Since When Is There a Telephone in Donkey Kong?

This week, I’m a guest on a Retronauts episode about Pac-Man Fever, the 1982 album by Buckner & Garcia in which each track is about a popular arcade game. (Additionally, there is a song about Mouse Trap.) If you listen — and you should! — you will hear me say that although I usually write a post about every Retronauts I appear on, I don’t think there’s anything to write about for this particular one.

I lied, it turns out!

As it often does, the internet ended up delivering me a thing to write about: the telephone in Donkey Kong.

The novelty single “Pac-Man Fever” was released in 1981 and proved popular enough that Columbia Records offered Buckner & Garcia the chance to make an entire album. They said yes, obviously and while the result didn’t measure up to the original title track, the album isn’t exactly a total loss. Almost every song features something interesting even if it doesn’t turn out to be wholly successful.

“Ode to Centipede” actually starts to go somewhere interesting, almost Styx-like, for example, but then the spoken word parts really spoil the mood. The line “The spiders can’t save you now” is especially jarring because it sounds like something a serial killer says to you as you’re hiding in a basement to get away from him.

One of the least successful songs, however, is “Do the Donkey Kong,” because it commits the unforgivable sin of commanding you to do a dance but not giving you clear instructions for how to do it. (This is actually more common than you’d think. “The Loco-Motion” also does this, all the while telling you that the dance is so easy that even babies can do it.) In the case of “Do the Donkey Kong,” it’s describing various actions Mario performs in the game, but anyone who attempted them in a public space would risk serious injury.

There is one line that I took particular offense to, however: 

Wave your hands in the air, stomp your feet on the ground,
Climb up the ladder quickly, and then spin yourself around.
Open the umbrella up and answer the phone;
You can do it with a partner, you can do it all alone.

There is not a phone in Donkey Kong. There never has been. So either Bucker & Garcia ran out of in-game references three lines in, or something was miscommunicated four decades ago and it’s immortalized in the lyrics to this song ever since.

As it happens, someone posted a comment on the Retronauts website that explains this. The keeper of two different “Pac-Man Fever”-centric websites — Pac-Man Fever Forever and 52 Weeks of Pac-Man Fever — expressed his dismay that neither of his websites were mentioned in the episode but also answered the question about the mystery phone. Apparently, at least one book about Donkey Kong misidentified an item appearing in the game. Every stage has Mario collecting three of Pauline’s lost articles for bonus points: her hat, her umbrella and her purse. Because they’re never identified in-game or in any of the cabinet art and because pixel art can be rather ambiguous, apparently Pauline’s purse was misinterpreted as a telephone.

I can kind of see it?

But it’s also weird to think of Pauline dropping her old-fashioned landline telephone as Donkey Kong drags her to the top of the construction site. Apparently no one involved in the production of How to Win at Donkey Kong stopped and considered whether it made sense for Pauline to lose her telephone, but maybe the reason for that is that video games were still new and seemed sort of surreal and silly. Like, Pac-Man chases down various pieces of produce for bonus points but then also a bell, a key and a spaceship — and he eats the latter three just as happily despite the notable handicap of them not being food. It doesn’t make sense, particularly, but it’s not more nonsensical than anything else in the game. 

Overall, this seems like a very reasonable explanation for how the lyrics to “Do the Donkey Kong” mention a phone. Case closed, I think, at least with this one mystery, but for the life of me, however, I cannot figure out how anyone looked at Pauline’s hat and decided it was a lunchpail — the rendering on the page looks neither like a hat nor a lunchpail — nor can I decide what in the game someone thought was a birthday cake. Pauline only has the three items that can be tagged for extra points, and nothing I see in the assets for the game looks anything like a birthday cake.

Anyone?

What’s interesting about this page is that at the bottom it correctly identifies the tubs of cement from what I knew growing up as the “pie factory” stage. I absolutely don’t think it’s obvious that those are meant to be cement tubs, though that would appear to be what they are, so either the writers had special insight for this one stage or they made another wild guess and happened to get it right, pixels be damned.

Between the Mushroom Retainers in Super Mario Bros. getting misread as female and the infamous character Stop Watch in Super Mario Bros. 2, I kind of want to do some kind of round-up of notable incidents of humans misinterpreting pixel art and bringing something entirely new to a game. You know, Omelette Robotnick-style?

Anyway, if you want to hear me discuss someone else’s creative endeavors, listen here. I at least think Retronauts was pretty fair and mostly respectful in our criticism of Pac-Man Fever.

Your mileage, of course, may vary, because some people see an assemblage of dots on a screen and see a woman’s purse, while others look at the same dots and see a telephone.