Super Mario as Transformative Icon for the Working Class
Mario ’ s own creator Shigeru Miyamoto , while being interviewed by the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata , acknowledges a relationship between Mario and Alice in Wonderland , though he denies being directly influenced in the sense of growing and shrinking . He says , “ When you think about Wonderland , you think about mushrooms [ ... ] there has always somehow been a relationship between mushrooms and magical realms . That ’ s why I decided that Mario would need a mushroom to become Super Mario .” It may be the case that Miyamoto ’ s decision to make Mario grow and shrink was not a direct reference to Lewis Carroll ’ s novel , but the admission that Wonderland was on his mind in regards to the Mushroom Kingdom at least suggests the possibility of him making the decision subconsciously . This admission also suggests that the mushrooms and their effect on Mario is connected to fantasy , and what is fantasy if not wish fulfillment ? Transformation is here connected to becoming better than who you were before .
But is growing taller or shorter enough to deem Mario a figure of the plasmatic as Eisenstein describes ? There are a multitude of bodily transformations that occur to him even in his earliest games in the form of the flame-shooting Fire Mario , the flying raccoon Tanooki Mario , and the swimming Frog Mario , but the most clearly Eisenstein-like transformations occur in Super Mario 64 in which the player is offered a strange title screen on which he or she sees a large close-up of Mario ’ s face that the player is then allowed to tug and stretch to comical proportions . This opportunity has no connection to the actual game and only seems to exist to familiarize new gamers with Mario ’ s identity , those players drawn in by the Nintendo 64 ’ s groundbreaking 3D graphics . It also suggests to those players the plasmatic qualities of Mario , that this is a man who can be shaped and reshaped and that doing so is a
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