Letters to Mario Play Nintendo
Nintendo decided to replace Charles Martinet as the voice of Super Mario. This is quite sad since Mario games will never be able to feel the same way without his voice coming out of Mario. Luckily for us there’s decades of Charles Martinet content voicing Mario, Luigi, wario and waluig (and the babies) out there for us to explore and this brings us to a small little video series Nintendo did in the late 2010s where Mario would respond to Fan letters.
In the mid 2010s Nintendo tried to do some marketing aimed exclusively at a younger audience and that’s how their youtube channel Play Nintendo came to be. In here there really wasn’t much for any die hard older fan and was strictly for kids. when Mario Odyssey came out they started a new show called Mario Reads your Letters. In it you could email Mario your questions and he’d answer them. I don’t know how successful it was or not, or perhaps the budget was never meant for it to be too long but we did get 7 episodes of around 2 minutes of length.
The questions seem scripted but perhaps they were real and only chose the ones they really thought they could make something fun. Overal there’s no real secrets revealed here and they’re all just cute answers or just blatantly advertising Super Mario Odyssey. This is also why Cappy is constantly mentioned, not to say that he’s literally in Mario’s cap.
Some said that Charles Martinet couldn’t talk with Mario’s voice for long or that it would be distracting. we’ve seen Charles use that voice in full sentences before and we see it in these videos so we know that’s not true.what is true is that it does get a bit distracting to hear that voice for much longer and these are only 2 minute clips. A small alteration woudl’ve likely been needed if we needed to hear him talk for longer and hear Mario express different emotions.
The episodes are still cute and it’s fun to be able to hear more of Charle’s Mario. These are the type of modern things that can become Lost Media easily since people overlook them and Nintendo could pull them at any moment. Definitely take time to check them out. How can you not love them, just check how happy he is to read his fans letters. Oh and we now know his official email as welL! Here is the complete Playlist.
Thank you Charles!