Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
If you’ve been following Sundry Sunday for a while here, you might have caught on to a few trends. One, too many Nintendo characters. And two, I have a high resistance to schmaltz.
There’s fifty-pound bags full of unearned sentiment just laying around the Youtube platform, and most of it I will have no truck with. A lot of it depends on your past connection with characters, and despite surface appearances, I don’t have a lot of connection with game characters. And it feels like theft, to cloyingly play off of pre-existing characters in such cheap and easy ways.
But that’s not to say it can’t be done well, as in this short voice-acted slideshow that was released soon after the recent Super Mario Bros. Movie. The (newer) SMB movie definitely has its faults, but it also has some pretty deep cuts from throughout Mario’s history, and the best of those has to be Foreman Spike, semi-antagonist from Wrecking Crew, and Mario & Luigi’s boss in the mundane world of plumbing.
There are slight hints that, despite his abrasive personality, there is a tiny bit more to Spike than seems at first, and that’s what makes the slideshow, from GabaLeth, feel like it’s slightly more entitled to its emotion than your standard cartoon sugarjob. And it’s only a minute long. Here:
Extra: here’s nine minutes more from the same account, of various Movie-themed clips.
