Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [97]
Shigeru Miyamoto ended 2006 being profiled in Time magazine’s list of Asian heroes. He was not put on the Artists & Thinkers list, alongside Akira Kurosawa, Hayao Miyazaki, and Salman Rushdie. Instead, he was added to the Business Leaders section, alongside microloan pioneer Mohammad Yunus, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, and ramen noodle creator Momofuku Ando. True to form, Miyamoto is a goofball in the photo, holding out his arms so a squad of Pikmin can stand on them. The following year, the goofball was given the Innovation Award for Consumer Goods by The Economist.
23 – MARIO’S PARTY
THREE DAYS IN THE LIFE OF NINTENDO
To properly demonstrate the scope of Mariolatry, let’s look at one slice of it: cake. Mario and friend show up on a lot of cake.
Groom cakes, birthday cakes, sheet cakes, multilayer cakes, cakes with Mario’s face, cakes with Mario leaping out like a stripper, cakes of Peach’s castle, cakes shaped like particular consoles, cakes so vast they replicate an entire level of the game. He’s even prolific in the handheld console of baking, the cupcake: clever bakers have arranged colored cupcakes or brownies to make Mario out of delicious pixels. (An allbrown version was also done in the medium of burned toast.) Other artists draw different characters and icons on each circular spread of icing. A search for “Mario cake” in Google images returned 1,490,000 results.
And then there’s statuary. Michaelangelo’s Pieta has been parodied, life size, with Princess Peach cradling fallen Mario. Another Mario statue, six feet tall, was made out of thousands of Lego blocks. It is far from the only Mario Lego sculpture. A life-size piranha plant out of papier-mâché. Mario on a red hydrant. Mario on a bowling pin. A wiener dog as Mario. Mario out of four thousand cans of food. A SMB mushroom out of ice.
Mario’s pixilated origins, and his variety of designs over the years, affords him the ability to be re-created in media that wouldn’t be able to show, say, Sonic. A Mario cross-stitch? No problem. Mario out of poker chips? Line ’em up! Pushpins? Push away! Bullets? Ready, aim, fire! Crocheted squares? It’s hip to be square! Floppy discs? Boot it up! Bottle caps? Let’s twist! Rubik’s Cube squares, broken off and rearranged? Pivot away! A supermarket display of a thousand twelvepacks of soda? It’ll take all weekend but it’ll be worth it.
Novelty T-shirts? There’s a new one every week. A piranha plant in a green pipe, underneath Magritte’s famous phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” An impressionistic painting of Donkey Kong’s first screen. A gray shirt that emulates the NES cartridge design. A winged Mario: WING MAN. A red mushroom: GROW UP. A green one: GET A LIFE. A gold coin: OLD SCHOOL GOLD FARMER. A question block: I’D HIT THAT. A gold coin, a star, and Princess Peach: FIRST YOU GET THE MONEY, THEN YOU GET THE POWER, THEN YOU GET THE WOMAN.
Want to, say, decorate your car to look like it drove out of the Mushroom Kingdom? It’s been done. Trick out a bass guitar to look like Bullet Bill? Done. Mock up condom wrappers with names like Donkey Schlong and Sextris? Rerecord “It’s a Wonderful World” with a Louie Armstrong impersonator singing about Super Mario World? Play the SMB theme using half-filled beer bottles or wineglasses? Put on a Mario-themed burlesque? Paint your nails with Mario designs? Sketch what Wario would have looked like as a baby? Pornography, of all Mario-inspired manners? Make Luigi a robot? Freeze him in carbonite? Mario, King Koopa, and Yoshi in a samurai-style Japanese print? Mario dissected? Princess Peach as the Virgin Mary? Mario and Luigi as zombies? Propose in-game? Make Super Mario Little Pony Bros.? Imagine Mario as a gay hustler? Design Mario furniture? Mario Russian nesting dolls? Mario graffiti? Raise a hundred thousand dollars by playing a marathon Mario session for charity? Done, done, done.