The Lineage of Mario

    Before we can talk about the mustachioed plumber, I need to take you back to the past. Not to play the shitty games that suck ass, but to read some comic strips.

    It's January of the 1917. It's been only 20 years since film as an art medium has been invented. Talkies are, essentially, not a thing, it's all silent films. Newspapers print comics. The New York American is one such newspaper, which employed the artist Ed Wheelan to draw some of their comics. Ed had the idea to make a comic strip series where he would parody films and actors that were popular at the time. The comic didn't really have a name of its own, you'd just turn the page and see an unnamed comic that was, in form, reminiscent of a short film.

    I suppose, in a way, silent films were a lot like comics. The actors couldn't talk, so the narration and the dialogue would be presented in text cards in between the footage of the actors. A lot like text boxes and speech bubbles in comics. Later, on April 8th 1918, the comic strip would finally get a name: "Midget Movies". He named it, not me. Each of these movies would consist of 5 or 6 parts, and they would be serialized in the newspaper every day for a week, and then they would wrap up the film. This was one of the first comics to have such continuity each day. Next Monday, you'd begin reading an entirely new film. You got films from all sorts of genres.

    A year later, Ed had a massive falling out with the owner of the publishing company, William Hearst. He quit, taking his comic strip with him. It was 1919, there wasn't really much of a precedent for this sort of thing, IP laws weren't what we know today. Comics creators owned their comics and could take the concept and characters to whatever publisher they wanted after departing from one, they just couldn't use the same name as the old publisher. So Ed moved on to another publisher, and rebranded the comic as "Minute Movies." Thank God. Now, this more fleshed out version of the comic had a metafictional element to it. You see, the real characters of the comics were people who worked as actors. There was a woman named Blanche Rogue, a guy named Paul Parsnip, a girl called Hazel Dearie etc. These characters were all actors and actresses. And then, in the world of the comic strip, they would play the roles of the characters in each "movie" that the comic was presenting.

    Hearst was PISSED. He had just lost his main comics guy. He ordered multiple people to make comics as replacements. One of these replacement comics was Thimble Theatre, by E. C. Segar. It was, in a sense, kind of a Minute Movies ripoff. It also had a cast of actors who would play out - not movies - but theatre plays. And of course it had unique characters and art style and direction and tone. Minute Movies was already kind of comedic, and Thimble Theatre was even more comedic and had a more cartoony art style. The leading actors from this comic were named Ham Gravy, Willie Wormwood, and Olive Oyl. Yes, THAT Olive Oyl. Segar carried out the theatre play concept for like, a couple months, before kinda abandoning it and just making it a regular newspaper funny focusing on the regular lives of the actors. Sadly, Willie Wormwood got the axe. So now, each comic had a self-contained gag, and the next comic was completely different.

    The comic would then expand and introduce a large cast of side characters. Olive's family members would get introduced, like her brother Castor Oyl, and her parents Cole and Nana. And Castor's wife Cylinda, and then her parents etc. Based off of what I could find, by 1926 a lot of the Olive and Ham comics were basically boomer style "wife bad" humor. Of course, this was decades before baby boomers were born, it would qualify as a "lost generation" comic. OK, loser. I guess marriage could kinda suck when it was giga taboo (and sometimes illegal) to get a divorce.

    In 1929, Thimble Theatre would introduce a new character, a sailor by the name of Popeye. He was initially hired by Castor and Ham for some treasure hunting adventure they went on, and they were kinda assholes to him.

    Popeye was an incidental character to this specific storyline, and he was meant to leave the strip, never to be seen again. But the readers loved him, and he came back a couple weeks later, and he stayed. He would become a reoccurring character, and then immediately prove to be so popular that he would basically overtake the entire comic. Just a year later, Olive would give Ham Gravy the boot, and she would start dating Popeye. Consequently, Ham would leave the comic shortly after. Another year after that, the comic would be re-titled to include Popeye in the name.

    All of this happened within the span of 11 years. 1919 to 1930. So imagine a kid that grew up with Thimble Theatre, who was a massive Ham Gravy fan, only for Ham to be replaced by some new character within the span of a year. Imagine if he was like a Thimble Theatre purist, who hated Popeye and thought the comic went downhill after they replaced Ham Gravy. If you think about it, Popeye is like the Paul to Ham Gravy's Spider-Man.

    So now, we have two parts of the trinity. First we got the Triforce of Wisdom, and then the Triforce of Courage. Where is the third? All great heroes have their great adversaries, their arch nemeses. Popeye's nemesis would first show his face in 1932, in the storyline titled The Eighth Sea. By this point sequential comics had become commonplace, and they were running sometimes months long storylines. Bluto would appear in one panel beforehand, before being fully introduced and then facing off against Popeye. They would fight for hours on end before Popeye uses his special move and defeats him.

    So now, the whole gang is here. About half a year later, Popeye would make the jump to animation. He, along with Olive and Bluto, was the focus of an episode of the Betty Boop theatrical shorts, before being spun off into his own theatrical animated series. 

    This first short set the template for what most episodes of the show would entail. Olive Oyl is there, Bluto kidnaps her, Popeye socks Bluto. On occasion they do other stuff like dancing, playing sports, skiing etc. But pretty much all episodes revolve around this general premise. This is not meant to diminish its value, they are very well animated and have a really beautiful and charming art style, as well as being funny. And at times very BAD when it comes to representing racial minorities.

    If you have to watch one, I recommend Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor. It's beautifully drawn and animated, in color, and employs some really cool and interesting film techniques. They constructed real life models of the environments and then animated the characters over them. Also, its copyright wasn't renewed in time, so it's in the public domain. You can literally watch it legally here.

    Now, let's step back a few years. In 1912, a book by the name of The Lost World would release, and go on to become the second thing Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for. The book concerns a secret island where dinosaurs have survived extinction and still live! It was adapted into a silent film in 1925. The dinosaurs were stunningly animated with stop-motion by animator Willis O'Brien. I love these models, and I love their little animations. They genuinely look great, whether they're fighting or just running about. There are scenes where the human actors appear in the same frame as the animated dinosaurs, though they're heavily segmented. There's also a cute monkey. This one is also public domain. I should warn though, this one is kinda giga racist. One of the characters is a racial caricature played by a white actor. It turns the whole thing to shit. Upsetting.

    The last section of the film involves a Brontosaurus getting brought back to London, which then escapes and starts wreaking havoc. That whole sequence is honestly executed so well and still looks great.

    Elsewhere; film director Merian Cooper was kind of obsessed with apes and had been meaning to make an ape movie for ages. He came up with the ending first, of the giant ape climbing a really tall building and fighting war planes. I guess coming up with hype moments is a valid way of starting a story. He once read a book about capturing Komodo dragons, which was a real account of events. This book inspired Cooper to involve dinosaurs in the film and have the giant ape fight them. He hired animator Willis O'Brien to do the special effects for the movie, since he had prior experience with animated beasts. Talkies were a thing now, so this new film had sound and audible dialogue. Their film, titled King Kong, made its debut in 1933. A year after Bluto. This film also involves people going to a secret island where dinosaurs have survived extinction and still live! But this time, instead of a cute little monkey, there is a GIANT APE. The special effects had improved, the human actors were now able to interact more meaningfully with the animated creatures. King Kong himself has a very nice model and is animated very well, his fights with the other creatures like a snake and an allosaurus look great. You'd figure that society would have somewhat progressed in the 8 years since The Lost World but no, this one is both racist and misogynistic.

    King Kong would go on to have sequels, crossovers, remakes, reboots, cartoons, and video games in the following decades, and is still going strong.

    In 1949, NBC Radio would release its new audio drama, a detective show by the name of Dragnet. This one is mostly unimportant, but will be relevant later.

    While the King Kong franchise enjoyed its success, in the meantime, Popeye would get a live action film adaptation, in December 1980. I LOVE this film. Popeye and Olive Oyl are played by Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, who embody the characters so well. It's a case of casting perfection, they are so good in their roles! You see them, and you watch them in motion, and you think "That's it, that's them. Those are the cartoon characters." It's as though they have jumped out of the page and become real.

    The costuming is really good too. It's very colorful and vibrant and really pops out of the screen. The set design, music, dialogue, it all comes together to make this film so great and so magical. It's the best live-action Popeye film that could exist. The cinematography is great. It's just a sweet film!

    You know what else released in the December of 1980? Radar Scope. (In the US, it released in October in Japan.)

    Radar Scope was an arcade game developed by Nintendo that hit the arcades. It was an alien shooting game a la Space Invaders or Galaxian. Nintendo really believed in this game, they believed that it would be a smash hit, so they ordered 3000 of these machines to be made. The game sucked and nobody liked it. I guess I did end up taking you back to the past, to play the shitty games that suck ass.

    Nintendo ended up selling 1000 cabinets, which barely made any money, and they had 2000 cabinets just sitting around in a warehouse, unable to be sold. They were in shambles. They were looking for some way to reuse the cabinets and were looking into many different game pitches for a candidate to replace Radar Scope.

    Enter Shigeru Miyamoto. He came up with a concept for a new game, based on Popeye, and made some sketches for his pitch. Nintendo had been trying to get the license for a Popeye game for some time then. They approved it and began development on it. They had managed to get the Popeye license. Bluto would kidnap Olive Oyl, and Popeye would have to rescue her. But the sprite art for Bluto turned out like garbage. On those older arcade systems, sprites can only be of a certain size. If they tried to fit Bluto into 2 sprites it would be too small to fit him, but if they used more sprites then it would be too large of a space, and they would be wasting memory space with mostly empty sprite art. So, Miyamoto decided to do what any reasonable person would do: Replace Bluto with a giant ape. The game was already about Bluto carrying Olive to the top of a construction site. You take that idea, and you look at King Kong, it just made sense.

    And then it's like, you've already replaced the villain, and the game now has even less to do with Popeye, at this point why even make it a Popeye game? You're already putting all this effort in, might as well make it something that you can fully call your own. Sometimes this is what I think of those really elaborate fangames. You're already putting so much effort into something that you do not own and can not sell. But I understand that the point of a fan project isn't to profit off of it. Not everything that you do needs to be profitable, you can just develop a fangame because you are passionate about a series. You shouldn't always be worrying about how to turn such and such into a business, especially when it comes to things you do for enjoyment in your off time. Sometimes, making art is just making art.

    In the case of this game though they kinda really needed a big success. That wasn't a fangame situation, they needed to sell 2000 cabinets that were sitting in a warehouse. Miyamoto would go on to develop his own original characters and come up with a different plot. He came up with a carpenter who would carry around a big hammer and was just a silly funny guy, and he'd be the owner of the gorilla. There was the lady that would be the girlfriend of the carpenter. And there was the pet gorilla, who would turn on his owner and kidnap the lady. The gorilla would be named Donkey Kong, which is what the game was also to be titled. The name, in essence, was supposed to mean something like "dumbass ape".

    Miyamoto's ideas for the game were ambitious, more ambitious than what the hardware allowed. He wanted to have large levels that the player could run through, but they couldn't have scrolling levels, so the levels were broken up into distinct screens. He wanted 4 levels which, from the programming side, meant they had to basically make four games and put them in the same circuit board. This ended up taking up a massive, whopping 20 KILOBYTES! That's as big as this JPG of Donkey Kong!

    He also wanted a unique way of defeating Donkey Kong. The carpenter would have to use a jack to raise one of the metal bars, which would make Donkey Kong's barrels roll back towards him and beat him. This concept was from back when the game was about Popeye, and it couldn't be implemented. Instead they made the character have to unscrew some screws and make the structure collapse, while Donkey Kong stood above.

    Nintendo sent over the game to America, where the instructions were translated and the characters were given names. They named the carpenter Mario, after the landlord of their office. I can't tell if that was done lovingly or mockingly. The lady was named Pauline, after the wife of their warehouse manager, who must have been managing the 2000 unsold cabinets they had for a year. And then the game would finally release in the July of 1981

    The game was a massive hit. They sold all of their remaining cabinets AND kept receiving orders for new ones! Within a few months they began selling 4000 cabinets a month, and in a year they had sold 60000 cabinets.

    The arcade cabinets and marketing material would have different artwork in Japan and America. The Japanese art was drawn by Miyamoto himself. Donkey Kong was the focal point of the poster and had a rather silly facial expression, like he's having mischievous fun. The American artwork was drawn by artist Leslie Cabarga, who gave Donkey Kong a more threatening expression. Miyamoto's own drawing is very cartoony too, but I can sense the Popeye influence a lot more on Cabarga's art. It more closely emulates Popeye's art style.

Miyamoto's art        |        Cabarga's art

    Cabarga illustrated the gang in a few other instances, in all of which you can clearly see the Popeye influence. Cabarga would later go on to write the book "The Fleischer Story in the Golden Age of Animation" which is about Fleischer Studios, the studio that animated the likes of Betty Boop and Popeye. He also illustrated Betty Boop for cards and posters on some occasions. So, he was definitely the right guy for the job.

    You can see some Olive Oyl influence in some of Pauline's earlier depictions too. Like in her illustrations in the different manuals for Nintendo's Family BASIC computer from 1984 and 1985. She's drawn in a more cartoony style, with a big old nose just like Mario's, and is more reminiscent of Olive Oyl's design. I like these designs! I see the vision.

    As for Donkey Kong, the game, I think it still mostly holds up! I think the theming around being an old-timey cartoon really works and is super charming! Aesthetically Donkey Kong is extremely well executed. The presentation is top notch. The opening scene with Donkey Kong climbing up the structure, and then jumping repeatedly, which makes the metal bars slanted. There is a little tune that plays during this scene, and that tune is taken from none other than Dragnet! Then you get the level intro, "How high can you get?" with an image of Donkey Kong standing at 25 meters and looking silly. I like the little animations between the levels, with Donkey Kong picking up Pauline and climbing higher up, breaking the lovers' hearts. It's a good game! And I see why it became such a massive sensation!

    Donkey Kong, the game, would go on to become the subject of toys, cereals, cartoons, sequels, remakes, revivals. Mario would go on to work a few different jobs after carpentry. He and his brother Luigi worked as construction workers and factory workers before settling as plumbers. They would then travel to the Mushroom Kingdom in the game Super Mario Bros. in 1985. The team at Nintendo was no longer held down by the constraints of having to use the same circuit boards as some failed arcade game. With their new technology, they were able to implement smooth vertical scrolling to create longer levels. Once they figured that out, it was over. It was smooth sailing from there, and Mario would become the super popular character that he is today.

    In 1988, Nintendo would release Super Mario Bros. 3 to great success. The aesthetic theming for this game was that it was a stage play. The game's intro involved curtains opening to reveal the game's title screen. The platforms in the game have shadows, implying that we are in front of a solid wall and not outdoors. The floating platforms are suspended from the ceiling with wires or bolted with screws to the background. When Mario or Luigi beat a level, they walk into a dark area. They are walking off-stage. So, Super Mario Bros. 3 has this metafictional element to it, where the characters are in the roles of actors in a stage production. It's kind of like a theatre of some sort, but small, like a thimble or something.

    Throughout the years, Mario has made his foray into many different genres of games. He appears in puzzle games, racing games, many different sports games. One wonders, how is Mario a plumber, a doctor, a racer, and a pro at several different sports, all at the same time? I think this works off of the same logic as the old Popeye cartoon show. The regular status quo for Mario is that he is a plumber, he lives in the Mushroom Kingdom that is ruled by Princess Peach, and they are enemies with Bowser the Koopa King. And the status quo for Popeye is that he is a sailor, who lives and sails with his girlfriend Olive Oyl, and they're enemies with Bluto the criminal. But depending on the Mario game, the whole gang gets together to go kart racing, or play tennis or baseball or soccer, or have parties together. And depending on the Popeye episode, the gang gets together to go ice skating or skiing, or play football or golf, or act out fairy tales. Because they are cartoon characters, and sometimes, exploring unique and interesting scenarios is more important than having consistent lore.

Thank you so much-a for to reading my post!

Image sources (in order of appearance):

1. Mario's Time Machine SNES Box Art
2. Untitled Film Comic
3. Minute Movies comic strip
4. Thimble Theatre comic strip from 1919
5. Castor Oyl from Thimble Theatre from February 22, 1925
6. Thimble Theatre comic from April 11, 1926
7. Popeye from Thimble Theatre from January 17, 1929
8. Paul from Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 6 #7
9. Bluto from Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye from September 12, 1932
10. Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye. I don't know the date on this one. Presumably late September or October 1932.
11. The Lost World (1925) screenshot that I took
12. Another The Lost World (1925) screenshot that I took
13. King Kong theatrical poster
14. Popeye (1980) screenshot that I took
15. Popeye (1980) screenshot that I took
16. Popeye game sketch by Shigeru Miyamoto from March 21, 1981
17. Popeye game sketch with unnamed gorilla by Shigeru Miyamoto
18. Donkey Kong character sketch by Shigeru Miyamoto
19. Carpenter character sketch by Shigeru Miyamoto
20. Lady character sketch by Shigeru Miyamoto
21. Donkey Kong drawing by Shigeru Miyamoto
22. Japanese Donkey Kong poster with art by Shigeru Miyamoto
23. American Donkey Kong poster with art by Leslie Cabarga
24. Donkey Kong cereal box with art by Leslie Cabarga
25. Mario drawing by Leslie Cabarga from Electronic Games magazine from 1982
26. Mario and Donkey Kong drawing by Leslie Cabarga from Tilt magazine #4 from March 1983
27. Olive Oyl and Popeye from Thimble Theatre Starring Popeye from 1932
28. Mario and Pauline drawing from Family BASIC manual v2 from 1984
29. Mario and Pauline drawing from Family BASIC manual v3 from 1985
30. Dragnet theme song
31. Donkey Kong (1981) Game Start music
32. Mario and Luigi in Wrecking Crew from Japanese Famitsu magazine from 1985
33. Peach's cake from Super Mario 64 (1996)