The Mario Years

I have been thinking about Mario Bros. lately. I can’t tell you why other than the simple fact that sometimes I just get stuck in a thought process and can’t escape it. Then, when I’m trapped, what started as something simple and stupid, i.e. “why does Luigi always help Mario save Peach when there’s no reward for him? Mario gets cake, and Luigi gets nothing?” evolves into something far more detailed, like the rest of this piece.

Mario and Luigi started in 1983. They are plumbers, or at least they were, because since 1983 they haven’t had any time to hold a single plumbing job given the fact that they are always busy rescuing Princess Peach from the clutches of a dinosaur-turtle that seems hell-bent on bestiality-rape. Since Bowser showed up, I’m assuming Mario and Luigi had to sell their plumbing company just to make ends meet. Those overalls aren’t free, and both Mario and Luigi seem to enjoy colour-coding what they wear with whatever power they have acquired. That means they had to buy their default overalls, white and red for fire power, blue for ice, frog suits, penguin suits, and then small versions of everything in case they can’t find an Alice in Wonderland type growth mushroom to wear their adult overalls. So I think it’s safe to say they are currently out of the plumbing industry, and have been so out of practice since 1983 that they probably couldn’t even re-open a business even if Princess Peach managed to hire some guards that weren’t tiny toadstools to protect her from Bowser.

So how do they make money? I think this is why Luigi always helps his brother save the Princess. I know that Mario is doing it for cake, which I firmly believe is a metaphor for sex, but I think Luigi is looking at the big picture. Worst case scenario, I’m sure Princess Peach has enough money to offer up some sort of reward for saving her. Best case scenario, Mario marries Princess Peach and lets his brother live in the castle with them. Honestly, I think the latter would be the best case scenario. I don’t think Bowser would keep trying to steal Princess Peach if Mario and Luigi lived with her. They would be an enormous deterrent, given the fact that they keep hurting him every time he tries to steal her. I mean, in Mario 64, they even threw him into exploding spike balls until he needed hospitalization and quite possibly extensive surgery.

Which brings me to my next point; throwing Bowser into spike balls must be hard. He’s heavy. I mean, he’s a giant dinosaur turtle with a spiked shell that’s at least twice the size of Mario in the original Mario Bros., and about 100 times the size of him in Mario Galaxy. By Mario 64, Bowser was about 10 times the size of Mario. That’s a lot of throwing power. To make things even more interesting, Mario spent some time doing community service work in Mario Sunshine. There he would run around with this interesting water-cannon backpack that would fire enormous amounts of water on pollution scattered across the city and neighboring areas. I would assume that the water cannon held about 50 cubic feet of water before Mario had to go find a nice clean water hole and fill it up. Water weighs roughly 62.5 pounds per cubic foot. That means Mario is not only lugging around 3125 pounds of water, but he’s pulling off triple jumps that are well over 3 stories high at the same time.

So why is Mario still fat? He jumps 3 stories high carrying 3125 pounds of water and about 200 pounds of body fat. How is he still fat? He must have some serious metabolism issues. Either that, or he has such enormous muscle mass (which is very likely given his strength) that it has to roll on top of each other and shape itself like fatty tissue in order to fit into his short little body. I mean, we’re talking about a guy that breaks brick with a light tap of his closed fist. This little guy is strong.

I don’t really expect answers to these questions. I would like them, but I don’t really expect them. I guess I’ll just have to go day-to-day in being unsure. But on a final note, what kind of dinosaur is Yoshi? And also, why when he’s hatched from an egg, is he already wearing a saddle? That’s just strange.