Episode 37 – Commercial Failure
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:19:26 — 73.9MB)
This week Curtis & Boet sit down to discuss what pisses them off about getting to see Super Bowl commercials early, or anything early for that matter. They also discuss exploding car roofs, infectious pets, and their bad luck with their “pets” from childhood.
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So…this bit of weirdness happened today. I figured since you guys were it’s inspiration that I should leave it here. Enjoy! (Or not
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Since his debut in 1981, the video game industry’s most famous protagonist, Mario, has been gracing the screens of our arcades, televisions, computer monitors and hand-held gaming systems. These screens have become magic windows allowing us a glimpse into Mario’s strange and wonderful world, the Mushroom Kingdom, and the games we’ve played on them have been chapters in Mario’s never-ending epic war with the villainous cretins who constantly attempt to invade the Kingdom and threaten its defenseless inhabitants.
Mario has, in fact, appeared in literally hundreds of games since his debut in the 1981 game ‘Donkey Kong’. One would think that within this vast library of games at least one of them would have explored Mario’s backstory and explained how a seemingly average plumber of Italian heritage ended up as the heroic champion and guardian of a surreal kingdom of mushroom people, and the constant savior of its titular monarch, Princess Peach. But alas, wonderers have been left to wonder and theorists could only theorize as to Mario’s origin story. Until now.
Mario’s story begins with the tale of a Brooklyn native, Italian-American plumber named Mario Giordano who, in 1979, passed away in a mental institution in Syracuse. He was treated at the Shady Glen Institution for the Mentally Disabled for seven years prior to his death due to complications arising from his long history of drug addiction and abuse of hallucinogenic narcotics. He was treated, mainly, by the hospital’s resident psychiatrist Doctor Pauline Smith, who kept extensive files of her notes on all of her patients. When the hospital shut down in 1980, Dr. Smith mandated that her meticulously kept files on her patients be mailed to their respective families. The hospital administrative staff did their best to track down the family members of the institution’s former patients and carry out the Doctor Smith’s instructions, but clerical errors do happen.
Mario Giordano’s records, journal, medical charts, and the notes from his sessions with Dr. Smith were all accidentally mailed to Japan. How, exactly, the information in these records and Mario’s personal journal got into the hands of the designers and developers of the Mario video games remains a mystery, but those who have seen copies of these records insist that the specific similarities between them and the finished video games are proof enough that Giordano is undoubtedly the inspiration of the franchise, the man behind the myth.
Speaking to former orderlies at the hospital, and reading through Dr. Smith’s records, one is given the impression of a funny, kind, likable (if not all that bright) fellow who’s spent his life searching for shelter from the demons of his past.
Born into a Catholic Italian family, Mario was the youngest of three children. Mario’s father and older sister died in a tragic car accident when Mario was only five years old, leaving his mother to raise him and his brother Luigi on her own. Luigi Giordano, ten years his brother’s senior, was by all accounts a gifted child. He graduated as valedictorian of his high school class and was given a full scholarship to the UCLA medical program. He still practices medicine in the Los Angeles area to this day.
Luigi’s departure to medical school was hard on little Mario, who idolized his older brother. Luigi had been like a father to him in his father’s absence. The fact that Luigi was better looking and more intelligent than Mario did not keep them apart in the slightest. They were the closest of friends until Luigi moved across the country. On top of losing his father, Mario now had to deal with the loss of the only other male role model in his life.
Being left alone in the house with his mother, an emotionally damaged widow, and Italian Catholic to boot, did not make for a pleasant living situation. She would often compare his meager scholastic achievements with those of his brother (whose science fair trophies and spelling bee ribbons still lined the mantle and hallways of the apartment). Although she didn’t attend church she would often bully Mario into submission with religion based tirades and extreme conservative religious morality.
Mario’s mother took the news of her husband and child’s death very hard and, as the years passed, slipped deeper and deeper into a descending spiral of psychosis that she transferred onto her son. Her strict Catholic upbringing melded with her deteriorating mental state to form a heady cocktail of guilt, rage, and righteousness which was all too often directed toward Mario. She became particularly fixated on the concept of the seven deadly sins, and would often scream at Mario for hours and physically abuse him while telling him exactly which of these sins he was guilty of, and how.
One incident in particular, described by Mario in his journal, and documented in Dr. Smith’s notes, illustrates this abuse to an uncomfortable degree of clarity. When Mario was 13 years old he received a pornographic magazine from his friend at school in exchange for several of his most valuable baseball cards. He took the magazine home and, like any boy his age, began to explore his sexuality while looking at the pictures in the magazine. It was unfortunately timed, however, as his mother was home early from work that day and walked in on her son masturbating, thereby committing one of the deadliest of the deadly sins: lust.
Now Ms. Giordano had recently been told by her coworker, Barbara, that she had walked in on her daughter smoking a cigarette the week prior and had had major success in dissuading her from continuing the bad habit by buying a whole pack of cigarettes and forcing her to smoke the entire thing in front of her. Being of less than sound mind, Ms. Giordano decided that she could employ a similar tactic in dissuading her son from the dreadful sin of lust. A little embarrassment for both of them now, she reasoned, would save him from the fires of hell later. She marched down to the corner store and bought one of every adult magazine they had in stock. She then forced her son to masturbate to all of them in front of her. Needless to say, the horror and shame of this incident caused profound injury to Mario’s sexual development and, in conjunctions with many other similar incidents, caused a great deal of emotional scarring and repression.
Twenty years later, Mario was making a decent living as a New York City plumber. He had been introduced to drugs years earlier by the same friend from whom he had received that porno magazine years earlier. He had tried everything, but his favorite drug by far, was the hallucinogenic fungus known colloquially as the “magic mushroom”. He had fallen into a regular schedule of going to work (which he enjoyed a great deal), coming home, swallowing one of his mushrooms and spending the rest of the evening escaping from his miserable past in the fantasy world he had created for himself: The Mushroom Kingdom.
While he was tripping he would write extensively about the hallucinations he experienced. Years later, in the Institute, Dr. Smith would read through his journals and come to the conclusion that even in his fantasy world he was unable to fully escape the scars of his upbringing. Mario’s mother had branded the idea of the seven deadly sins so deeply into his subconscious, and fueled these ideas so heavily with guilt and shame, that in his dream world each of the seven deadly sins manifested itself as a separate personality. A different character in his dream expressed his attempt to grapple with each sin, uniquely.
Envy
The most obvious representation of a deadly sin in Mario’s world was envy. Those who knew him say that Mario was a wonderful man who wouldn’t hurt a fly. He always had a smile, a joke, and a kind word for everyone. But this didn’t change the fact that the negative emotions he felt swam deep beneath the surface of his consciousness, unexpressed and unprocessed. According to Dr. Smith’s interpretation of Mario’s dream world, he felt so much envy for his real-life older brother, Luigi, that he created a dream world version of him.
Luigi’s success as a doctor, and Ms. Giordano’s constant praise for Luigi, caused a great deal of conflict and confusion in Mario as a child. He loved his brother a great deal, but always felt inadequate when he measured his successes and positive attributes using Luigi’s life as a yardstick. Luigi had, not just his mother’s love and admiration, good looks, intelligence, and an excellent career, but Mario also felt a deep sense of abandonment from his brother after he left New York to attend college.
In his dream world, Mario made Luigi a plumber instead of a doctor to bring him down, career-wise, to his same level. Luigi was still taller than Mario, but now they had matching mustaches to make them look more similar; while in real life Luigi had never had any facial hair whatsoever. And perhaps most telling of all, while in his fantasy land, Mario was always dressed in red, a color of passion and action, but Luigi was always dressed in green, the traditional color of envy.
Greed
Greed was represented in Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom by a distorted reflection of himself, Wario. Unlike Luigi, a real person whom Mario altered in his dream to look more similar to himself, Wario was born entirely from Mario’s imagination. Wario was Mario’s greedy evil twin who lusted after, not money, but treasure.
The money/treasure dichotomy in Mario’s hallucinations is important to note. Mario associated money with positive things, while associating treasure with negative things. In the Mushroom Kingdom, Mario subconsciously surmised that obtaining enough money would allow him to come back from the dead after he was killed and/or reattempt a challenge he had previously failed as if the failure had never occurred. Treasure, by contrast, was something that only his evil twin, Wario, coveted and hoarded. Even when a treasure chest appeared in the Mushroom Kingdom for Mario, it would bear a treasure with a useful application (e.g. a “power star” or a bubble of air that Mario could use to breathe if he was underwater), not simply an arbitrary object to be owned and kept.
This disparity between the value of money and the value of treasure in Mario’s mind is not as nonsensical as it appears at first glance. Raised during the depression, his mother most likely looked at money and material goods differently, and like so many of her idiosyncrasies, when it came to her own house and child she enforced it as if it were the law of God himself. She always praised Luigi for his ability to “earn a good living” and browbeat Mario into putting any money he was lucky enough to obtain away for “a rainy day” rather than “wasting it on toys or candy”. Whenever Mario showed an interest in collecting things she would chastise him and throw them away, or donate them to the church, calling him a greedy sinner and a worshiper of false idols. Money was to be spent on food, or invested in something that would yield more money, not for the petty, selfish purchase of personal enjoyment through material objects. Mario was only able to keep a baseball card collection for any extended length of time by keeping it in a secret hollow behind some loose bricks in the alley behind his apartment building.
It’s worthwhile to mention that this secret hollow behind the bricks would later come to have a significant role in the Mushroom Kingdom where bricks became the bearers of all kinds of innocent, secret treasures.
Gluttony
Mario was not the thinnest of children, and his mother never failed to attribute his ample middle to the sin of gluttony. She would ration his meals and send him to bed hungry, but this would only exacerbate the problem as he would be unable to stop himself from getting up in the middle of the night and gorging himself to make up for the hours of hunger pangs, which would only increase his sense of food-related guilt.
In the Mushroom Kingdom, his subconscious invented a friend for him who could eat endlessly and never gain weight: Yoshi. Yoshi’s reptilian nature was his interpretation of his deep subconscious, a less evolved portion of his brain.
Pride
Pride was one sin that Mario’s mother never accused him of, but would instead attribute to her coworkers, her boss, the neighbors, the landlord, or anyone in a position of power or authority over her. She would never cease telling Mario about how all of the prideful fools who had wronged her would regret their haughtiness and condescension, and would make “Pride goeth before a fall” an oft repeated motto during these tirades.
Relieved as he was that, for once, her venom wasn’t aimed in his direction, Mario wisely refrained from pointing out his mother’s own issues with pride to her during one of her diatribes.
Her frequent criticism of anyone and everyone made him picture her as a being in the clouds hurling judgments and raining insults down on the hapless beings of the world below. This, of course, would later morph into the being Lakitu after he began his long love affair with psychotropic drugs.
Sloth
Not being as intelligent, or as enterprising, as his brother, Mario was often accused of the sin of sloth by his mother. She interpreted his average grades and modest career aspirations as laziness rather than a lack of scholastic aptitude. Although he couldn’t eloquently express the way this made him feel in words, his subconscious was more than happy to pick up the slack years later in the Mushroom Kingdom.
What he desperately wanted his mother to understand was that he worked hard in school, but that she was so blinded by her experience with Luigi, that when she looked at Mario by comparison, it seemed like he wasn’t doing anything at all. Or in other words, when she wasn’t paying attention and criticizing, he felt like he was moving through life quite nicely, but when she looked at him, and made it clear that from her perspective he wasn’t getting anywhere, he felt as if he hadn’t made any progress whatsoever, but rather had been in the same place all along, still as a statue.
The internal confusion caused by the conflict between these two viewpoints spawned a character called Big Boo in the Mushroom Kingdom, a silent ghost who moved when Mario’s back was turned, but kept stock still when he looked.
Wrath
Like many young men, Mario became fascinated, and identified, with the character of King Kong. The lesson he took from the film was the same lesson he received at home, any expression of rage or anger would be met with oppression and violence. But it was impossible for Mario not to feel rage of some kind at his treatment. This suppression of his anger in his childhood and teens, along with his fascination with King Kong, made for a violent and fearsome foe in his dream world.
Donkey Kong, a character that Mario battled in his fantasies, but secretly cheered for at the same time, was an expression of Mario’s suppressed wrath.
Lust
After the horrible experience in his teens, Mario was forever scarred. He never showed more than a childlike crush for any woman, and he never masturbated. Externalizing his sexual feelings, he was convinced on some level that his mother was correct when she told him that that feelings of that nature were evil, and that women needed to be protected from them.
In a similar manner that another of his subconscious physical sensations, hunger, was attributed to a less evolved reptilian character manifested in the dinosaur, Yoshi, so too were his sexual feelings masked by an external character of reptilian descent: Bowser Koopa.
It’s no coincidence that Bowser would habitually kidnap Mario’s beautiful, yet plutonic, imaginary companion Princess Peach. This was most likely a reflection of how he would constantly attempt to avoid his sexual feelings toward women in his real life, thereby saving them from what he considered to be his evil internal urges.
The great minds of the videogame world may never acknowledge the existence of this troubled soul who was the inspirational spark behind a new media empire, but it’s always enlightening to view the crumbling foundations and cracked bedrock on which many of our most beloved institutions lie.
Back to you in the studio, Curtis.
Zeus dammit, Doc, I’ve missed your comments!
Yep. I’m young, dumb, and full of comments.