Super Mario by Jeff Ryan Read Free Book Online Page B

. (He still voices a CGI Optimus for the live-action remakes.)
    But before Optimus Prime became his trademark role, Cullen was Mario. An animated anthology program called the Saturday Supercade on CBS in 1983 featured characters from various video games, all with brief cartoons in a half-hour show. Q*Bert , the hopping star of a maze game, became a fifties-style teenager on the run from bullies. Frogger , about a poor animal trying to cross a busy road, was now about an amphibious reporter. Pitfall , at least, was a more traditional action-adventure, since Pitfall Harry was a blatant Indiana Jones rip-off.
    Mario was clearly the second banana (sorry) in the cartoon of Donkey Kong : Soupy Sales’s titular gorilla was the lead. DK was a Bugs Bunny type, always one step ahead of his circus trainer, Mario, who was trying to recage him. Mario was reduced to the Elmer Fudd role. Pauline was recast as Mario’s niece, who intervened on Donkey Kong’s behalf when Mario grew too close to capture.
    The slapstick portrayals didn’t mesh with the game, where tension and death awaited every misstep. And the show gained an odiously revisionist second act when the Donkey Kong Jr. cartoon premiered the following year, featuring lonely Junior’s quest to find his missing father. The show made DK seem to be a deadbeat dad, undeserving of his son’s efforts at reunion. But perhaps the gentle good humor helped soften Mario and Donkey Kong’s edges.
    The two rivals, though, would be parting ways. Shigeru Miyamoto introduced a new human protagonist for 1983’s Donkey Kong 3 , Stanley the exterminator. Donkey Kong, residing in the upper center of the screen, and again in the heavy role, is hanging between two jungle vines. When he punches a hive, a staggering variety of bugs pile out, ready to attack Stanley with all-different attack patterns. The exterminator has to zap them all with his bug spray, then once they’re gone grab some super bug spray and spritz Donkey Kong himself. (No little fun has been had with Stanley’s only available target: the gorilla’s rear end. The gorilla braces when he receives the bidet-style insecticide.)
    Donkey Kong 3 was, behind the jungle canopy, a clever reworking of Space Firebird , Nintendo’s old dogfighting game. Space games weren’t selling that well, but the game play was almost identical. Besides, Miyamoto was working on two games at the same time (not counting the DK3 adaptation Green House for the Game & Watch), and couldn’t be expected to generate all-original content for both.
    For that other game, Miyamoto was spinning off Mario into his own title. Mario was originally a carpenter, since he was at a construction site. But, a friend told Miyamoto, the overalls and hat and pudgy willingness to leap into nasty situations made him really more of a plumber. Hmm, Miyamoto thought. There could be a video game about plumbing. And Mario could be the star.
    The idea he came up with bears as much relation to plumbing as Pac-Man does to fighting the paranormal. Mario, down in the cavernous sewers of New York, jumps around on platforms four stories high. Open sewer pipes emit a series of nasties—crabs, turtles, flies. Mario attacks not by hammer or bug spray, but by jumping on enemies. Furthermore, the platforms are mutable: head butting one from below buckles it like a plank-and-rope bridge, and flips enemies. If Mario collides with them while they’re upside-down, he kicks them to the edge of the screen. Kick or bop them all offscreen, and the level is clear.
    The enemies were all “palette-swapped,” the same design with two paint jobs, which doubled the menagerie crawling out of the huge green drainage pipes. The Sidestepper crab started off red, but if not kicked offscreen after being flipped would turn a speedy blue. Good attacks and quick finishes rewarded Mario with points, as well as coins that went clattering around like a shanked football. The game’s grand challenge wasn’t just