{"id":2383,"date":"2013-11-18T00:06:55","date_gmt":"2013-11-18T07:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/?p=2383"},"modified":"2013-11-24T09:46:28","modified_gmt":"2013-11-24T16:46:28","slug":"seiyuu-spotlight-mario-desu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/2013\/11\/seiyuu-spotlight-mario-desu\/","title":{"rendered":"Seiyuu Spotlight: Mario desu."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Before I actually write this article, I&#8217;ll apologize in advance for all the YouTube videos being down (or mostly so). This is due to circumstances beyond my control which I&#8217;ve discussed on my Twitter. I&#8217;ll work on resolving it sooner or later.<\/p>\n<p>In the meantime, this article will not be using my own uploads to avoid this issue. Thankfully it doesn&#8217;t need to!<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nToday I&#8217;d like to write a little bit about Toru Furuya, in regard to his history as the Japanese voice of Mario. I decided to write this after I noticed that one particular Japanese tweeter found the 30-second Satellaview ad and was actually shocked to hear Mario speaking Japanese.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; Has it really been that long? Has Mario been Charles Martinet for so long that we have a whole generation of people who never knew Mario had a Japanese voice actor? It&#8217;s very, very strange, from my perspective.<\/p>\n<p>Toru Furuya&#8217;s been the voice of Mario in Japan for as far back as it was apparent that Mario was going to be Nintendo&#8217;s &#8220;Big thing&#8221;. Although I can&#8217;t tell exactly when this started, it became most apparent when the Super Mario Brothers anime movie, &#8220;Super Mario Bros.: Peach-hime Kyushustu Daisakusen!&#8221; was being promoted. Not only is Toru Mario&#8217;s voice in this anime, but various cross-media advertising featured him as well:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/3s7qrdfUALc\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;ve been paying attention to these voices in the advertising, you may have noticed that ONLY Mario&#8217;s is familiar. Indeed, between productions of various Mario products the voices of Peach, Bowser, and various other characters changed, but Mario was almost always Toru Furuya.<\/p>\n<p>Among some other spotlights for showcasing Toru Furuya as Mario is the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=052DPXNsJmY\">Amada series<\/a>, the Mario fire safety anime (clean rip pending), the Terebikko video &#8220;Mario to Yoshi no Bouken Land&#8221; (clean rip pending), and&#8230; um&#8230; I think the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ajgVtsjkynY\">Super Famicom launch CM<\/a> also had him singing, although I&#8217;m not too sure if that&#8217;s correct. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=nfTbC65iq9E\">Not so sure on the Mario Paint ad, but&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ah, I&#8217;m overthinking this, huh?<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, one particular thing to think about here is how the Satellaview highlights the transition between Nintendo using Toru Furuya in Japan, and switching to international voice-acting only in the following gen for the Super Mario series.<\/p>\n<p>For reference, Toru Furuya is credited in BS Super Mario USA, Excitebike: Bunbun Mario Battle, and BS Super Mario Collection.<br \/>\nInterestingly enough, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NhEHfpHF3hc\">Charles Martinet&#8217;s Mario can clearly be heard in-game on Excitebike, but is uncredited.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>As far as I can check, BS Super Mario Collection may very well be Toru Furuya&#8217;s last performance as Mario. Of course, I&#8217;m open for cross-checking facts here. But either way, it&#8217;s very strange, from my perspective. Toru Furuya is a very notable voice talent in Japan (if you&#8217;re not already familiar with his seiyuu history, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/T%C5%8Dru_Furuya\">check out his Wikipedia article<\/a>), and it&#8217;s quite apparent he was placed as Mario for the sake of star power. Why did Nintendo stop using him entirely, I wonder? I would have thought Charles Martinet would have been alienating to the Japanese &#8211; heck, Charles Martinet was quite different from Lou Albano, who I grew up with as a Mario voice. (And Toru&#8217;s Mario has more relation to Lou Albano&#8217;s than Charles Marinet&#8217;s, for sure.)<\/p>\n<p>Of course, ditching Toru Furuya wasn&#8217;t the only thing Nintendo did regarding Japanese seiyuu post-Satellaview. In general, their use was massively downscaled for mutliple console gens afterward. Zelda hasn&#8217;t had anything like the BS Zeldas since, and Fire Emblem games, while less impacted, have yet to have a whole narrative play out entirely voice-acted the way the BS Fire Emblem games had. Bizarrely enough, Nintendo tends to be a bit more willing to use seiyuu in games that didn&#8217;t have Satellaview releases, like Star Fox and Kid Icarus, but even then these games only come once every few years.<\/p>\n<p>I do wonder what happened. Did the Satellaview sour Nintendo&#8217;s views on voice acting in a video game? Or was it something else?<br \/>\nBased on what I&#8217;ve read up on for the reasons Nintendo wanted to discontinue Satellaview&#8217;s support, the service bled them a lot of money.<br \/>\nWas dealing with the seiyuu a part of this?<br \/>\nAre seiyuu contracts getting in the way of rereleasing Satellaview games under the Virtual Console service?<\/p>\n<p>This subject in particular&#8230; it&#8217;s the real dirty side of the Satellaview, isn&#8217;t it? Yet I feel like I need to figure out these answers sometime. When I ponder the scenario, I realize that whatever happened with the Satellaview influenced Nintendo&#8217;s approach to videogames to this date. There are many people that wonder why Nintendo doesn&#8217;t do such-n-such, and voice acting is a notable example here&#8230;. and I have every reason to think the Satellaview holds the answer, especially as it was the exception to the rule.<\/p>\n<p>Discussion will be welcome. Feel free to comment.<\/p>\n<p><script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\ngoogle_ad_client = \"ca-pub-5308582010420588\";\n\/* Sega Pico (Banner) *\/\ngoogle_ad_slot = \"4040450529\";\ngoogle_ad_width = 468;\ngoogle_ad_height = 60;\n\/\/-->\n<\/script><br \/>\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\nsrc=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\n<\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Before I actually write this article, I&#8217;ll apologize in advance for all the YouTube videos being down (or mostly so). This is due to circumstances beyond my control which I&#8217;ve discussed on my Twitter. I&#8217;ll work on resolving it sooner or later. In the meantime, this article will not be using my own uploads to<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-right\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Continue Reading&#8230; Seiyuu Spotlight: Mario desu.<\/span><a class=\"btn btn-secondary continue-reading\" href=\"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/2013\/11\/seiyuu-spotlight-mario-desu\/\">Continue Reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[145],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3rnlg-Cr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2383"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2383"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2480,"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2383\/revisions\/2480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/superfamicom.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}