Nintendo has released a series of short animations starring Mario in various inoffensive, vaguely humorous situations. They average at a little less than a minute each, are nearly wordless except for Mario’s vaguely-Italian noises, and are obviously intended for children. Hey, it’s a low-effort week. Consider yourselves informed.
The first:
Number two:
Tres:
One interesting thing bout them, they’re on Nintendo UK’s YouTube channel, and I think on Nintendo of Japan’s, but they’re not on Nintendo of America’s channel. I wonder why?
I find this video hilarious. (1 minute) It does feature the vaguely upsetting image of a couple of cartoon anthropomorphs being devoured by predators, who are also cartoon anthropomorphs. Surprisingly safe for work… except for a couple of not-illustrated pieces of trivia.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It was vitally important to tell all of you about Pugberto last week, I’m sure you’ll all agree. A couple of other items had to wait a week before I could present them to you.
The Amazing Digitial Circus has a fifth episode now. It got over 40 million views in a few days so there’s a good chance you’ve found it by now. Still though, here ’tis (25m):
The Amazing Digital Circus has merchandise, and some pretty amusing videos to sell it. There’s a new one of those too (4m):
Over on a much less trafficked portion of Youtube, the hapless heroes of the Wigglewood Tales have a couple of new videos too, The Bandit (2m):
And The Greatest Foe (a particular frog in the swamp, 2 minutes)—but Youtube’s awful policies think it’s made for kids, despite the frog getting murdered bloodily at the end, so they made it unembedable. YOUTUBE HAS DONE A STUPID THING, LET THIS ALLCAPS MESSAGE STAND IN TESTAMENT TO THIS RIDICULOUS FACT.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s been ten years since a little line drawning animation called URappinBad! shows up on Newgrounds. Now its creator Kevin Fagaragan has gone back and not only made it into a full color animation, but shows it side by side with the original.
Be on the lookout for cameos by Parappa’s friends PJ Berri and Katy Kat, Cheap Cheap the Cooking Chicken, and UmJammer Lammy. Both videos of course feature music taken directly from the Playstation classic Parappa the Rapper, which still has one of the best soundtracks in gaming. They got the music stuck in my head all over again. “When I say boom boom boom you say bam bam bam, no pause in between! C’mon let’s jam!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
It’s a little old, but we do claim here that sometimes we’ll post things that are decades old. This one’s only five years of age.
It’s an animation of audio from a (adjusts glasses) “Kirby drama CD.” I don’t want to image what the rest of it is like, but this part at least is funny and adorable and pretty much keeping in Kirby’s character of being enthusiastic about everything. It’s only 45 seconds long:
Who set up Popstar’s phone service? This seems to be a land line! Did Waddle Dees build it? Did they contract it out to Magolor, who has set up a network of satellites Starlink-style? Did King Dedede pay for it? Is it a naturally occurring phone system? Who the heck knows, poyo!
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
Its from Dorkly, a gamer content channel on Youtube. I usually try to keep the finds we present here to one-person operations or similar. But the animation (2 ½ minutes) is entertaining, and it addresses the experience of those people standing to the side watching others beat the crap out of each other. I’m surprised they don’t take an accidental Hadoken from time to time. Doesn’t seem very safe to be at ringside for a Psycho Crusher.
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:
Nintendo’s Rhythm Heaven games are still a bit obscure, but have a passionate fanbase. They share design sensibilities with the WarioWare series, which is because both share a character designer, Ko Takeuchi. They both have a distinctive clean-line look, and a similar sense of humor.
About four years ago, some of those fans made one of those reanimation compilations of the series, and the fruits of their labor is unusually keeping in spirit of the original, which itself samples many different art and musical styles. The reanimation feels like it could have been one of the remixes from the games itself.
Speaking of, the reanimation covers all of the remixes, of all of the games in the series, with the result that the full sequence is eighteen minutes long! It’s quite faithful to the originals, despite the vastly different animation styles, and it even scored an appreciative comment from Takeuchi himself! Here it is, but be warned: you’ll watch it for a while, then see one of the videos mention it’s only half over, and you’ll think to yourself, no way:
An aside, a different reanimation project near to my heart, but unrelated to video games, is the highly-memeable 2004 collaboration that animated They Might Be Giants’ Fingertips (6 minutes, original page). Note, in its original Flash incarnation, different elements would be selected on every play, an aspect that is unfortunately lost in these renderings.
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
From Periscope Films, a video preservation group that rescues niche short subjects from destruction and obscurity to be enjoyed by all. Many of their videos are of old army training videos or newsreels or the like, but there’s a deeper variety of subject there, waiting to be found. And one of them was a cartoon fro 1982, to introduce kids to the idea of microcomputers.
A microcomputer is an old name for small (compared to mainframes, and desktop-size minicomputers) computing devices made for home use in the 70s and 80s. You still see it once in a while, but it’s given way to just the term “computer,” especially since even some gigantic information companies mostly use clusters of consumer-class PCs, or else pay Amazon to use simulated computing power of that type. The word “microcomputer” was most often applied to machines like the Apple II, the Commodore PET or the like.
In this cartoon (17m), Jennifer is a girl living on a farm and has a gigantic chunk of microcomputer sitting on her desk, and introduces its use to her technologically-clueless visiting city cousin Jack.
It’s amazingly cringey, and perfect to show to friends and acquaintances, both students of what the Subgeniuses call badfilm, and more normal types who have been suitably psychologically altered.
Jack has bigger problems than scoffing at technology, like getting his eyes to focus.Jack would grow up to become Jon Arbuckle“Keep looking! It’s back there somewhere!” Jennifer then sneaks off to smoke weed.
In addition to Jennifer helping Jack learn how to use a computer that has 64K of RAM, tops, they also use it to catch a bank robber, by trapping her in their completely automated dairy barn (that contains no cows).
Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
WiggleWood is a Youtube channel that produces humorous short videos with an old-school computer vibe. They could be cutscenes from an old Sierra adventure. None are very long (the longest us under two minutes), but are entertaining enough to have a look at. Here are all five to date:
The Wizard’s Gummy (43s), what is the nature of his system of divination?
Magician’s Brick (31s), who is “Wormdal?” Later videos imply that he’s a wizard too.
The Dark Summoning (45s), here’s Wormdal. He doesn’t seem to be exceptionally evil though, just lonely.
The Magic Lamp (1m43s): The barbarian and the wizard again. It’s best to watch your tongue in matters concerning genies.
And the last one currently, The Cursed Throne (1m47s). Wormdal and the demon lady seem to have reached an accord of sorts. It’s nice to see old enchanters making new friends.
