Mario: the Once and Future King

While social media might bring together families in the here and now, it takes a video game company like Nintendo to draw families together in the past. Don’t understand that? Yeah, me either but let me try and explain it to both of us.

I grew up on Nintendo. We had a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) back in the late eighties and I played Super Mario Bros more or less 27 hours a day. Mario and me stomped on Koopas, beat up Bowser and saved the princess more times then I really want to get into now, mainly because it’s depressing how much of a loser I was (also: don’t mention to a Gen Xer that in a few years the NES will be 30 years old, unless you want to see that Gen Xer cry). And I wasn’t the only one if the amazing amount of Mario and Nintendo references in all modern media are to be believed. If you don’t believe me, go find a large sewer pipe sticking out of the ground and paint it green. Then sit back and see how many thirtysomethings have someone take a picture of them squatting down on it. When people start coming dressed in overalls, red hats and fake mustaches you can come to my house and apologize for not believing me in the first place.

Of course, Mario is still around and kids today can play with him not only as he saves Princess Peach but while he races go carts, plays a vast number of sports or goes head to head with other Nintendo characters and they beat the crap out of each other. And there are my kids playing with Mario and his brother Luigi, the patron saint of younger siblings all around the world. Of course, the games that the kids play today make the ones I played at their age look…well, crappy.

And thanks to Nintendo, I can show them EXACTLY how crappy. For those of you not in the know, Nintendo’s current gaming console, the Wii, offers you the chance to download old games from their past, including Super Mario Bros, the game that started it all. So now, kids that have fun with Mario moving all around a world filled with everything imaginable, with amazing colors and sounds, get to see what I had as a kid: a big bowl of suck.

Super Mario Bros is a side-scrolling platformer. You can only go forward and are stuck to one path through the level, which is timed. This is the anti-modern game, where you can go to almost any level you want, stay as long as you want and go where you want. The boys thought it was broken the first time they played it.

“Dad, something’s wrong! I can’t go back,” Big Bits told me the first time he played it.

“Yeah, that’s how it was back then,” I told him. He just stared at me for a moment.

“Na-uh,” he finally laughed. It took me a while to convince him otherwise. It also took me a while to convince him that the little, pixelated mess of a character was the same Mario he knew and loved from the nearly 3D animated games he played before.

“Na-uh. It doesn’t even sound like him.” I just shook my head.

“Games didn’t talk back then,” I told. He stared at me some more before coming back with a witty retort.

“Na-uh!”

Yes, son, I was born in the dark ages, count yourself amongst the lucky ones.

Want to stop a child in his tracks? Use the Dad Voice

In the Great Parent/Child War, fathers are given very few weapons (Moms have all kinds of weapons and go into battle ready for anything … at least they seem to). We are thrown into battle with our bundles of joy with little or no knowledge, few real skills and an overpowering fear our every move will result in permanent damage to the child. We think we know what we’re doing but no matter how many little siblings we had or kids we’ve babysat, we are still naked and alone against the great forces of babyhood. Luckily for us dads out there, the weapon we do have is a powerful one; one kids all over the world are powerless against: the Dad Voice.

The Dad Voice is something only fathers have. Mothers don’t have it and even nonfather men can’t seem to get the right inflection to pull off the Dad Voice, a perfect combination of righteous rage and incredulity that tells children immediately they have been caught doing something they shouldn’t be. It doesn’t have to be a shout — it works better when it is said in a voice that is just a little louder than your normal speaking voice — but it can make a kid change his behavior faster than screaming at him all day long could ever do.

I can still remember the first time I used the voice. Big Bits, our now 6-year-old, was just 18 months or so and we were sitting on the couch after cleaning the living room. I left for the kitchen to get a celebratory snack and when I came back a moment later he had climbed off the couch and was digging into his box of wooden blocks, throwing them over his shoulder one at a time and making a giant mess. I stopped at the couch and couldn’t believe my eyes: there was my Little Buddy wrecking our just cleaned room. “What are you doing?!” I said in a voice that made me jump a little and made my poor child spring up, turn around and start crying, wooden block still in hand. I felt so bad I picked him up and we snuggled on the couch for a bit before we went back to work cleaning up his mess.

This voice works on all kids, not just your own. Our middle child goes to a cooperative preschool where I’m the teacher helper once a month. Mostly this involves herding the kids around the preschool and providing the snack for the day. I also help police the children during gym and one day I spied a child going to every kid in the class and pushing them down. Without thinking about it, I invoked the Dad Voice, and he stopped in mid push and spun his head around so fast I thought he might have whiplash. We locked eyes from across the gym and, without another word,  he knew exactly what he had done wrong and stopped. He also gave me a wide berth for the rest of the day.

And the “kids” don’t have to be young either. Or even see you. A friend and I went to the movies this winter to see the latest sci-fi/action epic (quick review: meh). As the theater filled, several teenagers took seats in the very front and started talking loudly. I didn’t care as the only thing on the screen was commercials but as the film started they only got louder. Out came my Dad Voice, a bit louder than I would use with my own boys, but these kids were older and needed more “intense” help to correct their behavior. One “SHUT UP!” was all it took to get the kids to settle down and enjoy the film like they were real human beings. My friend congratulated me on my Dad Voice, and the people next to us even shook my hand after the movie was over. To be fair, the people who shook my hand were  —  how do I put this gently? — “weirdos” but it was nice to see others appreciated my Dad Voice as well.

The Dad Voice: Don’t leave home without it. And it’s best to have it at home as well.

Originally published on stltoday.com