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21st April 2023
01:22pm BST
The Super Mario Bros. Movie was filled to the brim with some great nods towards the game series' long and detailed history, including mentions of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out to mention of Jump Man, which was Mario's game title before the franchise was renamed.
However, one reference that might have gone right over the heads of most viewers was a character by the name of Spike.
In the movie, we're introduced to him in the restaurant near the start of the story, and he appears again close to the end of the action. He makes fun of Mario and Luigi for their OTT advert on TV, and it turns out that Spike was actually a character from the games themselves.
However, he originally went under a different name, which has been officially changed by Nintendo going forward for... well... obvious reasons...
Translated, the social media post says: "The name of the character 'Blackie' that appears in the family computer software Wrecking Crew will be changed to 'Spike', which is the same as the name in Europe and the United States. In addition, the name in The Super Mario Bros. Movie released on April 28, 2023 is also 'Spike'."
While we've had the movie in our cinemas for a few weeks now, Japanese fans actually won't get to check it out on their big screens until the end of April.
As for Spike - aka 'Blackie' - he first appeared in the NES and arcade game Wrecking Crew when it was first released way back in 1985, and canonically, he was Mario and Luigi's boss but has been rewritten as a competing foreman for the movie.
In some other positive news around the movie, Jack Black has cracked the Billboard 100 chart for the first time with Mario song, 'Peaches'.
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