I bet you always thought that when Mario died in a Mario game, he simply magically jumped towards the screen. Little did you know that there were many grizzlier fates that could have befallen him.
This excerpt from the choose-your-own-adventure book Mario Brothers in: Double Trouble: Nintendo Adventure Book #1 posted to the Tumblr You Chose Wrong depicts one of the darker ways that Mario can meet his demise.
He runs into a Boomerang Bro. and whoops! Forgets that the boomerangs come back. (Well, almost always, anyway.) And with that, an unconscious Mario is tossed into a sack to be eaten later. Woah.
I loved CYOA books as a kid, and have always found there to be something distinctly chilling about the pages where your character would die. Something about the languid pace of reading, of following along with a description of how a spider ate you, or a witch threw you into a boiling pot, or you became a vampire or whatever… it's creepy. And yet awesome.
I think here, it's the fact that they toss Mario into a sack full of orange peels. What a weird detail! I always thought the Koopas were trying to keep Mario from getting to the princess; I never thought they would want to eat him. Yikes.
You Chose Wrong [Tumblr]