Berwald – Non-Core Post #4

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeXfXUUkNfY

I messed up my YouTube algorithm to bring you this video from the Nintendo Life YouTube channel titled, “Overanalysing the New Mario Movie Poster.” The video-game-to-movie IP churn has always interested me, because in the late 1990s and early to mid 2000s, there was a mainstream discourse that video games were still chasing after movies (trying to become more and more like movies) and that this reflected a very early stage in their development. The idea was that medium specificity hadn’t been worked out by studios yet. In retrospect, I’m not sure this was ever really a tendency. The discourse may only have reflected the rapid changes in the perceived quality of cut-scenes. Still, in my experience predictions about the future of video games and the medium specificity of the video game in relation to film never extended to the cannibalization of classic games by commercial film. A final observation would be that the primary source of friction here has not been that of translating between mediums– one interactive and procedural and the other not– but has instead occurred at the point where the two mediums have come to share the most: CGI. I’m thinking of Sonic’s teeth and fur and, in this video, Toad’s teeth, which are persistently ridiculed as uncanny, dumb, disturbing, etc.