Do gamers really want Chris Pratt to replace Charles Martinet as Mario, or is this just an elaborate troll?

You know how sometimes when you were a kid and you had a substitute teacher, the class would decide to prank them by like, saying that one kid’s name was actually a different kid’s name? And how the lack of cohesion between you and the other kids would inevitably mean a bunch of yelling and fighting, and it wasn’t long before the teacher who just wanted to know a simple thing like their student’s names would be anxiously stuck in a quagmire of childish fury, unsure what was a joke and what wasn’t and really just regretting having asked anything in the first place? Well that’s basically what social media is: A confusing tangle of screaming children, all hopped up on cereal marshmallows and convinced that they’re being hilarious when really they’re just making everyone uncomfortable and tired. 

Exhibit A: The public discourse surrounding the voice of Mario in the wake of Nintendo’s announcement that long-time performer Charles Martinet has left the iconic role. Twitter being one of the last places on Earth where annoying people can chase their dreams without getting punitively tased, the first, loudest, and most obnoxious choice was an obvious one.

It’s-ah as close as you can get to bullying the wealthy

Do gamers really want Chris Pratt to take over as the voice of Mario moving forward? Does film Twitter really want a cut of CATS where you can see the 18th hole of the cat people’s digestive system? Did anyone really want a boat called Boaty McBoatface, or a movie about snakes getting loose on a plane, or to see the original edit of Sonic the Hedgehog where the main character looks like that monster you see right as the dentist’s gas starts to knock you unconscious?

The answer is: “it’s complicated, but no, not really.” Even the most enthusiastic members of the Pratt Pack would tell you that, as choices for the voice of Mario go, he was, at best, inoffensive. It’s the kind of decision that has to be made when you’re taking a protagonist’s load of dialogue from “Wahoo!” and “Let’s-ah go!” to complete, comprehensible sentences. Two hours of high-pitched Italian stereotype interjections would have been a lot, even by the standards of the animation studio that brought us five Despicable Me movies. 

But bringing an international movie star – one that the loudest parts of social media threw a face-down-on-the-floor-of-the-Piggly-Wiggle temper tantrum about in the first place – into the booth just to get four lines of dialogue and the “oof” noise he makes when he hits the ground too hard? That’s not the sort of thing that a real friend would encourage you to do, Nintendo. It’s just the toxic behavior that Hollywood encouraged people to exhibit when they rolled the dice on folks genuinely wanting a re-release of Morbius. It’s like they say: “You teach people how to treat you,” and entertainment studios have pretty much taught us that they’ll eat bugs if we tell them we think it’s cool.