Is Super Mario Bros a surrealistic masterpiece? Think of it, a man eating a flower that gives him the power to throw fireballs, walking mushrooms, and two turtles that throw hammers at their enemies would make one consider the logic of this phenomena. Super Mario Bros. is a popular video game as it still attracts gamers of all ages even though it is 30 years old. Its soundtrack and characters have become household names in popular culture. This web post will examine whether Super Mario Bros. can be on par with the works of artists such as Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst.
Before we go any further, we must define surrealism. Surrealism is an artistic and literary movement that mixed the realm of the conscious and the unconscious by juxtaposing incompatible images. The main goal in surrealism was to evoke responses from the realm of the psyche. Famous surrealist artists include Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte and Joan Miró. The viewer of the art encounters a world that is defined perfectly and fastidiously depicted yet at the same time doesn’t make any sense. The viewer is forced to confess that there is a perception of what cannot be logically explained.
Enter Super Mario Bros. The world of Mario is such that one can eat a mushroom which causes him to grow, flying turtles and a world ruled by a gigantic lizard. These things are such a mind blowing concept that it sounds like something Dalí would come up with in his paintings. It is also a world where two plumbers travel through pipes, jump on turtles, and get a star that makes them invincible toward their enemies. This is also something that sounds like something out of Alice in Wonderland. P.S. the concept of growing and shrinking from eating mushrooms comes out of it.
Surrealist art can be distinguished by how it accurately represents the world of the unconscious giving people the ability to examine the way the human subconscious works through a plural experience of someone’s inner workings. The more one thinks of the plot, setting and characters of Super Mario Bros., the higher the possibility that it resembles a dream resulting from eating pizza. As a result, we have an amalgamation of confirmed reality with experimental (I use it in the archaic way meaning experiential) fantasy. It is all overstated and distorted as one would expect if he/she had a dream.
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http://gizmodo.com/famous-surrealist-art-amazingly-reimagined-with-super-m-918449348
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