Super Mario Brothers Is The World's Greatest Piece Of Surrealist Art | Idea Channel | PBS

We all know who the Mario Brothers are but have you ever stepped back and tried looking at those games from a fresh perspective? Like you've never seen or heard of them before? They're bananas! There are armored turtles who stand on their hind legs and steal princesses! There are bullets with FACES! We make a case for Mario's inclusion into a canon of art wider than "Video Game": we think Mario is a piece of surrealist artwork.

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Hosted by Mike Rugnetta (@mikerugnetta)
Made by Kornhaber Brown (www.kornhaberbrown.com)

Thanks to the artists of the work we featured in the Fan Art section! (in order)
Mike Puncekar http://mpuncekar.blogspot.com/
Mario and Luigi by Anthony Jones http://www.robotpencil.org/
Sebastien Harding http://www.7splat.com/
Ted McClung http://living-oxymoron.deviantart.com/
Ryan Wood http://cghub.com/images/view/5209
MikePMitchell http://mikepmitchell.deviantart.com/
Fellipe Martins http://nationpoo.blogspot.com/
Winona Nelson http://www.winonanelson.com/
Bob Dob http://www.bobdob.com/

• Category

  Education

[jonasbuurrm]

mario inspired me to eat mushrooms

[MrGuy8675]

Those elephants had tubas for heads, not sousaphones. The more you know!

[patu8010]

I don't think Mario is even as surreal as Adventure Time. Maybe I'm just blind to Mario's surrealism, having played Mario games for almost two decades. But many NES platformers have similar silly themes like they're just coming up with stuff as they go.

[thewowmister]

Mario inspired me to ride green dinosaurs and rescue princesses from Giant turtles that spit fire oh yeah and do TONS of Shrooms WAHOOOO!!!

[mewmaster151]

mario want originally so surreal, you saved a damsel in distress from a dragon -like monster, which is basically every classic adventure tale

[lordofgiovanni]

Mario, in my opinion, was not the prime mover of non-sequiter in our culture. I would say that begins with diuglas adams, and 42. The idea of the guide to the galaxy world gave everyone else the apiphony that the worlds we write about DONT HAVE TO MAKE SENSE! I will bet u that douglas adams had SOMETHING to do with miyamotos creation of mario!

[strawberryJAMM]

Awesome. I love Dali's works. I hope you include references to some of his less well known works. ;-)

[Stanislav Serbezov]

Sure, whenever we have a working build I will PM you. ^^

[strawberryJAMM]

Now *there's* and idea!

(Can I be a beta tester?!?)

[dogamrocks]

The x files theme song nearly killed me!