We can’t say that it’s the kind of question that normally crops up in our everyday lives, but if someone put us on the spot and asked “does Mario actually eat those power-up mushrooms?”, we’d struggle to know the definitive answer.
Of course, The Super Mario Bros. Movie dedicated an entire subplot to this very question (spoiler: yes he does eat them), but before his big screen animated debut, did we know for sure?
The developers of Mario Kart World certainly didn’t. While discussing the game’s new Dash Food mechanic in a recent Ask the Developer interview, producer Kosuke Yabuki confessed that the feature prompted the team to question, “Does Mario, in fact, eat mushrooms?”. Let’s not forget that the game was in development (for the Switch 1, no less) long before the Mario Movie, so they had to pull out the big guns for an answer: Takashi Tezuka.
“In the midst of development, we went up to Tezuka-san and asked him to confirm, ‘Is Mario actually eating those mushrooms?’,” planning team lead Shintaro Jikumaru explained. According to Yabuki-san, the legendary Mario producer gave a pretty definitive response, “Yeah, he is”.
We’ll admit, we had never really imagined Mario munching on those mushrooms as he navigated the kingdom, but what was the other option? Stomping on them to gain their powers? Picking it up via osmosis? Absorbing it some other way (steady)? Either way, there’s your concrete answer, straight from the mouth of a man who really ought to know.
Now, onto the bigger topic, are they suitable for vegetarians..?
