You can’t discount the importance of a good bad guy—or at least a cute one. One of the many reasons the Super Mario games have been so popular over the last 40 years is the lineup of weird, quirky critters Mario has to defeat. From grumpy, ambulatory mushrooms, to chomping mad man-eating plants, to, um, straight-up just turtles, Mario’s stomped and fireballed a wide-ranging crew of adorable weirdos and pesky sweethearts. Bowser and his army of miscreants are as iconic as Mario and Luigi themselves, and their gradual evolution since Super Mario Bros. has been one of the many rewards long-time players have enjoyed over the decades. And with Super Mario Bros. Wonder we’ve seen perhaps their biggest jump yet.
I had heard about some of the newly found self-awareness within the latest crop of Goombas and Koopas. Those brown little mushroom guys—Bowser’s perennial first wave of (almost entirely futile) assault—now acknowledge Mario right before he flattens them beneath his prodigious girth. Their eyes look upward at Mario as he’s about to land on them, their little mouths twisting in horror as they realize they’re about to wind up on the wrong end of his comically bulbous boots. Meanwhile the turtle-like Koopas, who always seemed way more easy-going than their fungal brethren, now turn up their faces in sadistic glee when they see the plumber head their way. They can’t wait to kill this man, almost as if they all live with the weight of the several generations of failure their kind has lived through, the entire swaths of Koopa populations crushed beneath the mustachioed one’s feet. Of course they also seem blissfully unaware of why all their ancestors failed—of how, ultimately, they’re almost at the very bottom of this game’s food chain, existing entirely to make for easy fodder while newcomers are just learning the ropes. It doesn’t matter how confident these vengeful Koopas act: they’re practically guaranteed to die just like most of their forebears.
I knew to expect these little glances from Mario’s most common enemies. I’ve seen GIFs on Twitter, come across links to other articles that touch on this one minor aspect of Super Mario Bros. Wonder. People dig ‘em (for good reason) and they’re part of why the game has become so celebrated so quickly.
I did not anticipate the singing Piranha Plants, though.
One of Wonder’s major new additions to the Mario canon is the Wonder Flower. It’s a big blue bouncing flower that doesn’t give Mario a power-up but does trigger a psychedelic hurry-up state called a Wonder Effect that warps the level and its characters in weird and unpredictable ways. It’s like an alt mode for each level, often built around collecting purple coins as quickly as possible to keep adding time to the Wonder Effect’s clock. From what I’ve seen Wonder Flowers can incite some of the most hallucinatory and memorable sequences in recent Super Mario history, which help make Super Mario Bros. Wonder one of the most surprisingly unique games in the series’ long history.
A Wonder Flower can also make the Piranha Plants sing. One of the game’s earliest levels, Piranha Plants on Parade, is built around the venus flytrap-inspired enemies that have lived within pipes in the Mario universe since 1985. Historically they’ll pop up from a pipe, snapping wildly at anything that might be moving overhead. Some of them started shooting the same kind of fireballs Mario tosses out after he’s eaten a Fire Flower, and eventually some of them became unrooted from their pipes and started to roam around the level. (That’s a pretty cursory overview of 38 years of Piranha Plant history, if you were wondering.) You’ll find them doing all of that in Super Mario Bros. Wonder, but you’ll also see them doing something I don’t think they’ve ever done before: sing.
When you grab the Wonder Flower in this level, those Piranha Plants come alive, leaving their pipes and joining together in what’s essentially a song-and-dance routine. They’ll sway along as the score speeds up and becomes almost tropical, their jagged toothed mouths clamshelling not out of hunger or defense but for the pure love of music. They don’t sing words—these are more like the “sha la las” of ‘50s back-up singers or early Pavement songs—but they’re all on key and on beat, and the result is one of the most charming and unexpected things I’ve ever seen in any videogame—much less a side-scrolling Mario game, part of a gaming tradition so foundational that it’s almost biblical.
How can you hurt a Piranha Plant when all it wants to do is a little doo-wop with its pals?
The Piranha Plants’ musical number is a more elaborate example of the new facial expressions made by Mario’s most familiar enemies. It’s a surprising little update on characters we’ve known for decades, only at a bigger scale and with more entertainment value than a Goomba looking up or a Koopa scowling at you. It feels like something you’d find in a Ray-Man game more than a Super Mario, and idiosyncratic platformers like that are exactly what Nintendo should be looking at when creating their latest Mario blockbuster. Hopefully this newfound love of musical theater becomes one more part of the Piranha Plant’s personality—not necessarily something it does all the time or in every game, but just often enough to remind us that, at heart, it’s a song-and-dance plant.
Moments and details like these have made Super Mario Bros. Wonder an unpredictably refreshing new spin on the most basic Mario-isms. Along with entirely new enemies, like rushing buffalos and bloated, trampoline-like hippos, they’ve contributed to the first side-scrolling Mario game that could be considered genuinely revelatory in about 30 years. I have a lot of Wonder to go, and if it can keep surprising me like those Piranha Plants, it’ll go down as one of the most inventive Mario games ever.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.