Nov 21 2007
But Where Have the Raccoon Tails Gone?
In the span of about a week, Nintendo diehards and Mario loyalists received a double treat: the arrival of Super Mario Galaxy just days after Super Mario Bros. 3 finally hit the Wii Virtual Console. The former brought Mario into a new age of three-dimensional gameplay while the latter took many of us back to that wonderful day in 1990 when we took that yellow box home, ripped it open and played through an adventure that has perhaps never quite been paralleled in terms of sheer fun.
As many gamers have noted, Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario Galaxy share enough similarities that, in a sense, one could consider Galaxy the true sequel to Super Mario Bros. 3, both in terms of Mario’s costume change power-up system and in terms of sheer fun factor. I’d wager that Super Mario Bros. 3’s debut on the Virtual Console coming so soon before Galaxy’s release date is no mere coincidence, as perhaps the Nintendo higher-ups are as aware as anybody of how much the two titles have in common.
Looking back on the development of the Super Mario games since Super Mario Bros. 3 gave everyone’s favorite plumber a raccoon tail and made him soar into the pixelated heavens, however, I am struck by the relative lack of gameplay elements from this groundbreaking title that carried over into the sequels.
Take the most-touted advancement of this game: raccoon tail-powered flight. Though Mario took to the skies again in Su
per Mario World (with the Super Cape), in Super Mario 64 (with the Wing Cap) and now in Super Mario Galaxy (with the Red Star), the striped stylings of Mario’s raccoon tail and ears never appeared again. Moreover, the rest of the game’s big-name power-ups — the Frog Suit, the Tanooki Suit, the Sledgehammer Suit and Kuribo’s Shoe — also faded from favor. (Beta versions of Super Mario World featured a raccoon-tailed Mario, but the power-up eventually gave way to the cape before the final version, never to be seen again.) Of course, one could easily explain this with theory that Nintendo wants to re-invent Mario, to an extent, with every game needing to introduce something new and shed what was new in the previous title. (Really, would it have been sensory overload to see Tanooki Mario riding Yoshi in with F.L.U.D.D. strapped to his back?)
Spiritually, the costume change dynamic of Super Mario Bros. 3 has lived on in other titles as well. For example, despite being more heavily influenced graphics-wise by Super Mario World, Super Mario Land 2 featured its hero fluttering about with a pair of rabbit ears. Even more so, NEW Super Mario Bros., despite marking a return to basics, allowed Mario to hop into a Koopa shell, combining elements of the Frog Suit and Hammer Bros. Suit. And the power-up system in Super Mario Galaxy clearly draws on Super Mario Bros. 3’s, with the Bee Suit being particularly reminiscent of Mario’s eight-bit days.
But it has always puzzled me why a game as monumentally popular as Super Mario Bros. 3 — the only Nintendo-produced title to be deemed culturally relevant and officially archived by Stanford’s History of Science and Technology department — has yielded surprisingly little to the games that followed it aside from certain gameplay elements, and even then only in the abstract sense. (Flying, for example, and navigating a map to get from stage to stage.) Super Mario World’s universe and characters were reused time and time again, with the Dinosaur Land-esque background and baddies appearing throughout Super Mario Kart, Yoshi’s Safari and Yoshi’s Island, while Yoshi himself joined the roster of Mario series stars immediately upon his debut. Hell, even F.L.U.D.D. made the cut for Super Smash Bros. Brawl. And yet fairly few Super Mario Bros. 3 icons are still around today, and the only direct Super Mario Bros. 3 throwback I can think of is the airship stage in Mario Kart DS.
The game pitted Mario against a much larger stable of foes than any of the previous games, but only a few of the generic baddies regularly appear in later games, with Boo, Thwomp, Dry Bones, and 
Chain Chomp being among the more successful. (Conversely, proportionally more of the enemies in series black sheep Super Mario Bros. 2 now show up regularly in newer games.) Remember the Koopalings? (That is, the seven older ones?) Despite reaching moderate levels of fame post-Super Mario Bros. 3, they’ve been all-but-dropped from the rosters of recent Mario outings. Want to get down to the nitty-gritty? Sure, I’ll admit a few more Super Mario Bros. 3 enemies have made the stray cameo in the seventeen years since they debuted. (Among them: The Angry Sun in Mario Kart DS, the Boomerang and Fire Bros. in Paper Mario games, and those damn Nipper Plants have been biting at Mario’s heels for a while now.) What, then, has become of Boom-Boom, the fortress boss terror? Where are all the original Super Mario Bros. baddies with baby versions of themselves in tow? Did the mole-like Koopas throwing wrenches at Mario during the airship stages simply became the actual Monty Mole characters in so many games since? Where are the gargantuan-sized inhabitants of the Land of Giants? Hot Foot, the weirdly ambulatory flame? Stretch, the quadrangle ghost weirdo? Variation after variation on the Piranha Plant?
Believe me, I was happier than anyone when I saw the opening cinema for Super Mario Galaxy and recognized the Super Mario Bros. 3. airship theme playing in the scene in which Bowser’s fleet attacks the Mushroom Kingdom. It wasn’t a full-on, coin-filled heavenly bounty of nostalgia, but it was a small touch that told me that Nintendo hasn’t, in fact, forgotten all about Super Mario Bros. 3 — a phenomenal game whose successors have curiously little homage to it. In a strange way, Super Mario Bros. 3 is a victim of having been release before the age in which each Super Mario adventure arrives surrounded of a cluster of spin-offs based on its aesthetic theme. (Super Mario World, meet Super Mario Kart. Super Mario 64, meet Mario Kart 64, and so forth.)
I appreciate that Mario must move onward and upward — pretty far upward, as of late — but I also fondly recall my days playing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time. I don’t know what Nintendo has planned for the portly plumber in the future. (After all, where do you go after you conquer space?) But I’m just saying, I may not be the only one who’d appreciate seeing a raccoon tail or two thrown into the mix on a future outing.
Drew also writes at his pop culture blog, Back of the Cereal Box.
5 Responses to “But Where Have the Raccoon Tails Gone?”
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Kudos. Very well written as usual, Drew, but I’m afraid I must respectfully disagree.
Super Mario Bros. 3 was a revolutionary game, and currently stands as my favourite game of all time. I’m glad, though, that no other Mario game has tried to imitate parts of it to piggyback on its originality and glory. It would just stain the overwhelmingly positive image of SMB3. Galaxy has quite enough homages to SMB3, I don’t think it needs any more, nor do we need to fill up other games with blatant throwbacks and spin-offs to the best game of all time.
SMB3 stands so well on its own as a set-piece of gameplay originality and artistic creativity that I’d much rather the Mario series move on in other directions, leaving it to stand solitary in its glory, than have future games rehash bits and pieces of it.
That’s just my opinion.
I could go either way, but I kind of agree with rarefactory. SMB3 is probably best left on its own, let the new games bring new stuff to the table, like the boo suit. I only just realized that other boos will fall in love with you if you have the suit on, they bump into you and then you’re pretty much toast.
I agree that it would be really cool to see a Raccoon suit or a Tanooki suit somewhere down the line, but it’s alright by me if they stay focused on creating new things and experimenting each time.
Great read Drew, Keep ‘em coming!
Not to worry, that wrench-throwing mole (Rocky Wrench) is back in Galaxy. And aren’t the Koopalings bosses in the Mario & Luigi games?
In Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time I believe it was just Bowser Jr. I kind of regret trading in that game.. I was completely bored with it, but it might have been worth keeping.
Yeah, the kids show up in the first Mario & Luigi but not the second. And in the first, the weirdly don’t speak the entire game. It’s very odd and their inclusion seems either tacked-on or half-assed, depending on how you look at it.