A Super Mario variety blog.
Screenshots, photos, sprites, gifs, scans and more from all around the world of Super Mario Bros.
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In Super Mario Bros. Wonder, butterfly colors are randomized every time a level is loaded. While the positions and number of butterflies are fixed, each of them can assume one of three colors.
This is the latest in a long tradition of adding very subtle elements of randomization to 2D Mario levels that are only noticeable when paying extremely close attention and comparing different playthroughs of the same level, such as e.g. the item outlines in the sky in Super Mario Bros. 3 changing positions, or the flowers in the foreground of Yoshi’s Island being slightly different every time.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: SMBW (NA, Switch)
An unused interaction with Melody Pianissima in Luigi’s Mansion found in the game’s files has her play Totaka’s Song, the recurring musical Easter egg in games composed by Kazumi Totaka, which is then identified as “Totakeke’s theme”. Totakeke is the real name of K.K. Slider, the dog musician character from the Animal Crossing series, where this song is his theme, and called “K.K. Song”.
Of particular interest is that Melody Pianissima claims to have written the song herself. This raises a number of possibilities:
1. If Mario and Animal Crossing are taken to exist in separate universes, then this song appears to exist diegetically in-universe in both, but have different origin points, being composed by her in the Mario world and by K.K. Slider in the Animal Crossing world.
2. If both of them take place in the same universe, then K.K. Slider didn’t actually write his own theme, but rather had it ghostwritten by Melody Pianissima (in both the sense that it was written without credit and that it was written by a ghost).
3. Melody Pianissima could also just be lying.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source
In Super Mario Bros. 3, there is a visual glitch with two frames of the wand whenever Mario clears an airship level and falls down to one of the kings’ castles. Due to the wand moving extremely quickly in-game, this can only be seen by severely slowing down the footage.
Top: the scene as seen in the game, slowed down.
Bottom: the glitched frames in question, making the wand appear Y-shaped.
While it can potentially be argued that these could be intentional smear frames, this is highly unlikely since the effect only appears on some orientations of the wand, and more importantly, that it only happens in the castles. When the wands drop down after defeating the Koopalings in the airships, the glitch does not occur.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: SMB3 (NA, NES)
To save space, the Super Mario Maker 2 logo is not saved internally as an image containing the full logo, but rather is chopped up and rearranged from an image containing only one instance of each character per font size. As such, the M, A and R in “MAKER” are not present in the image and are arranged at runtime by duplicating the same letters in “MARIO”.
This results in the actual graphic as it appears in the files seemingly calling the game “SUPER MARIOKE 2”.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source
In version 1.1.0 and earlier of Super Mario Odyssey (patched in all subsequent versions), having Cappy hit Talkatoo directly after Mario finishes talking to him would result in a variety of glitched behaviors.
One of these is that Mario would start talking to Talkatoo again, but only when the camera actually turns in such a way that he is visible. Mario would be able to wait long enough to fall asleep just by having the camera point in a different direction, and instantly start talking by having Talkatoo come into view.
Normally, a bird lands on Mario’s nose when he falls asleep in areas where birds occur, but flies off the second Mario starts moving again. This glitch was the only way Mario was able to change animations without scaring off the bird, allowing it to be seen perching on his nose while he is standing up.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: syrkl_dsc
During the introduction of the Mecha-Bowser Mayhem minigame in Mario Power Tennis, Bowser’s Castle is seen in the distance beyond the court before the camera tilts down and it is not seen again for the rest of the minigame.
Zooming in on the castle reveals that it is based on the design of Bowser’s Keep as seen in Super Mario RPG, a rare example of that game being referenced outside of an RPG context.
Main Blog | Patreon | Twitter | Bluesky | Small Findings | Source: MPT (NA, GC)