This is a short story about Mario and his mustache.
By the time Donkey Kong Jr. was released in arcades, Mario was being drawn to truly look like some kind of Italian stereotype. Curiously, there are conflicting accounts for when Nintendo decided that the character would be of Italian heritage.
There's a 2008 interview with Wired in which Shigeru Miyamoto says that it was decided to make Mario Italian because he had a mustache.
However, there's also a 2022 interview with the Japanese gaming mag Nintendo Dream that states that it happened the other way around; they wanted an Italian character, therefore he was given a mustache.
But both these mustache origin stories skip over what seems like an obvious forebearer in Nintendo's own history: the 1979 video game Sheriff. The protagonist is a cowboy gunman who is depicting in the official art as having a tough guy sneer. However, when that's translated into pixels, it just looks like a mustache.
There's a 2009 Iwata Asks in which Miyamoto talks about realizing how giving Mario a mustache divided up the parts of his face in a way that would read well in the limited pixels of Donkey Kong. He doesn't namecheck Sheriff explicitly, but it's pretty clear that he learn these lessons from making the art for this game. And in this sense, Mr. Jack is kind of a spiritual ancestor to Mario — and another reason he has a mustache, fully separate from Italian stereotypes.
Anyway, read more stories like these in Mario 101, my big "weird" history of the Super Mairo games.
The weird history of Super Mario, told in one hundred and one stories.
