Long before Nintendo named him Super Mario Bros. Wonder in his first Nintendo Direct trailer, I had already named him. For me, that psychedelia of twisting pipes and dreamlike explosions of color was going to be called Mario Amsterdam.
As soon as he appeared Mario ElephantElefario for friends, I was even clearer than my interpretation of what Nintendo has searched with Super Mario Bros. Wonderalthough from the most innocent filter possible, it was not at all far-fetched.
The joke of Mario and the hallucinogenic mushrooms
Nintendo Switch has made it very easy for us to recover it thanks to one of the nicest, most colorful and surprising games we have seen to date about the plumber, but in reality the joke of Mario and the ingestion of hallucinogenic mushrooms comes from afar, it is not only thing of Super Mario Bros. Wonder.
When I visited Amsterdam in my teens some twenty years ago (it was to the 2000s what Ibiza was to the 90s), I was surprised to see that all the shops had T-shirts from Mario with red eyes or eating mushrooms in attitudes that would make Miyamoto cry.
But almost as surprised to see how far Mario was a figure so referenced in that sense, I was amazed to see that there was another animal, to which I had not attributed that relationship either, among the many shirts that adorned the stores: the elephant.
That Nintendo has remembered that specific animal in a game so elesediano as Super Mario Bros. Wonder it is not trivial In fact, we have been using the pachyderm for more than 100 years as a symbol of hallucinations caused by drug or alcohol abuse.
The elephant and substance abuse
Where does that story come from? At what point did an elephant become a symbol of going overboard with certain substances and ending up on a dream trip? It is time to travel to 1896 to find the first written reference, up to a comic called The Man and the Serpent in which a drunk man saw a pink and green elephant next to a feathered hippo.
To date, the norm in literature and popular culture was to remember to see snakes or imagine snakes in boots to refer to being drunk in the most exaggerated way possible, but for some reason that idea of colored animals began to win. strength, and the pink Elephant It was the most used of all.
Coming from the color shown by the pups of albino elephantMuch paler pink than the bubblegum pink that usually comes to mind, pink elephants began to find a place in popular culture as references to hallucinations.
From books to comics, the idea of the pink elephant even appears in the first issue of Supermanwhen Lois Lane is laughed at for saying that she has seen a man flying asking if she has also seen the surreal animal, but the most outstanding example we owe to Disney and Dumbo’s drunken episode when they accidentally drink champagne and start seeing colorful elephants singing and dancing.
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