Digital melodrama

In my real life, I'm a high school teacher. Although I'm going to be starting an actual job next week, I've been substitute teaching for the last year and a half. Yesterday was my last day (maybe forever, maybe just for awhile) as a substitute teacher, and I was teaching grade nine drama to 25 girls. The teacher left me with notes to give to them and go over on traditional/historical theatre forms from all over the world. I've done a lot of study into theatre history, so it was pretty easy to talk about.

We went through several different forms of theatre – Greek tragedy, Noh theatre, Kabuki, Miracle plays, etc. We came upon 18th century theatre, and how it was dominated by the melodrama. The examples the teacher left for me were the modern soap opera, but I thought that was a pretty boring example, so I gave them my own: Super Mario Bros.

It hadn't even occurred to me as melodrama before, but the more I think about it, the more the Super Mario Bros. series (especially the 2D ones) are, in essence, classic (albeit surreal and minimalistic) melodramas.

Consider: melodramas traditionally have an unambiguously good, heroic protaganist, and an unambiguously evil antagonist. A damsel in distress. There's no complex conflict – the hero has been duped by the villain ("Our princess is in another castle!"), and has to set out to overcome the villain while saving the damsel.

The term "melodrama" itself is a portmanteau of "melody" and "drama," basically signalling the use of motifs to manipulate the audience's emotional response to the characters. In Super Mario Bros., Shigeru Miyamoto and Koji Kondo, the legendary Nintendo music composer, essentially use motifs as the only way we know anything about the characters or the situation. This could have backfired, but of course it didn't – the Super Mario Bros. motifs are some of the most well-known pieces of music on the planet (seriously, I can't even count the number of times where I'll be doing some sneaking around and the "dun-a-dun-a-dun-a" theme will pop into my head).

Michael Thomsen of IGN made the claim that Super Mario Bros. (and especially New Super Mario Bros., both on the DS and Wii) are inspired by the vaudeville show. While I suppose Miyamoto could have been familiar with that particular form of entertainment (and Thomsen's points are pretty well based entirely on extremely superficial elements of the gameplay, not unlike his fairly ridiculous article proclaiming Metroid Prime as "the Citizen Kane of videogames"), it seems more likely to me that Miyamoto was simply tapping into a form of storytelling that seemed natural, even instinctual. To what degree the melodramatic form is as engrained in Japanese culture as it is in North America's (when are we going to see some Kabuki videogames, hmm?), I'm not sure. Perhaps it's another sign of the explosion of American culture all over the globe, but maybe not as well. That'd be a question I'd pose to Miyamoto.

I've been playing a lot of New Super Mario Bros. Wii lately, and sometimes I just stop and think about how bizarre the game is. I mean, it's not any more bizarre than any other Mario game. But I think that because Mario's been a part of the collective consciousness for so long now, it's difficult to remember a time when bob-ombs and Toads and fireflowers weren't a part of not only our videogame lexicon, but also the more mainstream cultural one. The reason why I think that Mario has become a more recognizable symbol than Mickey Mouse is maybe because his fantastically surreal world was grafted onto such a classic structure. The adage that every great idea is an old one with a new coat of paint is true here – Mario repackaged the classic melodrama into one of the greatest gaming series of all time.

Now, enjoy a little bit of the Mario theme song played on glass bottles by a remote controlled car: