Musical Secrets & Trivia in Super Mario RPG! (+ the Mario & Luigi Series)

Shoutouts to the 10 people having an out of body experience at the mention of Super Mario Crossover. That's me.

A bit of credence to the idea of the unused track from Brawl being Forest’s Mushrooms is the fact Sakurai has gone on record saying he wanted to put Geno in Brawl, only for Square to turn him down.

That thing with Cackletta's theme being in deep castle, to me it diverges so heavily after the first 7 notes to show just how far Fawful has come. Like yeah, it all started with Cackletta, so there's your nod to her of course. But it kinda shows that Fawful has grown up and become his own villain in a way where he wasn't before, and just how he's following in her footsteps while still being distinct and threatening in his own right At least that's what I got out of that after the 3 seconds of knowing that Cackletta's theme was hinted at here lmao

Do you ever think of the Super Mario World TV show intro

Another official instance of Mario RPG music is in one of the Very Best of Yoko Shimomura albums. These are two albums of orchestrated arrangements of Yoko Shimomura music from throughout Square Enix's history, and the second one ("memoria!") has arrangements of "Beware the Forest's Mushrooms" and "Goodbye Geno... ~ Seeking Dreams Through the Window of the Stars" from Mario RPG. It's a rare instance of Square acknowledging the game before remake was announced and they're both great arrangements.

two more fun callbacks! 1. the superstar saga battle theme reappears in paper jam as the battle theme at the start of the game before paper mario joins your party. 2. the superstar saga track "departure" that plays in the ending cutscene reappears in partners in time's ending cutscene.

the Mario & Luigi series is one of the biggest reasons why I love video game music so much. All of the nods to older mario songs blew my mind! And made me have such a greater appreciation for how influential game music can be on my life! This is such a great showcase of a really underappreciated aspect of that series!! ALSO I had no idea the BiS remake had the Cackletta boss remix??? That is so cool, that is one of my favorite songs in that game holy moly!

So glad mario crossover was brought at the end bc it was all I was thinking abt when u brought up the vs mario theme

The Hello Neighbor guy holding the subscribe button and stuff made me cough up my water from laughing lol

1:00 you're absolutely right! It explains why playing it in the Arcade was SO much harder than on my Nintendo at home! I was saying "This won't waste my quarter, I have it at home!" Then I promptly got my little Mario bootie handed to me in the first level! My jaw dropped! Bye bye quarter, and bye bye faith in my ability to play Super Mario...

Another Mario RPG and Superstar Saga musical connection is that the SMB1 underground remixes (From Inside the Earthen Pipe in Mario RPG cause there's a few in that game) both use the same drum fill when the drums begin to be introduced. I don't know if that was in an earlier Mario game than that, but my brain always attributes it to the Yoko Shimomura remixes.

One thing I noticed in Mario kart is that the Super Circuit ice world theme sounds like an altered version of Choco Mountain from MK64, and what’s even more interesting about this is that it mirrors how the snow theme from Mario 64 is an altered version of the slider theme which is in a similar style to Choco Mountain

pikmin would be good for this series if you’re interested in it! pikmin 4 alone has a ton of them like the songs pikmin sing while following you, the music box treasures, and olimar’s side story

Also a few notes of another's requiem from partners in time plays during the baby scene in the mario movie.

Another fun one is in Bowsers Inside Story. Short Break in Toad town, aka the toad town theme has a small little reference to Mario rpgs forest maze theme

Here’s another SMRPG secret not many people talk about: In Super Mario Advance 4 (specifically the World-e content), there’s a castle where you can view the collected e-coins you found within the levels and for some reason, they decided to do a weird stylized remix of the “Hello Happy Kingdom” song in it. The song is titled “World-e castle”!

Ah, Super Mario Crossover. AKA Blaster Master's playground. What fond memories.

hey! vinyl collector here, a vinyl release takes around 3-6 months to be completed, so the music is submitted way before its release on streaming, what probably happened is an earlier version of the song was submitted but changed for legal reasons when put on streaming but by the time it was changed the vinyl production had already started and it’d be way to expensive to change, but that’s just my guess, luv u. :))

I will die on the hill of the deep castle theory... Great video! I always like hearing you talk about soundtracks

me when the music is secretive: