Hello its blogging time once again and this time I'm going to talk about an interesting side note in video game history.
For many gamers and non gamers alike, this character is no stranger. He’s appeared in movies, Tv shows, and is a staple in pop culture. When it comes to Nintendo game franchises, Mario is the series that many people immediately think of. Over 200 video games have featured the iconic Italian plumber alone, with many characteristics making him instantly recognizable to anyone and one of the most recognizable things is his voice However he didn't always sound like this. In fact, the potential origins of his iconic voice trace back to 1984 in, of all things, a cereal commercial. While many may not know this, this cereal is one of the first and most important stops on the path it would take to make Mario who he is today. This is the story of how Mario got his voice.
Now in order to understand this cereal and how it defined Mario as an Italian at first I think it's important to understand where Mario came from in the first place. So let's go back and start at the beginning.
It begins in 1980 when Nintendo, a Japanese playing card and toy manufacturer, was trying to expand into the North American arcade market by releasing an arcade game called Radar Scope.
Radar Scope was originally released in Japan in December 1979 and by 1980 it had become #1 game of Japan right behind Pac Man. So Nintendo decided to bring Radar Scope to the US but things didn't go as planned because while the initial test market and sales were good, they fell off shortly. out of the 3000 machines that were shipped to the United States only 1000 sold making Radar Scope a market failure.
The main reason was gamers' tastes changing. By the time Radar Scope had made its way to the US in November 1980, people were starting to move away from space shooters and more toward games like Pac man which had non violent game play and colorful cute characters that could attract a wider audience. After hearing the bad news, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi realized that in order to successfully break into the North American market, they needed to make Radar Scope into a game that could appeal to American audiences. Luckily he had just the man to make it possible, it was a 28 year old industrial designer named Shigeru Miyamoto.
Miyamoto was very different than most people living in Japan at the time as he grew up with both Japanese and American cultures. Born in Sonobe, Kyoto in 1952, Miyamoto had grown up on Manga, Anime, puppet shows, and Disney movies. By the time he had entered college he grew a love for music taking up the banjo and American bluegrass. After graduating from college, he was hired at Nintendo in 1977 as an industrial designer designing board games and packaging for toys but eventually got into doing artwork for Nintendo's video game division starting with the Color TV Game series and arcade games such as Sheriff.
Realizing the opportunity to bring his ideas to life, Miyamoto happily agreed. After looking at the technology and his options, he came up with the idea of making a Popeye themed game, where The player controlled Popeye at the bottom of the screen and would have to jump over barrels tossed down by Bluto in order to save the damsel in distress, Olive Oyl.
It seemed like a good idea, especially since Nintendo had a licensing history with King Features Syndicate making Popeye themed playing cards. However, when they demonstrated the game to King Features Syndicate in early 1981, they turned them down. So in March 1981, Miyamoto literally went back to the drawing board and came up with original characters to use instead. Inspired by Beauty and the beast and King Kong, he came up with the idea where players must rescue a girl from an oversized stubborn gorilla and the goofy boyfriend of the girl who has to rescue her is an American carpenter named Jumpman.
Due to the hardware limitations of the time, Miyamoto had to get creative to work around them. since the character was 16 by 16 pixels, He started by giving Jumpman a big goofy nose and mustache to define a face, overalls to give definition to his arms and legs, a cap to avoid difficulties drawing and animating hair, and a red-and-blue color scheme to make it stand out from the black background.
All the game needed now was a name, Miyamoto wanted to chose a name that would convey Stubborn Gorilla or Stupid Ape, so he chose Donkey for stubborn and Kong for gorilla, combined the two, and named the game Donkey Kong.
The game was released in Japan on July 9, 1981 and North America on July 31, 1981 and became an immediate smash hit with over 67,000 machines being sold the first year. With this success it's no surprise Nintendo made a sequel: Donkey Kong Junior. It was released in Japan on August 13, 1982 and North America on September 19, 1982 this time Donkey Kong became a more sympathetic character. In the game, the player takes on the role of Donkey Kong Junior who has to rescue Donkey Kong from Mario who has captured Donkey Kong after the events of the first game.
This game marks the first time Mario had been given a proper name. The story goes that the name came from Nintendo of America’s landlord, Mario Segale, both because he resembled Segale and because of a memorable argument with Nintendo of America’s then head of operations Minoru Arakawa over their late rent.
Although the game wasn't as successful as the first Donkey Kong, it still was a success selling about 35,000 units. However Mario was still a carpenter, It wasn’t until 1983 when Mario Bros came out that Mario was finally changed to an Italian plumber alongside his brother Luigi. Once again, Miyamoto took inspiration from old cartoons like Popeye, Where the characters would take on different professions depending on the cartoon, and since the game took place in a sewer, he decided he could quote “put him in New York'' and make him Italian.
So that explains where Mario came from but what about this cereal commercial? Well to understand that and how it was portraying Mario as Italian we need to look at the licensing history as well. So let's go back to 1981 for a moment right after Donkey Kong was released. With the game selling so well, there were many companies that were interested in licensing the game to make various products starting with the license to make home console conversions. there were 5 companies that had approached Nintendo with the offer to gain the exclusive right to make home conversions, Taito, Parker Brothers, Atari, Mattel Electronics, and Coleco. In the end, Coleco was the winner and on Christmas Eve 1981 Coleco had gained the rights to make Donkey Kong on home consoles. The first game Coleco made with the license was a Donkey Kong game for their tabletop arcade series, then they made various toys featuring the characters, and finally they had plans to not only make home console ports of the game for Atari 2600 and Mattel Intellivision, but also they had planned to make Donkey Kong the pack in game for their own upcoming video game console, The Colecovision.
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After renegotiating with Nintendo, on August 1, 1982 the Colecovision shipped with Donkey Kong as the pack in game and had a commercial to advertise their port of Donkey Kong along with the first actor to play Mario.
Now this commercial is very interesting visually because all the characters look more like the characters from King Kong rather than Donkey Kong, especially Pauline who is dressed to look like Ann Darrow. This might actually be because of a deal Coleco had with Universal in which Coleco would pay royalties on every Donkey Kong cartridge sold and promised future ventures with Universal. Either way, this marks the first time Mario had an actor to portray him in this case Harris Shore but Mario was portrayed as American not Italian.
Still, the game sold very well and by the time the Colecovision was discontinued in 1985 it had sold over 2 million units. Many other companies had approached Nintendo trying to license Donkey Kong to produce various memorabilia. By June 1982, Nintendo had prompted more than 50 parties both in Japan and the United States to license the Donkey Kong's characters. Many companies like Topps and Milton Bradley had made a lot of money doing so and one of these companies interested in the license was Ralston Purina. Ralston Purina was Founded on January 8, 1894 as a pet food company but later expanded into a line of non pet food as well as breakfast cereals, most notably Chex and Cookie Crisp. Ralston Purina had approached Nintendo to reach a license agreement to make a Donkey Kong themed cereal with puffed corn in the shape barrels and on February 9, 1983 they did just that. The cereal launched along with a tv ad with a James Earl Jones like voice-over saying "the sweet, crunchy, corn taste will drive you ape." and featured small animated versions of Mario, Pauline, and Donkey Kong acting very much as they do in the game with Donkey Kong capturing Pauline climbing on top of the cereal box and Mario has to use his hammer to destroy the barrels of cereal being thrown down at him. Mario and Pauline played by Larry Moran and Jo Belle Yonely respectively although they didn't talk much in the ads but one ad from 1984 is very special in that regard because Mario spoke in an italian accent.
This was very radical for the time because up till this point all actors portraying Mario had been with American accents such as Harris Shore in the Colecovision commercials of Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr and Peter Cullen in the Saturday Supercade cartoon. So this commercial marks the very first time Mario spoke in the accent we know him for today. Now, I don't know how much input Nintendo had on the Purina and the ads other than just giving them the license, but it probably wasn't much. But while this was the first time Mario spoke in an Italian accent, he wouldn't speak it again for another 5 years.
With so much success in the arcade, Nintendo was eager to get the same success in the home console market as a result they created the Famicom, a unique video game system designed by Masayuki Uemura. It was released in Japan on July 15, 1983 for ¥14,800 and was quite popular with Japanese gamers due to its power and price point so much so Nintendo wanted to bring the Famicom to North America but the American video game industry was in decline. Due to the losses faced by companies like Atari during the Video Game Market Crash of 1983, people were starting to think of video games as just simply a passing fad. Not only that, but the famicom just didn't fall into American taste because it looked more like a fisher price kids toy then a powerful piece of technology. Nintendo knew the only way to convince retailers in America to carry it was to redesign it into something that could appeal to Americans and sell it with a hit game to make it worth buying. Another two years of redesigns and a focus group test later, the Famicom as the Nintendo Entertainment System or NES with Super Mario Bros as a separate purchase launch title on October 18, 1985 in a test market in New York City and was a decent success selling 30,000 out of the initial shipment of 50,000 units. By 1987 Nintendo sold 5.4 million NES units in the United States alone and Super Mario Bros sold 27 million copies.
By 1989, Mario Mania was growing bigger and sweeping over both countries. In Japan alone, Super Mario Bros sold 6.8 million copies. The country's bestselling book at the end of 1985 was "Super Mario Bros.: The Complete Strategy Guide," a strategy guide on how to beat the game. The Mario Bros. theme song was given lyrics and released as a single, "Go Go Mario." There was even a movie, "Super Mario Bros.: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach" was an animated film released only in Japan based on the game, one of the first movies of its kind. There were promotions for products like rice, curry, ice cream, travel, and studying desks. The game caused a sales explosion for the Famicom system. By June of 1986, Nintendo had sold more than 6.5 million units. 1 out of every 5 Japanese households had a Famicom. In the US, there was a ton of Mario Memorabilia sold like backpacks, t-shirts, sleeping bags, bedsheets, and even cereal made by Ralston Purina once again. That year in February, Andy Heyward, the CEO of DIC Enterprises, the creators of the popular Inspector Gadget cartoon series, approached Nintendo to license the Super Mario Bros characters to use in a cartoon series. Nintendo agreed and on September 4, 1989 The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! Debuted on Television with professional wrestler "Capt." Lou Albano taking the role of Mario in both the animated and live action segments once again giving Mario an Italian accent But the accent was more of a deep, raspy stereotypical Italian American voice. Although it was a decent success with kids, many critics still attacked the cartoon for its heavy slapstick humor. As such the cartoon was pulled in two months.
By 1990 Nintendo sold 20 million NES units in the United states and had controlled more than 80% of the gaming market easily beating out other Video game console manufacturers like Sega with their Master System and Genesis, NEC with their TurboGrafx-16, INTV Corporation with their Intellivision, and Atari with their Atari 7800 and 2600jr. Mario titles also began to grow in popularity with titles like Super Mario Bros 3, But due to technical limitations of game consoles at the time, Mario was still a mute however two major events would soon change that. The first event was Nintendo attempting to get into the edutainment market to appeal to concerned parents who were worried about the negative effects of video games on children. This resulted in the creation of Mario Paint on the Super Nintendo and Nintendo giving the Mario license to publishers like The Software Toolworks and Interplay Productions to make edutainment games. The first of the company to make a Mario edutainment title was Interplay Productions with Mario Teaches Typing released for MS-DOS compatible PC’s in 1992 followed up by The Software Toolworks with Mario Is Missing! released in 1993 for the PC, Macintosh, NES and Super Nintendo. And thanks to the technological capabilities of personal computers they became the very first video games where Mario spoke. In Mario Teaches Typing Mario was voiced by Ronald B. Ruben and in Mario is Missing, Mario was voiced by Nicholas Glaeser.
And the second event was the introduction of the CD ROM drive. Although the technology had existed since 1985, it wasn't until 1989 when the CD ROM started to grow in popularity with Nintendo being particularly interested in the technology, though connections with Sony they planned to make a CD-ROM-based add-on for what would become the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), known as the SNES-CD but due to a rift between the two companies Nintendo instead ditched Sony (who would eventually turn the add-on into the Playstation) and partnered with Phillips to make the add-on But by 1993 Nintendo had abandoned plans for the add-on So Phillips created they’re own system the CD-I and thanks to the deal they made with Nintendo they were able to use two major Nintendo franchises: The Legend of Zelda, and Super Mario. Originally, they planned to release a sequel to Super Mario World called Super Mario’s Wacky Worlds, but it was canceled while still in the prototype stage and instead came up with a puzzle game called Hotel Mario released for the CD-i in 1994. Here Mario was voiced by Marc Graue.
The problem with all these games was that they were, well, terrible. These titles were panned by critics for their cheesy cutscenes, bad graphics, and awful gameplay as well as commercial failures. But one Mario game one Nintendo's next console would bring a new life and new voice to the courageous italian and this actor came from the most Unlikeliest of places.
In 1996 Nintendo was getting ready to launch their newest system, The Nintendo 64 this time facing heavy competition. The Sony PlayStation and the Sega Saturn had been released in the US in 1995 but compared to them the N64 seemed to be stuck in the past. While the PlayStation and Saturn used CD-ROM for storage the N64 stuck with cartridges. Although critics were skeptical, Nintendo moved ahead with another Mario game for the launch title. Super Mario 64 was released on June 23, 1996 in Japan and in North America on September 29, 1996. and became an instant success with its innovative 3D graphics, design, and gameplay. Along with bringing Mario in 3D, it introduced a new voice actor who would become the standard voice of Mario for the next 26 years. It was a 41 year old voice actor from California named Charles Martinet.
This wasn't the first time Martinet had portrayed Mario, he actually began voice acting for Nintendo 6 years earlier. In 1990, Martinet had heard that Nintendo was setting up auditions for a Nintendo trade show event in which attendees would walk up to a TV screen displaying a 3-D Mario head that moved around the screen and talked. When he arrived for the audition, the director had already put away the camera, but allowed for Martinet to read for the character of Mario anyway. He was told that he was to be the voice of an Italian plumber from Brooklyn and that he would have a number of motion-sensors attached to his face that would allow him to animate a cartoon Mario head, interactive for passers-by. At first, Martinet panicked, since he didn't know anything about Nintendo or Mario and never had any experience with the video game industry before in his life, but that didn't deter him and quickly thought of a voice on the spot. initially he thought of the archetypal Brooklyn "Mafioso" accent, but thought that it may be too gruff and unfriendly, if he had to speak to children. Inspired by the character Petruchio he played in a theater version of The Taming of the Shrew, Martinet spoke to the camera in a falsetto Italian accent until the tape ran out. He learned later that the director rang Nintendo of America's chief operations officer Don James, and said, "We've found our Mario." Martinet's was the only tape sent to Nintendo. Over the next 5 years Martinet started voicing Mario at more video game trade shows, in the Super Mario Bros and Super Mario Bros. Mushroom World pinball machines for Gottlieb in 1992, and for another critically panned Mario edutainment title Mario's Game Gallery developed by Presage Software, Inc. and published by Interplay Productions in 1995 for DOS, Windows and the Macintosh as well as a sequel to Mario Teaches Typing.
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