Historical Perspective; Origins of Super Mario Brothers

Super Mario Brothers is a platform video game developed by and for use on Nintendo gaming consoles, originally debuted in 1985. Starring a high-energy determined plumber in painter coveralls named Mario, the game leads the user through the perilous quest of rescuing Princess Toadstool from Bowser, King of the Koopas. The game, which takes place in the fictional Mushroom Kingdom, was produced by Shigeru Miyamoto and is largely credited with pulling the United States from the video game crash of 1983.

Super Mario Brothers found its beginnings in urban San Francisco when in 1949, Anthony Puccini, Jr. was the eighth child born to lower class working parents Stella and Anthony Puccini Senior. Stella tragically died during Anthony Jr.’ s birth, leaving Anthony Sr. to tend to the eight children on his own with only the meager wages of an electrician for sustenance. As Anthony Jr. began to mature, complications involving his respiratory system began to arise and by the time he was six, Puccini was diagnosed with both a deviated septum and a collapsed posterior nasal cavity, leading the boy to labored breathing.

The resulting effects of the condition led Anthony to unnatural breathing patterns –when his mouth was closed Anthony suffered from a form of walking Apnea where he snored while awake. The symptom forced Anthony to breath with his mouth constantly agape, which resulted in an increased level of saliva build-up in and around his mouth, an issue that proved to continually embarrass Anthony’s father, who never truly forgave his eighth child for the death of his beloved wife Stella.

By 1959, Anthony Sr. and Anthony Jr.’s relationship had become strained and Anthony Jr. was cast out of his San Francisco home, relegated to the San Francisco County Children’s Orphanage. Anthony’s father wrote the boy a letter as the ten-year old was cast from the family as an outcast: ‘The financial burden of eight children is enough, but your constant snoring and drooling around the house and around the women I meet and would hope to be suitable to take your mother’s place as a family provider made this decision an easy one. You are a mouth-breather. I hope you find a supportive mouth-breathing family.’

The years leading into Anthony’s adolescence proved just as complicated and Anthony’s untreated respiratory condition severely inhibited his social interactions at the orphanage. The boy was described by many of his caretakers as a ‘loner’ and his eventual escape from the orphanage walls in 1966 found the boy on the streets where he rapidly descended into the San Francisco underworld of drug experimentation.

On Puccini’s 20th birthday in 1969, he professes in his diary a severe dependence on LSD, cocaine and cannabis as outlets from his ‘slack-jawed slobbering existence.’ Despite his disability, homelessness and severe drug habit, Puccini shows a burgeoning interest in both culture and literature, citing his idolization of Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac and refers to the 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as his ‘personal bible.’ Like Thompson, Puccini viewed his own drug-induced ramblings as his pursuit of the American Dream. Inspired, Puccini began drafting a loosely autobiographical manuscript entitled “Mario and the Toadstool" (a reference to hallucinogenic mushrooms). The plot follows a young electrician who seeks to circumvent a world fraught with perilous hazards (both literal and figurative) through the use of hallucinogens to find ultimate happiness.

Lacking the resources or connections to have a book sent to market, Puccini soon gave up on having the manuscript published and instead focused on piecing his life back together. By 1975, the War in Vietnam had seen the return of American troops to home-soil and with the help of Vice President Gerald Ford, the United States Department of Veteran’s Affairs sought to re-integrate the war’s veterans back into American peace-time society. Posing as a soldier who fought during the Tet Offensive in Saigon, Puccini received Federally sanctioned housing in Los Angeles where he spent the next five years of his life in relative solitude.

By the early 1980’s, the growing trend of interactive video-gaming (video games) had grabbed the attention of residential America and Puccini saw an opportunity to pitch his “Mario and the Toadstool” idea not as a novel, but rather as the first ‘plot driven interactive video experience.’ Posing as a French technician and engineer, Puccini secured a meeting at the Los Angeles Atari Corp. office with Aaron Tramiel, Atari’s Western Director of Operations.

It is unclear if Puccini had taken hallucinogens prior to his meeting with Atari, but Tramiel’s account of the meeting was far from favorable. Mr. Tramiel had Puccini escorted from the Atari office after a brief fifteen minutes. Only after Super Mario Brothers’ immense success on the rival Nintendo Console did Tramiel discuss the meeting; ‘Puccini was a drooling, snorting invalid incapable of rational thought. He spoke extensively about the game’s protagonist, a super-energized electrician who ate body-altering mushrooms who attacks his enemies (which include fire-flowers and lethal turtles known as ‘Goombas’) by leaping atop their bodies. He made reference to the game’s ultimate antagonist ‘Bowser’ and the ultimate prize, ‘Princess Toadstool.’ His non-sensical proposal and his abrasive presentation forced us to have him vacate the compound.

Puccini however, was determined. Researching the industry, he found up-and-coming gaming company Nintendo and, leveraging his meeting with Atari, secured a time to speak with video game visionary Shigeru Miyamoto, who financed Puccini’s trip to Kyoto, Japan to pitch the “Mario” idea to the Nintendo team. Miyamoto, whose reputation was that of a risk-taker in the gaming industry, vouched for Puccini’s vision and Nintendo bought the rights to “Super Mario” as a follow-up to the company’s earlier venture, Donkey Kong.

In 1983, ‘Super Mario Brothers’ was officially produced with Puccini serving as independent consultant, and ultimately released to the public with enormous success. Nintendo followed Puccini’s vision closely, changing very little of Puccini’s ideas (Mario, the lead character was changed from an electrician to a plumber). During an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Puccini admits to several very ‘thinly veiled references to a drug-related past.’ Much speculation has been made that the game’s antagonist Bowser is the virtual embodiment of Puccini’s father while Princess Toadstool is that of Puccini’s mother, although neither has been confirmed. More likely though, is that Mario’s sidekick Luigi is the gaming-manifestation of Puccini’s lover Luis Carbado, though Puccini has never confirmed or denied that he is in fact homosexual.

The game’s music was composed by Japanese musician Koji Kondo who began his career writing the music for the widely acclaimed ‘Duck Hunt’ game for Nintendo. Kondo, the self-proclaimed ‘God of the ring-tone’ has set the Japanese national record for marriages and divorces, marrying 17 different women a total of 22 times. Each ceremony has maintained the distinction of using the theme music from ‘Super Mario; Mario’s Underworld’ as the bride and groom’s first dance.

In 1997, the North American Coalition of Homosexual Plumbers (NACHP) used likenesses of Mario and Luigi to promote awareness of their organization in a series of television commercials, which were later taken off the air when Nintendo threatened legal action, citing the use of 'likenesses of characters owned and operated by the Nintendo Corp as an egregious violation of copyright law.'

Historical Perspective - Evolution of the Hot Dog Bun

The modern day hot dog is the most recent evolution of tubed meat products originating from the frankfurter, the product of Vienna Austria likely dating to the 18th century. The hot dog is described as a soft moist sausage made of mechanically recovered meat and shares the tubed meat family with other products such as the wiener, sausage, brockwurst and bologna. Most often, the hot dog is served inside a bread-shaped roll called a hot dog bun.

Currently, hot dog buns are divided into two distinct families: the top loader and the side loader. 'Top loaders' tend to be easier to manage and are intended for consumers who struggle to manage the food without spilling. The 'side loader' is a more risky product intended for advanced hot dog consumers and tend to be doughier than their counterparts.

The original hot dog buns, however, bore little resemblance to the top or side loaders that we are familiar with in present day. As hot dogs began to grow in prevalence and popularity in the 1820's, the original roll was developed as a single roll with no side or top split, but rather a tubular hole in which the hot dog is inserted and firmly housed as it is eaten. The uppermost portion of the role featured a canal that ran lengthwise along the bun, which was filled with various garnishings and condiments including ketchup, mustard, relish and sauerkraut (a cabbage based food invented by Germanic tribes in the 2nd century BCE which was force-fed to captured Roman soldiers as a torture-tactic). See below for a sketch of the original hot dog roll:

In the mid-1850's, a professional baseball craze hit the New York Metropolitan area and with this success, so grew the prominence of hot dogs and the tubular bread products which housed them. Following a brief drop in hot dog consumption during the Civil War, the tubed meat enjoyed record-setting sales from Bangor, Maine to Tallahassee, Florida and out West through the new frontier.

The early 1880's, however, saw a major set-back and ultimately evolutionary period for hot dogs, and the buns associated with them in particular. In 1883 a group of Quaker dissenters known as Beanites launched a very aggressive, very public boycott of hot dogs, who saw the act of inserting hot dogs into their tubular buns as an innuendo of sexual intercourse. The Beanites, founded by Joel Bean in 1863, opposed extreme radical evangelicalism that had crept into the Quaker ideology. With a community of over 5,000 in New Hampshire, the group held a great deal of influence over social and political spheres in post-Civil War New England.

In the twenty years since the Beanite community's inception, the group's population nearly tripled in size, 'the symptom,' Joel Bean claimed 'of a formerly unexplained spike in teenage pregnancy directly linked to the subliminal sexual messaging that the consumption of hot dogs promotes.' Bean, the author of the Quaker pamphlet 'Bean's Banter' claimed in a lengthy essay in 1883 that the 'lewd image of a hot dog inserted into its tubular bun has directed a God-fearing community of Beanites into a dark era of vice dubbed as The Three P's: early Pregnancy, eventual Poverty and Prostitution.' In effect, Bean claimed that the sexual nature of hot dog and hot dog bun consumption was influencing the younger generation of his community to engage in unplanned, ill-advised premarital intercourse.

In June of 1884, Bean found an audience for his message when Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Times published an editorial by Bean entitled 'A Hot Dog Roll in the Hay? No Thanks!' The aggressive, often slanderous piece formed the basis for an offensive on hot dog manufacturers and bread-bakers nationwide. With the support of extensive nationwide boycotts and petitions signed by various types of religious groups, the first hot dog bun-baker closed its doors in October of 1884, citing a lack of sales. It was the first major victory for the Beanites in a long list of many and by September of 1885, three of the top five hot dog roll manufacturers closed their doors.

As the Quaker-dissenting group reveled in its successes, Congress and major political figures took notice of the movement. In 1885, the Episcopalian incumbent President of the United States Chester A. Arthur voiced his opinion during his re-election campaign. Denouncing the consumption of all hot-dog related products, Arthur stated, 'True Patriots enjoy hamburgers, or at the very least hot dogs without buns. Any refusal to adhere to this simple guideline of decency is in effect a blatant rejection of the sanctity of God, family and the very beliefs and fortitude with which this country was founded.'

Joel Bean officially declared victory when hot dog and hot dog bun sales plummeted to a mere 25% of industry revenue standards achieved just five years earlier in 1880. Only in 1894, when Wonder Bread introduced a new 'top loaded' hot dog roll product with the tagline: 'Wonder Bread is God's Choice!' did the hot dog industry begin to realign. The product was reintroduced to ballparks and sales immediately spiked, thus commencing the Golden Age of Hot Dog consumption, a period which lasted for over 50 years.

Sales once again faltered, however, following the hot dog's introduction to Soviet Belarus. In 1963, as the international nuclear arms race raged, US President John Kennedy penned and ratified the Nuclear Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) which banned the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water. The treaty was to be signed by Kennedy on October 7th in the Oval Office, as well as ratified by the United Kingdom and the USSR, represented by Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, Andrei Gromyko. Following the meeting, President Kennedy (a lover of tubed meat) is said to have shared several hot dogs with Minister Gromyko, who considered the food a 'new and foreign delicacy.'

Gromyko was so taken with hot dogs that he ordered his plane back to Moscow be stocked with the meat, citing the unavailability of the product in Soviet Russia. Hot dogs quickly became a steady staple in the Minister's diet and during a public address in Minsk, Belarus concerning arms disarmament issues, Gromyko jokingly made reference to his new-found love of hot dogs stating, 'I am introducing hot dogs to Eastern Europe!'

Belarussians however, misunderstood the foreign reference, and assumed that the term 'hot dog' referred to a species of canine, rather than a food. Belarus, one of Europe's major chicken exporters, immediately began to panic, worrying that a new introduced species of canine would decimate the chicken population, greatly inhibiting job growth and the region's competitiveness. The reaction was swift as several Soviet media outlets immediately slandered Gromyko's attempt at introducing a new race of dog. International headlines widely denounced both Gromyko and hot dogs, and sales within the industry once again plummeted. The issue did not however have an immense impact on Gromyko's politcal career, who held office until 1985 and played a pivotal role in the Cuban Missile Crisis negotiations as well as the non-aggression pact with West Germany. He did not speak publicly about his fondness of hot dogs again.

Currently, hot dogs are sold in the United States at a clip of over 100 million per year. They have found a spot in American culture in baseball parks across the country and every Fourth of July, Nathan's Hot Dogs sponsors a hot dog eating contest, of which Rosie O'Donnell is a yearly participant, winning the competition in 2002.