What Were They Thinking?!

Yes, it has been a while. I have been a busy, cranky little person so I didn't really have anything fun to write about. However, a wonderful person made it his goal to cheer me up the other day and he worked wonders. So she's back...

I'd like to pick up on a random conversation that I had while walking to lab the other day. My unnamed friend was talking about how he had been playing Super Mario 3 instead of studying. Then, in all of his brilliant glory, he asked, "What were thinking when they decided to turn Mario into a flying raccoon?" It made sense to ask the question.

In the first Mario, you had four different options. You could be small, big, big with fireball shooting powers, or you could get the star and morph into superfreak Mario for 30 seconds. Mario 2 showed us new characters, with the Princess and the Toadstool (whether or not he had an actual name, I don't know). Each character played the game a little differently so it was to your advantage to pick certain characters for different levels.

Mario 3 went crazy. You no longer had your choice of characters but now you had warp whistles, raccoons, p-wings, teddy bears, frog suits, and slot machines. Were the makers of Super Mario 3 smoking weed when they dreamed up this game? If not, these are some of the weirdest people known to man.

Take for instance the raccoon, which my friend justifiably had a problem with. How do you get from catching a falling leaf to becoming a flying raccoon? I can see becoming a flying squirrel if you catch a falling acorn, but what the hell do falling leaves and magical flying raccoons have in common? In order to solve this conundrum, I shall play a "7 degrees of Kevin Bacon-esque" game.

1. When it starts to get cold out, the leaves begin to fall off the trees.
2. Once all of the leaves are on the ground, one of the maintenance guys comes around with a ridiculously loud leaf blower to gather the leaves in a pile.
3. Since I haven't stayed around long enough to see what he does with the leaves, I'm going to pretend that he puts them in garbage bags.
4. Once bagged, the leaves are thrown into the dumpster.
5. Bandit is a scary raccoon that scavenges through the dumpster and likes to jump out at people when they walk by. I'm pretty sure Bandit has rabies. He scares the shit out of me.
6. Since it's getting cold, Bandit probably nestles himself in the dumpster to keep warm. He doesn't like being disturbed so he gets very angry when the bagged leaves are thrown on top of him.
7. In a rage, Bandit flies out of the dumpster and bites the maintenance guy, giving him rabies.

It all makes perfect sense now. Obviously someone happened to look up from their book and out their window to see this happening. Since med students have a sick sense of humor, he thought it would be hilarious to have flying raccoons in the game. Falling leaves = flying raccoons.

Now if only I could figure out how having a teddy bear costume on can turn you into a statue, my life would be complete.