Franchise: Mario

According to Shigeru Miyamoto, neither Mario or Luigi have surnames. The Super Mario Bros. film has Mario and Luigi's last name as Mario, but this was because of a scene where the two had to provide their full name.

In a 2023 interview done to promote "The Super Mario Bros. Movie", Shigeru Miyamoto shared his thoughts and opinions on certain aspects of the character Mario that the filmmakers could easily take from the video games that made him endure over time and become so beloved the world over:

"It's the very fact that he is not your typical superhero that makes him such an interesting movie character[...]He's so relatable. He's an Everyman character. He never gives up. He always keeps coming. Those qualities make for a very compelling central character.

I think part of it is the idea that Mario never gives up[...]And he's kind of got this shy side to him. When all the attention is focused on him, he's a little bashful and doesn't maybe want that. That speaks to me. He might seem brave, but that's still a fundamental core essence of his character."

While Mario's mustache, red shirt and blue overalls were described by Miyamoto as the result of technical limitations, there's a possibility that they were also inspired by an issue of the Japanese men's fashion magazine Popeye, named after the fictional character that Mario was already partly inspired by. The March 1980 issue of Popeye magazine features cover art of a man with a mustache wearing a red shirt with blue overalls.

A common belief relating to Rare's work with Nintendo in the 1990s is that the Banjo-Kazooie series and the early family-friendly iteration of the Conker series were originally intended to share a universe with Donkey Kong. By extension, this would also connect them to the Mario series. This belief stemmed from Banjo and Conker's debuts as playable characters in Diddy Kong Racing, other shared characters (e.g. Gnawty, a beaver who appears in both Donkey Kong Country and Banjo-Kazooie), and other planned appearances like the Ice Key from the Banjo-Kazooie series' unused Stop 'n' Swop feature being found in the data for Donkey Kong 64. This interpretation was so popular at one point that the largest English-language Mario fan wiki, Super Mario Wiki, hosted articles about Banjo-Kazooie and Conker characters.

However, Banjo-Kazooie creator Gregg Mayles has stated that Rare's non-Donkey Kong games were never intended to share a universe with Donkey Kong (although he did entertain the idea of them traveling between universes for crossover appearances), while Conker's Bad Fur Day director Chris Seavor has gone on to say that Banjo-Kazooie and Conker also do not share a universe.

When Birdo (known in Japanese as Catherine) was first introduced in Yume Koujou: Doki-doki Panic, the game's manual gave this description:


This carried over to the manual for the game's Western reskin as Super Mario Bros. 2 (known as Super Mario USA in Japan), where it instead states that Birdo's preferred name is "Birdetta". Starting with the commercial for Super Mario USA, Birdo was depicted in Japanese media as a flamboyant and flirtatious okama (a Japanese-language derogatory slur used to refer to gay men, transgender women, male crossdressers, and/or effeminate men) in both her voice acting and mannerisms for comedic purposes. However, this depiction, as well as the Western Birdetta name, were largely omitted from English localizations of future Mario games, with some exceptions:

• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, where Birdo appears as an accomplice of Popple, who feels confused and discomforted by her.
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl, where Birdo's trophy description calls Birdo "gender indeterminate", uses "it" instead of a gendered pronoun, and includes the omitted Birdetta name.
• Super Mario Party, where Birdo is referred to with she/her pronouns in the American English script, he/him pronouns in the British English script, and no gendered pronouns in the Japanese script.

Birdo's Japanese depictions drew characteristics from drag queens and transgender women in Japanese pop culture, and Birdo would retain toned down elements of these in subsequent reappearances. Birdo frequently refers to herself in Japanese media with both the first-person feminine pronoun "atashi" and the gender-neutral first-person pronoun "watashi", invoking the latter in a feminine manner. In the Satellaview game BS Super Mario USA, the three types of Birdo are voiced by Shiroi Heya nightclub performers Jun Donna, Rika, and Akemi, all of whom identified as newhalves (a Japanese term interchangeably used to refer to transgender people and male crossdressers). Birdo's gender is most explicitly addressed in Captain Rainbow, where she is depicted again as an okama and is arrested for using a women's restroom. This forms the basis for a sidequest where she can only be exonerated once the player finds a censored item in her house called the "female proof" that is strongly implied to be a vibrator. In one trailer for the game, Little Mac describes Birdo as a "young lady", before pausing and restating: "Depending on one's view point, she is a young lady."

In 2015, a representative for Nintendo told the Japanese news site Netorabo that Birdo, as well as Yoshi, were neither male or female, or even dinosaurs; Birdo was "someone who believes they are a girl [...] 'Yoshi' is 'Yoshi' and 'Catherine' is 'Catherine'".

On April 22, 2015, Nintendo of America uploaded a tweet with an image of a Waluigi plush doll riding a Wiggler plush doll, with the caption:


Someone at Nintendo of America forgot to spell-check Wiggler's name, because the term "wigger" describes a white person who emulates the cultural behaviors attributed to African-Americans.

Shortly after finding the mistake, Nintendo of America took it down and apologized for the error.

In the 2023 film "The Super Mario Bros. Movie", the Japanese name for the character Spike (the foreman from Wrecking Crew) was changed in the corresponding dub. Although no specific reason was given as to why the change was made, it can be assumed it was done to avoid controversy as the character's original Japanese name is "Blackie", which is also a derogatory racial slur in English-speaking countries used to refer to dark-skinned people of African descent.

As of 2023, Mario has prominently appeared in at least one theatrical film per decade since he was created in 1981:
•1986’s Super Mario Bros: The Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach, which is one of the first film adaptations of a video game.
•1993’s Super Mario Bros, the first live-action film adaptation of a video game.
•2007’s The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, a documentary that revolves around Steve Wiebe attempting to usurp Billy Mitchell’s high score on Donkey Kong.
•2015’s Pixels, which incorporates Donkey Kong as the final boss of the film’s climax (alongside Mario making a brief cameo).
•2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which is the first video game film to make $1 billion dollars at the box office.

Interestingly, the two films that weren’t direct adaptations of the games, The King of Kong and Pixels, were directed and produced respectively by Seth Gordon, who considered making a 3D film adaptation of Super Paper Mario back in 2008.

The lead technical character artist for Luigi's Mansion 3, Jeffrey Zoern, previously worked as the art director for Hotel Mario, another Mario series game themed around hotels that Nintendo has historically been reluctant to acknowledge.

Lexibook, a company infamous for low-quality unlicensed NES-based consoles (or "Famiclones") featuring plagiarized content from a variety of sources including Nintendo games, entered an official agreement with Nintendo in 2020 to license various Nintendo IPs including Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda, and Mario.

While filming the infamous live-action Super Mario Bros movie released in 1993, Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo would deliberately get intoxicated before shoots to help them cope with the disastrous production.

In 1991, Nintendo and MCA Records released a compilation album titled "Nintendo: White Knuckle Scorin'". While the original plan was to have numerous rock and pop acts record songs based off Nintendo franchises, all but one of the songs contributed to the album have nothing to do with them. The album booklet featured a short comic loosely based on Super Mario World that was written and illustrated by the team responsible for the "Nintendo Comics System" comic book series released in the early 1990's. The comic and the album's release were designed to promote children's literacy, and was dedicated to Bobby Brooks, a talent agent passionate about promoting that cause who was killed in a 1990 helicopter crash that also took the life of blues musician Stevie Ray Vaughan.

The most notable thing to come out of this album's existence is an officially-licensed original song based on the Mario series titled "Ignorance is Bliss" written by Andy Sturmer and his then-girlfriend Sarah Wirt, and performed by Sturmer's psychedelic pop band Jellyfish. Sturmer, despite not being interested in video games, took it upon himself to make sure the song's lyrics remained relevant to the Mario series by directly basing them off of the album booklet's comic, which featured an illiterate Bowser ranting to Princess Toadstool about his plans of turning Dinosaur Land into fossil fuels and using his newfound status as an oil tycoon to join the real-life Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), as well as how much he hates reading. Sturmer later described the song as a "mini-opera" that was "a lot of fun to write".

Starting with Super Mario 64, the Koopa Troopa's voice is an incredibly short snippet of "HUMAN, YELL - YELL: FEMALE", a sound effect of a woman gleefully screaming from the Best Service Voice Spectral Volume 1 sound pack, modified into different pitches and speeds. In some games, a different snippet from the sound effect is used to represent Koopa Troopas screaming or being frustrated.

Years prior to the animation studio Illumination having a film based off the Mario franchise with the 2023 film "The Super Mario Bros. Movie", the series had been referenced in a handful of films by the same studio, including Donkey Kong references in "Dr. Seuss' The Lorax" and "Despicable Me 3", and an homage to kicking a Koopa Troopa shell featured in "The Secret Life of Pets".

In 1983, an album was released on vinyl by Kid Stuff Records titled Donkey Kong (alternatively called Donkey Kong Goes Home), retelling the story of the video game of the same name. It is notable for not only potentially being the first time Mario was voiced (having an unknown release date in 1983, which was also the debut year of Saturday Supercade), but also giving Mario a stereotypical Italian accent with an "-a-" verbal tic as opposed to the gruff Italian-American accent that would be used in multimedia projects for the rest of the 80s (including Saturday Supercade), predating Charles Martinet's debut as Mario in Mario Teaches Typing by 8 years. According to Kid Stuff Mario voice actor Pat McBride, the reasoning for this voice direction was


Nintendo never gave the team behind Donkey Kong Goes Home any form of guidance for the project, and did not give any word - positive or negative - about the finished album beyond approving it.

Paratroopa's Japanese name, 'Pata-pata' (パタパタ), comes from the Japanese onomatopoeia for flapping wings.

Yoshi's Story was the first Mario series game to be rated E for Everyone instead of K-A for Kids to Adults due to the changeover by the ESRB from the previously used K-A rating in 1998.

Concept art for Paper Mario: Color Splash shows that the captain of the Violet Passage was at one point going to have a dark skin tone. This would've marked the first instance of a Toad with a distinct skin color (not counting usually-pale Toads under a transformation) in a Mario game, but not the first instance of a non-pale Toad in the Mario franchise as a whole. The Super Mario Bros. Super Show featured a one-off Native American Toad named Pronto, a parody of Tonto from The Lone Ranger, in the episode "The Provolone Ranger".

At the time Wario was created, he was originally intended to be German. In the Japanese version of Mario Kart 64, the western versions of Mario Party and all versions of Mario Party 2, Wario says the line "So ein mist!" (often misheard for many years as "Doh I missed!"), which means "Such a crap!" in German. These voice clips were provided by German translator Thomas Spindler, who lived in Japan at the time and was contracted by Nintendo to translate their games. During the development of Mario Kart 64, Spindler attended a voice recording session with French translator Julien Bardakoff (who would provide the voice of Luigi) and was picked by producer Takashi Tezuka for the role of Wario for his deep, German-accented voice because "You have the voice of a bad guy!" When Charles Martinet took on the role however, he was not made aware that Wario was supposed to be German, and voiced him with an Italian accent like he did with Mario and Luigi, which would then become a staple of the character's personality. Even though the idea of Wario being German was dropped after this change, his theme music in Mario Strikers Charged would be stylized off of German folk music.

The sounds used for Yoshi's voice in Super Mario World were created by composer Koji Kondo by playing an orchestral hit keyboard preset and pitching it both higher and lower. This sound would go on to be used as Yoshi's voice in several of his appearances throughout the Mario series, even in some instances after Kazumi Totaka became his voice actor.