Super Mario Bros. Wonder Is The Closest We’ll Ever Get To M-Rated Mario

15.11.2023 - 14:33 / screenrant.com

The series has flirted with the psychedelic since its early days, but with the franchise leans fully into the trippy nature of the acrobatic plumber’s adventures. Simply hearing the premise of the original suggests a nod to drug culture, from an adult perspective, as it involves a pair of blue-collar workers from Brooklyn who leave their mundane lives behind to journey to a magical mushroom land. With the mind-bending changes to reality resulting from Wonder Flowers, it is harder than ever to deny that is a psychedelic series, and embraces that more overtly than any prior entry.

Before its release, some fans believed the new title might bring back the 1986 anime’s strange original character, Prince Haru, who was the prince of the Flower Kingdom in the animated adaptation. The monarch of the Flower Kingdom in is Prince Florian, a Wiggler-like entity, whereas Haru spent most of the anime trapped in the form of a dog. While there are no storyline connections to the anime, the 1986 film was also somewhat hallucinatory in tone, as it sported a similar vibe and style to .

Related: Super Mario Bros. Wonder Review: «Mario's Most Magical Adventure»

Unlike the largely mellow experience of the 1980s anime, some of the Wonder Flower sequences in are outright whacky, warping reality in ways ranging from whimsical to terrifying. Some alter the perception of the characters’ bodies, seeing themselves as abnormally tall, but still able to crouch to their standard compact ducking sizes. Mario might find himself transformed into a slime creature, granted a metal body, or even living the life of a Goomba. Several Wonder Flower sequences shift the perspective from a side scrolling platformer to an overhead action game, as Mario appears to stand on the back wall of the environment. Many of these experiences resemble confusing, hallucinatory experiences associated with psychoactive drug use.

The iconic Super Mushroom power-up item was originally called a Magic Mushroom in the NES instruction manual for Super Mario Bros.

The intersection of drug culture and video games extends far beyond the franchise, of course. Timothy Leary nearly made a game adaptation of , and many games have dealt with the subject of drug use with varying degrees of maturity. In all likelihood, the Wonder Flower segments adhere closer to a non-drug user’s idea of a trip more than any actual hallucinogenic experience, which is true of similar sequences in most games. Still, it takes a certain naïveté to dismiss wholesale the implication present in: Mario and his crew experience some strange psychedelic ordeals in order to collect Wonder Seeds.

Where most of the Wonder Flowers result in what might be described as out-of-body, or altered reality