Mario Misconceptions: Baby Bowser, Bowser Jr., and Koopa Kid
This will be a new series where I discuss common misconceptions in the Mario franchise! This time I'm talking about the still very common idea of Bowser Jr. being the same entity as Baby Bowser, as well as the Koopa Kid from Mario Party causing confusion relating to these two.
Now, most seasoned Mario fans will know the difference between the two, but I will clear up any misconceptions here, with images provided, as the designs are often one of the main reasons people get confused.
In short, "Baby Bowser" is Bowser as a young koopa in the past, and "Bowser Jr." is Bowser's son in the current day and age.
Here you can see the differences between them. Note that in older depictions of Baby Bowser, he isn't wearing a bandana, meanwhile Bowser Jr. always wears one, showing the obvious differences in their design. Confusingly, Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time depicts Baby Bowser with a white (albeit featureless) bandana. This design alone is most likely the main reason so many have confused the two, since Bowser Jr. wears a similar bandana. However, Bowser Jr.'s bandana always features a face of some sort, whereas Bowser's bandana as a child has nothing drawn onto it.
Finally, I want to mention the "Koopa Kid" from the Mario Party series. Introduced in the first game in the series "Mario Party", they act as helpers to Bowser during the games.
They appear similar to Bowser, but only younger, leading some to think the main Koopa Kid (featured on the left in the image above) was either his past self, or alternatively his son, thinking it was merely an early design of Bowser Junior. The name of the Koopa Kid in some instances is actually "Baby Bowser", causing much of the confusion. They are still called "Koopa Kids" almost everywhere else, however.
While it's almost certainly confirmed that none of them are Bowser Jr. or Bowser himself, it is still unknown whether not they are related to Bowser in some form, if at all. The Super Mario Wiki mentions more specific details of this topic in the image below:
As one can see, the game's dialogue and naming has caused a large amount of the confusion. Koopa Kid's nature seems to imply they may either be split off from Bowser, like a copy of some kind, or simply just his son.
The main Koopa Kid's ability to split into three beings (featured on the right of the Koopa Kid image) as shown in Mario Party 5 may possibly imply the original's origin to be Bowser's copy. His Japanese description being 「クッパさまのぶんしん」 seems to partially support this theory, as 「分身」 can mean "one's other self" as shown in the wiki screenshot. None of this is 100% confirmed however, and is simply speculation on my part.
Koopa Kids as a whole have since stopped making appearances in games, most likely due to the redundancy of now having Bowser Jr. existing as the "Bowser's young helper" role. This is shown by the fact that any remakes of old minigames featuring them now replace them with Bowser Jr. instead. They may also have stopped appearing to not cause further confusion on this subject.
One final thing: "Koopa Kids" is a phrase that many official sources call the Koopalings, but this is largely phased out and is mostly used in the older media, although still used in other languages today. The Koopalings are not confirmed to be related to the Koopa Kids from Mario Party, despite the similar naming in some places.
I think that's all I really have to say on this topic, so I hope this cleared up any misconceptions on these characters and their relationships with one another! Thanks for reading.
Credit goes to Nintendo and all affiliated parties, and to the Super Mario Wiki.