During tonight’s Nintendo Direct, a brief chat built wholly around the third and final Mario movie trailer, series creator Shigeru Miyamoto ended the presentation with one of the weirdest “one more thing” announcements I can remember.
Nintendo is renowned for saving some of its biggest news for the very end of its shows, so when Miyamoto literally says “I have one more thing to share”, you can’t blame people for getting excited! Sure, given the brevity and focus of this trailer it wasn’t going to be “we’re making a new F-Zero”, or “we’re bringing back the GameCube”, but those words have weight, so maybe it was going to be something cool?
Instead the man said...we’ve got boots. Miyamoto says, staring directly into the camera, that “we recreated the boots that Mario wears in the movie”, and that they’ll be on display at the Nintendo World Store in New York City. No further questions, thank you.
But I have questions. His boots, recreated from the movie? They’re just boots! Boots that look like orthopaedic platform footwear for pensioners. Weird button-shaped boots, suggesting that Mario doesn’t have toes and is in fact held upright by squishy, toad-like flesh stumps, but still, they’re boots. Illumination’s approximation of work boots, the kind that millions of people wear everyday to work.
If you’re going to pick one part of Mario’s outfit to “recreate”, and go to the trouble of making an exhibition for it, why the boots (unless this is some high-concept homage to the Timbs meme, or even worse, a collaboration)? He’s got a bright red hat with an M on it! It’s one of the most iconic pieces of clothing in the history of video games! Do the hat!
Unless, of course, this is but the first in a series of announcements, with Japan to get the hat, Europe the overalls and Australasia, I dunno, his moustache. Or socks. In which case, disregard my questions (and replace them with countless more questions).
Anyway, our office is right around the corner from the store, so hopefully tomorrow somebody can swing by, take some photos, ask some questions.