesus. They did it anyway. It's like trails in the sky. Trails in this. Oh, dear. some some acronyms just need to be thought out a little more carefully but i just remember being really disappointed because i had discovered quite late that yoshi's island was a brilliant game that a lot of people overlooked they were probably saving up for nancy4 by that time on the playstation

or whatever so when i heard oh new one for the ds and at first glance it looks fantastic and then to find out it was actually kind of crummy out that was a big disappointment yeah nintendo was doing that a lot in the ds era they were releasing these these kind of platformers based on legacy series developed by external studios, and they should have been great and they weren't. The master of disguise was... I forgot about that. It's best that way.

It's best to forget. Yes. The makers of Pinobee should not be making Yoshi's Island, too. Oh, dear. Yeah. Yeah, so this is one of those that didn't work out. Princess Peach, I think, did so Princess Peach was a solidly made game. You know, New Super Mario Brothers was a solidly made game, but Yoshi's Island DS, not so much.

Not one of the standout moments for Peach. Around the same time, they started putting her in a lot of sports games. You had Mario Superstar Baseball, Super Mario Strikers, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games. games, and she all, you know, there she kind of follows the general light, fast, weak, technical design that they gave her in Mario's tennis. So that's kind of her canon throughout these games. I don't know if any of you, like Kat, I feel like you're the most likely to have played these games unless someone got pulled into reviewing it.

But I'm curious if you have opinions. I don't have a huge number of opinions for the Mario sports titles because they're all extremely arcady and out of all of them I think I like Mario strikers the best ultimately and I'm a little sad that Mario moved away from the whole soccer conceit for its particular sports games. In these sports games I don't think Peach stands out particularly aside from the fact that she wears cute outfits

and she is one of a many colorful members of the Mario cast In recent years, I think that, again, I think Nintendo has fallen a little bit in love with Rosalina as a character in a Zion, because I feel like she has been getting a lot more of the spotlight in some of the more recent sports games. I think Mario Tennis Aces is coming on on the Switch. And if I recall the trailer,

she got a lot more screen time than Peach, for example. But in terms of her actual appearances in the sports games, it's a it's an opportunity for peach to be i want to say uh sporty kind of fun a very active um like like i said like the compare contrast of mario tennis uh the instruction manual where she's hitting whacking the ball as hard as possible while yoshi is eating the uh the actual racket is uh telling to me yeah also peach is one of the few people to actually attend the tokyo 2020 olympics oh god oh god yes they made that game Right. Speaking of things that are Japan-only, she did have a role in Yakuman DS, a Japan-only

Mahjong game featuring Mario characters, kind of like, you know, Tetris DS, where you had the Nintendo characters in there, but each character had a much more meaningful role. One, there were a ton of Mario characters that you could play as your opponents, but two, each of them had a different personality and a different play style. So I don't know that much about Mahjong, even though I have to keep making videos. about them. But I do know Japanese mahjong is called Ricci, and

there are different suits that you have to create, and you have to call them when you create them, and then in order to win, you have to call Ricci. And the thing about Princess Peach is that she's programmed never to win. She'll never call Ricci, even if she has a winning hand.

So I don't know if that's her being sporting and saying, you know, like the lesser minions, they should deserve their moment of joy. Like, I'm already powerful and wealthy, so they can have their fun, or if she's just meant to be timid, I don't know, or polite. In any case, that is her personality when she plays mahjong. So if you ever find yourself playing mahjong against Princess Peach, don't worry, you're going to win. Was it a bug? Maybe it was a bug? No, I mean, that that is her program

personality. Each character will do specific things or, like, focus on creating different sets of tiles or be very aggressive or whatever. Her personality is not aggressive. Yes. Girls aren't allowed to beat the boys. It's how it goes. Ah, is that it? Okay.

It's not very feminine. I had heard that, but that would explain a lot about why I won so much as a kid, even though I'm terrible at things. This goes back to, as we were saying, like, Nintendo has gotten better over the years about Peach, but there's some definite misogyny creeping into her portrayal over the years. So, and I think that that was honestly probably intentional that they were like, no, no, Peach can't actually beat you a mahjong.

You don't want that. Come on. Maybe it's just too aggressive. Like, you don't want a woman to be so aggressive that she would win at mahjong. But then again, I'm sure, like, there are many, many, many older East Asian ladies who could probably destroy anybody at mahjong. Yes. I have been to backroom mahjong games, and it's terrifying.

Like, they are out for blood. it's it's amazing um anyway super paper mario is worth a mention uh this is one that i never really got around to playing but one of the memorable because i heard it wasn't actually that great and is very drawn out which you know was time for that but the you know kind of the memorable promotions for this uh they really leaned into the eight bit pixel art style for a lot of the powerups and specifically they leaned into the Super Mario Brothers style. So Princess Peach is playable here, and she can turn into a giant 8-bit character,

and they just went for it. They took that horrible gouty sprite from Super Mario Brothers, and, you know, a little 8-4 at the end, and that's a playable sprite. You can play as that character, like the size of the screen. It's amazing. I don't know if it's a good idea, but they did it. is this self-deprecating humor

like when Capcom started introducing the terrible Mega Man Yeah they sure never let go to that joke Yeah I think so But less I don't know There's less sourness about it It's more just like

Hey this is a part of our legacy You know it's not great But it's there Whereas I feel like Bad Art Mega Man was There was a kind of I don't know A little bit of a bit of nastiness to it

Yeah that It was also really poorly timed when Tekken came out and that was when they had cancelled all of the Mega Man projects and gave us bad box art Mega Man. That did not go over well with anybody in the fandom. Yeah, it was a fun joke in the early

2000s that was a cultural touchstone for certain people, but then once it became integrated into actual official games, it was just like, come on guys, this is not that funny. Yeah, exactly. All right. So then we move on to new Super Mario Brothers We and You, which, you know, added the multiplayer component, like Super Mario Brothers 2, USA. And so, of course, they made Princess Peach playable. Just kidding.

No, she had to be kidnapped. Two toads. So in her place, you get another toad. You have a blue toad and a yellow toad. That was Nintendo's great innovation. That was a controversy. People were like, what the heck are you doing? It was dumb and insulting.

It was. You can't at least put another character in there. Like, stick Princess Daisy in there or Wario or something. But come on. Especially in a game. Like a second toad. Especially for a game that was designed to be played with, you know, all the players to have two of them be almost identical.

It feels just like a bad design choice to me. And also, you know, they were leaning so heavily into play with the whole family, you know, people who are non-traditional gamers, that this is our audience now. And not to include a playable woman in the game, a girl, you know, woman, whatever. Like, that just seems like it's not a great message. People ask them and they had some weird excuse, like, I just looked it up now and they said, Nintendo said, I don't know who from Nintendo, but the response was basically like, well, we wanted everyone to have identical skills to Mario and Luigi in the game. And my response is, well, Peach is fictional and you can make a video game, just give her the same skills and

abilities. And then it's like, end of story. But that was their excuse. It reminds me of the, well, women are hard to design excuse. Yes. All right. It's hard to render a dress. Yeah. So not great. But, but New Super Mario, or sorry, Super Mario 3D land did try to at least put things right a bit by giving you the actual Super Mario Brothers to playable cast and differentiating them according to their skills. So once again, Peach was back and playable and could do the hover skirt thing and everything

and also transform into a cat, which is great. Yes, absolutely. I have to say Cat Peach is just about one of my favorite things in Mario ever. and single-handedly made me like I wasn't that much of a like I could vacillate between Mario and Peach in Mario 2 but in Mario 3D world I'm like I must insist I have to play as Peach I have to be Cat Peach she's very cute I like black and white tuxio Rosalina as well and I do like how Luigi is a technically a think he's supposed to be a Scottish fold he's got like the little ears I thought that was very cute I was sorry did I say Mario 3D

land. I meant world. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So this was remade for, like, re, you know, ported to switch with some new content. How does Princess Peach factor into that whole Bowsup thing that made the internet very, very horny for about a week? Yeah. Because it's something to do with her crown, isn't it? Yes. There's a super crown and a toad can put the crown on and become peachette. Toadette can become peachette and, like, level up or something. And so the internet imagined what would happen if, I guess, Bowser put on the crown, and then Bowser gender swaps and becomes a bouset, and that became a thing.

Yeah, I think a lot of times you see creators do fun, goofy things without really thinking about the ramifications. And then fandom is like, let's talk about some ramifications. I remember, you know, Rumiko Takahashi, the creator of Ranma one half. Like someone asked her once, what would happen if Ronma became pregnant while he was, you know, in his, his trap in his girl form? Like, would he stay a woman? Would he be pregnant as a man? And her response was just, you know, I never thought about that and you, you shouldn't either. Like, don't think too hard about this. Now, I don't think all creators are that innocent. I think someone thought, I want to see this as cosplay. Let's make Princess Bousette or whatever. I think that Mackey is a Final Fantasy 14 fan. You can definitely say the death. are thinking about it all the time. Oh, well, yes. Some games, certainly.

You know that she was probably laying in bed one night at three in the morning. She's like, but what if she got pregnant while a girl for? I have to admit, it's a good question. That's very intriguing. You know that has to have been a question that occurred her, and she's like, no, the body horror implications are too much. I'm just moved. I'm not even going to address this.

And pregg exists for a reason. God. I choose not to speculate about the motives and thoughts of the creative. of things that I like. It's a dangerous road. Anyway, yes, I guess that's, you know, the great current last, like, that was, I believe Peach's last playable appearance in a game. So that's, that's her current legacy is an extraordinarily horny version of Bowser.

That's better ways to go. Or a version of Bowser for which the internet is extremely horny. I guess, yeah, Bowser's always kind of in that way. Anyway, what a note to end on. Amazing. Thanks, everyone. Oh, that's what happened to get me on the podcast. I know.

If you get naughty on the podcast, there has to be some very messed up fan fiction discussions at some point. Well, I mean, it's my fault because I just remembered, as we were talking, I didn't put it in the notes, but I just remembered the whole Bousette thing. Yeah, the Bousette thing was a dangerous road. That was also pre-COVID. Think of how much more deprave we've all become since this has happened. Oh, that's partially vanilla. Yeah. Not even vanilla.

Like, error root flavor. I mean, has anyone thought about what would happen if you put the? the Peachette crown on Lady de Mestru, Dimitrescu. What's her name? Dimitresk? Dimitresk, I think. So we would have very tall vampire peach, which it's almost what we had in Thousand Year Door, right?

That's absolutely right. Dark Peach. Hmm. Good point. All right. Well, okay, so Nintendo has already gone there. All right. So Peach has been in a few other games recently.

None so recent as the Switch version of Mario 3D World, but she's playable in Dr. Mario World, which is a mobile game, and therefore I have not played it, sorry. She is a playable character in Mario and Rabbit's Kingdom Battle, which a game whose existence I find offensive, but apparently it's really, really good. So I guess if you like strategy games, tactics games, and want to see Nintendo characters with Rabbids, I know that this game is excellent and it's so entirely my jam because I love tactics games. I love excom very much. Yes, excom. Yeah, it's just excom. But the, the inclusion of rabbits, including a rabid wearing the Princess Peach outfit, is so offensive to me that I'm sorry,

I can't do it. I can't play this game. It's, it's really gross. It's tough. Yeah, these characters, I just, after we did the We generation with these guys and they came back, I was like, what are we doing here? These aren't things that anybody likes. They're very popular in Europe. Yeah, in Europe. They're huge. Lots of things are popular in Europe. Figure out what I'm meaning. I could go further, but I won't. Anyway, that's our journey. super, sometimes not. But on the whole, you know, a pretty fun character. And when they let her

stand on her own and shine, I think she's, she's interesting and fun to play as. So that's my pitch. Anyway, we do have a letter. I put out a call for letters. And only one person has opinions about Princess Peach. And that is Peter LaProd, who says, it feels unbelievable that our acquaintance with the character Princess Peach is now 35 years. Although in my youth of watching dike cartoons with the Mario Brothers, with their Brooklyn accents, I know the character as Princess Toadstool. My fondest memories of the NES include playing as Peach and Super Mario Brothers 2, or as Japan would call it, Super Mario Brothers USA. I completely skipped by the N64 in GameCube, so I missed out on the early voice over of Peach in those games. I think either

Super Mario Galaxy or New Super Mario Brothers Wii was the first game I'd ever heard Peach's voice in. I will get around to playing Super Bowl's 3D worlds. I do prefer seeing Peach take an active role in the story, rather than being the person Mario needs to rescue from Bowser. The Cupa, nice guy who definitely needs to learn a few things. I have no opinion on pink gold peach as I don't play Mario Kart.

I can imagine the discussion of Mario Canon and the head canon of the podcasters will be a lively one looking forward to hearing it. That was a correct prediction. Yeah, all those all those card versions. Like, what's the whole pink gold thing? Gold finger? Is that just... Is it? I thought it was just like...

No, I know idea. Nintendo like, oh, we got to get on that iPhone bandwagon. Oh, God, that's even worse. Okay. Well, anyway, that's, I think that's plenty of Princess Peach talk. So thanks all of you for being on this here episode. It was a, it was a lively one. It was peachy.

Oh, peachy. Very good. Very good, Nadia. Thank you, thank you. All right. So hopefully everyone at home listening enjoyed this journey, this romp through the mushroom kingdom and its most famous monarch. If you enjoyed it, the good news is that Retronauts puts together mini-podcasts on a more than weekly basis talking about such things. And you can find it at Retronauts.com on Libson, on the Greenlight Podcast Network, on mini podcatching devices.

And, of course, you can go all in and subscribe to us on Patreon. This podcast is community-funded. And patrons like you, hopefully you, keep the show going. And you can go to patreon.com slash retronauts for three bucks a month, get early access to our podcast every Monday with higher bitrate quality, no cross promotions or advertisements. Or you can go deluxe and pay $5 a month and get all of that plus additional content every other Friday, a patron exclusive episode of the podcast, just, you know, like a full-on episode, no gimmicks, no, no scrimping, no cutbacks.

It's the legit thing. And then on weekends, Diamond Fight puts together a column and a podcast to go with it, a little mini podcast. So that's a lot of bonus content for your extra $2. I highly recommend it. It is like travel back in time to the 90s. It's the nice price. It's the best deal for your money.

Anyway, that's the retronauts pitch. Nadia, you came up with the peachy joke. So you get to pitch your wares first. I guess I'm speaking for myself and cat here when I say, that we both are on the Acts of the Blood God podcast, RPG podcast. We talk about RPG's old, new Eastern and Western, that is at patreon.com forward slash blood god pod. And since I like Kat so much,

I'll let her fill in all the tier stuff because I totally all slips my mind right now. Yeah, if you come over to Axel the Blood Guide, you get to hear a lot more fan fiction stories, honestly. So that's just the energy that Nadia and I have. But, yeah, patreon.com slash plug-gapod. We have a lot of specials. We're currently playing Mass Effect Legendary Edition as of the recording of this podcast.

And we're going to record an episode next week. It'll be a lot of fun. And you can follow me on Twitter at the underscore catpot. All right. Bob. Hey, everybody. It's Bob. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo.

My other podcasts are all on the Talking Simpsons network. That's at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. There's Talking Simpsons, the Chronological Exploration of the Simpsons. And what a cartoon. We look at a different cartoon from a different series every week. you can find those wherever you find podcasts. But again, patreon.com slash talking Simpsons. That's where we have all of our bonus episodes and our mini series like the recently Rapp, Talking of the Hill. That's our King of the Hill podcast retrospective.

So again, you can find that all at patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, doing stuff here on Retronauts, doing stuff at limited run games and doing stuff on my YouTube channel, which is just Jeremy Parrish. It's all video game related. So if you like the stuff we're talking about here. You'll probably like that too. You can find me on social media as GameSpite on Twitter. And if you look on Instagram, look for TeleBunny. And every other day or so, I post a photo of a classic video game box art, like a shot of a, in a chronological order, talking about its context and stuff. It's a thing that I've been doing, and I'm going to keep doing it until I run out of boxes. So that's

what I do, video games, basically. Anyway, that was it for Princess Peach. And I think with this, that's um you know we've pretty much covered the entirety of the mario universe like i said we've got mario yoshi toad wario and peach so uh we're done we're done with mario no more characters to talk about mario's dead mario's dead mario's dead everyone's gone not no no no mario's fine he's fine he's fine he's just you know been covered i don't know like i said there's there's weird characters like e gad uh princess daisy so we might talk about them sometime but for now that's that's pretty much it. So thanks everyone for listening. And now I think, you know, you should ask yourself, what would Peach do? And the answer is, slam a bottle of champagne. Do it.

Thank you.