So People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals doesn't like Super Mario.  Really, I don't either.  Wasn't he the bad guy in Donkey Kong?  Donkey Kong was the name of the game, after all, and the big primate only steals Pauline because Mario was a mean jerk to him. How did he suddenly become a good guy? 

Oh, that was 30 years ago?

I am trapped in the past, just like PETA.  Though they are trapped in the 17th century and I am only trapped in 1981, long after animal testing achieved pretty much every advance in medical science, that stuff the anti-science hippies at PETA refuse to acknowledge.

Nintendo has a new version of Mario coming out, "Super Mario 3D Land", and they are probably pretty excited about it.  Video games are big business - bigger than movies.  Heck, movies stars star in commercials for video games now.  Check out this plug for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 starring Sam Worthington and Jonah Hill and some guy who used to play in a major league sport before his union lost their senses:



A lot of people are probably killed in that game.  A lot.  PETA has no problem with that, even though they wear no fur.  It's hard to imagine their reaction if any characters did wear fur.

Mario does wear fur in his new game; I don't know why, but I also don't know why it has anthropomorphic mushrooms. It's a "Tanooki suit", some sort of power up like all these games have, and it lets him clobber his cartoon foes so he can rescue whatever he is rescuing now.



What's the rumpus?  It isn't like this is Mario Deer Hunter, he just sometimes dons a suit and clobbers mushrooms. It seems like animal empowerment to me, not animal cruelty.  PETA disagrees and have launched a counter-offensive, namely their own game where a character that looks like Mario is flying overhead, wearing a fur suit that is dripping blood. They call it "Super Tanooki Skin 2D" and you have to help Tanooki reclaim his fur.  See?  Mario is the bad guy again, just like 1981.

Which one of those does PETA think is damaging children?



I'm certainly not in favor of actually skinning raccoon dogs, but does PETA truly believe my 8 year old will grow up to be a raccoon dog skinner if he plays the Mario game without the blood instead of the gory PETA one?

What happened to the good old days, when games like "Custer's Revenge" disappeared into oblivion without getting much attention at all? PETA is probably selling a ton of these games for Sony.