Promotional Consideration: Return of the reused assets
Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.
Revisiting last week's theme of recycled assets, we're taking a look at the familiar artwork seen in a recent print ad for Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games. Unlike the Flower, Sun, and Rain commercial which repurposed an old promotional music video to great effect, this one's a forgetful piece, the video game equivalent of a comic book cover with a generic superhero-team action shot.
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Scowling hedgehogs. Brothers with crossed arms. A dinosaur in boots.
This ad fits the description of our column's introduction, being a page we usually flip past without a second glance whenever it pops up in a magazine. We likely never would have thought of it again had it not been for reader Wesley Chafin who pointed out that the image used for Mario was also featured on the back of the box for Dance Dance Revolution: Mario Mix. Maybe that's why it looks like he's floating an inch above the track! You can actually see this picture of the plumber with his tough-guy look plastered all over the GameCube game's official site.
The shot of Luigi in the background, doing his best Heihachi Mishima impression, is also grabbed from the DDR game's library of assets. Peach is the only member of the Nintendo mascot crew appearing with an original image from Olympic Games. Yoshi, sized much smaller than he probably should be, gave us that same goofy smile and high-step in Mario Party 7 -- and before that, he was practicing the pose in Mario Party Advance!
We realize that this isn't a big deal and that no one else cares about this stuff other than us, but we really have to ask -- why wouldn't someone want to redraw Yoshi? Next to Kirby and Boo, he really is the cutest, easiest, and most fun character to draw. Also, considering that Sega was predicting a total of four million sales for the game (combined with sales for the Wii version), isn't it a bit cheap of them to not have paid an artist to create new assets for the ad?
[Thanks, Wesley!]
