Super Mario Bros. Wonder is Nintendo’s Mickey moment

polygon.com:

Since Nintendo announced Super Mario Bros. Wonder, I’ve wondered, Why now? Why change Mario?

Earlier in October, Nintendo quietly tweaked the box art for its upcoming Princess Peach game to give the Mushroom Kingdom monarch a new face closer to her Hollywood-friendly nip-tuck from The Super Mario Bros. Movie. The decision might tempt longtime Nintendo fans to compare the changes in Super Mario Bros. Wonder to the recent ultra-successful animated film. And that’s fair, to a point. As you hop about the Flower Kingdom, Wonder’s colors have so much contrast they practically glow, eerily similar to Illumination’s house style. The game may also recall Nintendo’s collaboration with Ubisoft on the Mario + Rabbids games. The pair of strategy games broke from decades of meticulous IP consistency, giving Mario a gun and partnering him with googly-eyed rabbits that communicate via bloodcurdling warbles.

I’m hesitant to give too much credit to either in influencing Wonder. Video games take years to create and the astonishing success of the Mario film is, comparably, a recent phenomenon. And Mario + Rabbids is Mario with guns and Wallace and Gromit humor. A traditional Mario game it is not.

To grok what Nintendo could accomplish with Wonder, you should consider its closest contemporary: Disney.

In the late 20th century and into the 21st, Disney expanded beyond Mickey, to the point the mouse and his compatriots became icons rather than the pieces of a story. You might see Minnie Mouse on a Swatch or in Mickey and the Roadster Racers, but the biggest Disney films were reserved for new princesses and Pixar cuties.

Then came The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse, a manic, grotesque, and surprising riff on the mouse that had more in common