My introduction to Donkey Kong (both the game and the ape) didn’t come in an arcade but on my family’s first computer. Along with more practical programs, we ended up with a port of the original Nintendo arcade title that was trying its best but nonetheless falling short. Although we got our NES shortly thereafter, I didn’t realize that Donkey Kong’s little jumping man was supposed to be Mario until much later, mostly because the graphics on this computer port were so limited that I don’t think you could even tell that he had a mustache. To me, he was just some guy with a few white pixels for a face. He liked hammers, and he was trying to get to the running lady, whoever she was.

Sometime later, I encountered Donkey Kong in an arcade and based off the cabinet art, I realized that this jumping man was the same guy as the one adventuring through the Mushroom Kingdom. The running lady, however, still confused me because she didn’t look like the princess from the Super Mario games, even with the higher resolution of the arcade original. I wondered who she was for some time.

In putting together this piece, I tried finding that PC port of Donkey Kong but couldn’t be certain which one we actually had. They all look wrong enough, I suppose, but the one that sounds like the right kind of wrong would be the one featured below, allegedly a 1983 version by Atarisoft.

To this day, if I see Donkey Kong’s “How high can you get?” screen, I expect to hear the decidedly offkey version of the jingle from the PC port and not the “correct” one from the arcade version. I guess what stuck with me most about this off-brand introduction to Mario is the music.

This might not have been most Nintendo fans’ path to Mario, but as it turns out, it’s a pretty good introduction to the running lady, better known as Pauline, because she’s always had an association with music. Despite being one of the three characters in the first-ever Mario game, however, Pauline would be relegated to a Phantom Zone-like limbo for decades. And although it was always Nintendo’s plan to make her a playable character, she wouldn’t be, with only supporting appearances here and there until 2017’s Super Mario Odyssey, which still kept her on the sidelines but at least gave her a more prominent role in the story. She became playable at long last in 2018’s Mario Tennis Aces, thirty-six years after her debut. And only with Donkey Kong Bananza, released in July, is she finally playable in a mainline platformer.

It’s been a long time coming to the point that Pauline goes back to the earliest days of Nintendo video games… and maybe even to a point in time before Mario or Donkey Kong existed. That’s right, in this post I’m going to explain to you how she might actually be the oldest Mario character of all.

But first: pretty dresses and changing hairstyles.

She’s Got the Look

It’s well-known among video game history buffs that Nintendo ended up releasing Donkey Kong because they did not secure the rights to make a Popeye game. I have a whole post about how Popeye changed video games if you’re not familiar with this story, but the big takeaway is that Nintendo ended up inventing Mario, Donkey Kong and Pauline as fill-ins for Popeye, Bluto and Olive Oyl, so in one sense, Pauline originated there.

There’s a great video by Kate Willaert on the transformation of the one-time, would-be Popeye game into Donkey Kong that includes her own mock up of what this version of Olive Oyl would have looked like. It’s based on court documents relating to the 1983 Universal Studios lawsuit against Nintendo on grounds that Donkey Kong infringed upon the moviemaker’s copyright for King Kong and its characters. Willaert’s animated version shows us a version of the game that could have been, wasn’t, and for all we know was released in an alternate dimension where know one knows who Super Mario is.

While that in-game sprite on top is the “official” onscreen look — a pink dress that’s ankle-length and belted, blue boots, long blondish hair — Pauline actually suffered a sort of identity crisis that was common for video game characters at this time, wherein they might be rendered differently in the cabinet art than how they look in the game. The original, Japanese cabinet art, for example, keeps Pauline closer to how her sprite looks while still managing to recall the aesthetic of Fleischer Studios, which produced the Popeye Cartoons and whose influence can still be felt despite this not being a Popeye game.

However, there’s even a disparity in hair color between how she’s depicted in the main art versus how she’s depicted in the bezel art that frames the screen. Is she supposed to be a blonde or a redhead?

However she looked in the cabinet art, it would appear that it was always Shigeru Miyamoto’s intention that Pauline would have brown hair and a red dress. It’s just that it took a while for the technology to catch up to the point where she could look that way onscreen. Alongside other documents showing how Shigeru Miyamoto created the Donkey Kong aesthetic, the below sketches for Pauline’s sprite were displayed as part of the Japan Media Arts Festival going back to at least 2010.

For the western release of the game, Nintendo commissioned new art by the comic artist Leslie Cabarga, and it has Pauline looking a little flashier. Not only is she showing more skin, but she’s got a wholly different face as well.

In a 2022 interview, Cabarga recalled that he based this interpretation of the damsel in distress on Betty Boop, even if his general inspiration for the scene was the look of the Popeye cartoons. Apparently this was a harmonious coincidence, as he did not know at the time about the Popeye-Mario connection or that the Japanese art was also inspired by Fleischer. What he doesn’t mention, however, is the fact that the torn hem on Pauline’s dress seems fairly obviously inspired by Fay Wray’s look in the 1933 King Kong.

Pauline rocking this look can’t be a coincidence, but her apparently taking on an element from Fay Wray isn’t the only time she’d quietly absorb something from greater pop culture.

Who’s That Girl?

Pauline’s identity crisis wasn’t limited to her look. Just as Mario was still called Jumpman at this early point in his video game career, the woman at the top of the construction site wasn’t officially known as Pauline when Donkey Kong first hit arcades, either in Japan or in the U.S. In Japan, she was Lady (レディor Redi), and her apparent lack of name was reflected in early English-language materials, such as the below flyer where she’s merely referred to as “the beautiful girl.”

In fact, that is how she’s legally referred to in the documents from Universal v. Nintendo lawsuit, alongside “Mr. Kong” and “Little Mario the Carpenter.”

The lack of clarity regarding her name resulted in some odd promotional material such as this advertisement for the Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong running in the November 1983 issue of Computer & Video Games magazine, in which the damsel in distress is inexplicably referred to as Louise.

According to the Super Mario Wiki, she didn’t become associated with the name Pauline until the release of promotional tie-ins in 1982, including a coloring/activity book and a rather sultry-looking figurine released by Coleco.

Even then, that name only existed in the west; she remained Lady in Japan for another decade. But most people would have become aware of her name as a result of Saturday Supercade, a Ruby-Spears cartoon that aired on CBS from 1983 to 1984 and that featured animated shorts based on Frogger, Pitfall!, Q*Bert and Donkey Kong. This version of Pauline, voiced by Judy Strangis, shows up in nineteen segments.

And if you’re wondering why her design looks familiar even if you came of age after Saturday Supercade stopped airing, it might be because it’s this take on Pauline that showed up in the Nintendo Power Mario Mania guide, which served as a strategy guide for Super Mario World and a recap of Mario’s history so far.

I have no idea how anyone would have ended up with the Saturday Supercade version of Pauline instead of any of the art that Nintendo would have owned outright, but that’s what happened.

But why Pauline of all names? According to the official story, the Donkey Kong damsel takes her name from that of the now-former wife of Don James, who would become the executive vice president of operations for Nintendo of America but who in 1981 was the manager of the company’s warehouse in Tukwila, Washington. James said as much during a 2018 Nintendo Treehouse chat, but here’s the thing: James’ wife wasn’t actually named Pauline but Polly. The alleged explanation for how the video game character ended up with a longer, different name comes from a 2012 episode of the Wired magazine video game podcast Game|Life, where James says that then-Nintendo president Minoru Arakawa mistakenly thought James’ wife was named Pauline instead of Polly.

I don’t want to imply that Don James he’s telling the story wrong, but I think the mistake on Arakawa’s part goes a little deeper than just misremembering Polly’s name. Given that Pauline’s only role in Donkey Kong is to cry for help and await rescue by the hero, it seems very likely that her name has some connection to The Perils of Pauline, a melodramatic film serial that ran in American theaters in 1914 and in Japanese ones in 1916. Each installment focused on the adventures of Pauline Marvin, played by Pearl White. Through the passage of time, people mistakenly associated this Pauline with the image of a woman being tied to a railroad track by a mustache-twirling villain. This never happened in The Perils of Pauline; but it did happen in a Lass of the Lumberlands, a follow-up to Helen Holmes’ earlier serial The Hazards of Helen. No, I don’t know why the titles of these serials are all so formulaic, but it’s worth noting that it’s actually Helen who rescues a man from the path of the oncoming train.

However, a 1947 musical based on the life of actress Pearl White, with Annie Get Your gun star Betty Hutton as the lead, does feature Pauline being tied to the train tracks, historical accuracy be damned.

This film eventually made it to Japanese theaters in 1952, when future Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa would have been six years old, which makes him the perfect age to imprint on the media he was taking in. I think this is the reason that Arakawa mistook James’ wife’s name as Pauline instead of Polly — and while Pauline would have made sense to him as the name to give a female character defined by needing to be rescued. To be clear, James might be correct that Arakawa got his wife’s name wrong, but it’s more important to point out that one major reason why the “wrong” name would have sounded right to Arakawa would be that the film serial character has lingered in pop culture memory. After all, everyone knows that image of the old west maiden tied to the railroad tracks, even if they wouldn’t know The Perils of Pauline by name.

I realize that was a lot of pop culture folding in on itself, but I’m actually going to do that again by explaining to you what I think is a fairly credible theory for why Pauline is actually an older character than Mario or Donkey Kong.

Like I said earlier, Pauline’s look changes a bit, depending on who’s drawing the art. One of the more unsettling renditions of her has to be the one appearing on the back of the box of the Commodore VIC-20 port of Donkey Kong. Rather than improve on what the pixels were suggesting, this one just tries to match them, and frankly, Pauline looks like some kind of blank-faced automaton monstrosity.

But seeing her drawn in this way, I realized also she looks like something else: the heroine from an western movie — the prim schoolmarm, let’s say, who serves as a contrast for the saloon girls who dress more like the version of Pauline in the red dress. It is a look that Pauline does sport from time to time. For example, there’s a Yoichi Kotabe original of her that appears in the Perfect Edition: Great Mario Character Encyclopedia (Perfect Ban Mario Character Daijiten) that seems a lot more in line with a western heroine than the Pauline we know and love.

Compare these variations of Pauline with cabinet art from the 1979 Nintendo arcade release Sheriff.

Does that silhouette look familiar?

The first game in which Shigeru Miyamoto was credited as a graphic designer, Sheriff is also considered the first video game to feature actual Nintendo characters. Players controlled the titular sheriff, named Mr. Jack, shooting down a team of bandits in an effort to rescue a captured damsel in distress, who like Pauline goes by different names. In some versions, she’s named Betty, but in the North American release of Sheriff, distributed by Exidy, she was renamed Pretty Priscilla. The Japanese flyer promoting the game, however, just refers to her as Lady. Whichever name she goes by, she is very much so Nintendo’s first female character.

I actually had trouble finding high-res versions of the Sheriff arcade cabinet art that frames the actual screen. The best I could find is this photo on Reddit. But you can see that she was meant to be a brown-haired maiden in a red dress, much along the lines of what Miyamoto would draw a few years later for Donkey Kong.

It might have been common back in the day to also highlight a given video game’s cast in the art surrounding the screen, but the fact that both Sheriff and Donkey Kong do this make me think it’s even more likely that Betty and Pauline are actually meant to be one and the same.

That said, even if Sheriff’s Lady is not necessarily the same character as Pauline, she’s definitely a forerunner appearing two years before Mario and Donkey Kong had to be created once Nintendo did not secure the rights to make that Popeye game. As a result, there’s a sense in which Pauline actually predates the other two stars of Donkey Kong. Miyamoto’s original conception for the controllable hero in Donkey Kong was that he’d be a sort of everyman who could be plunked into any video game situation that needed him. Before he could jump (and before the name Jumpman was attached to him), he was Mr. Video, and the idea that this generic guy would be showing up in game after game, regardless of continuity or context, makes me think that Pauline/Lady worked similarly, as she essentially serves the same role in both Sheriff and Donkey Kong. The fact that Pauline’s in-game Donkey Kong sprite retains some of that old west schoolmarm flavor, regardless of how she was depicted in the official illustrations, makes me think that she was essentially Mrs. Video.

So why didn’t we see her more? In fact, if you get into the history of Nintendo’s arcade and NES days, you can find a lot of examples of how Nintendo tried to bring her back and make her a playable character. It just never stuck.

The Lady in Red

In the west, Pauline’s next appearances didn’t come in Donkey Kong Jr. or Donkey Kong 3, as she sat out both. No, the next time North American players saw her was in Pinball, released in the U.S. in October 1985. She and Mario both appear in the bonus stage.

In Japan, however, she appeared in Family BASIC, a 1984 programming peripheral that came bundled with a keyboard. With this, players could program their own video games using a version of the BASIC coding language. The overall vibe is an 8-bit forerunner to Mario Paint or Mario Maker, and honestly I’m a little jealous that it wasn’t released anywhere outside Japan, because it seems like the kind of thing that would have helped kids like me understand video games better on a constructional level. In 2023, Masahiro Sakurai demonstrated Family BASIC in his video series about creating games and credited it with sparking his interest in game design.

Family BASIC came with assets either from or based on existing Nintendo software, and this included a new sprite set for Pauline that fully matched Mario’s — running, jumping, climbing and even dying. This means, in effect, that she was a fully playable character, should the programmer in question have chosen to make a game that starred her.

The third interaction of Family BASIC even includes the premade game Heart, which features Mario and Pauline re-creating the a cutscene from Sheriff, with Mario subbing in for Mr. Jack and Pauline… playing herself, I suppose.

And while you can alter a given sprite’s colors, making it possible for the Mario sprite to look like Luigi, it really seems like Pauline is the default player two at this point in time. For example, she shows up in artwork with Mario and Luigi does not. She looks different once again, but for the record Mario also looks markedly different from one version of the manual to another, and neither one looks all that much like what we see onscreen.

That second example, with Pauline sporting Mario’s trademark potato nose, reminded me of a flyer promoting the Nintendo VS. System, which allowed arcade operators to swap out special versions of Famicom or NES titles from a single arcade cabinet. The below flyer promoting the titles available for the service features a bunch of Marios… and one similarly potato-nosed female character.

Back in 2020, esteemed Paulinologist Kate Willaert posted to Twitter that this mystery woman might actually be Pauline herself. One of the titles released for the VS. System was VS. Ladies Golf. It is a variation on the NES/Famicom Golf, which got its own VS. System release. Both those original golf games star a mustached man who looks a great deal like Mario and has even been identified as Mario in some materials, even if the 2008 Nintendo nostalgia fest Captain Rainbow treats him like a separate character named Ossan. (Like Lady, it’s either a name or a generic term, depending on how you look at it, because おっさん or ossan refers to a middle-aged man, and this was yet another of the names used internally to refer to Mario early on.) For VS. Ladies Golf, Nintendo subbed in a female duffer, and I agree with Willaert that it’s likely meant to be Pauline even if the game never says so. Willaert contends that if it is her, then that means Pauline is actually the first female playable character in a Nintendo game.

What’s more, in any version of the Nintendo Golf game, the player’s outfit changes from white to red when they reach the putting green, and Willaert points out that version of Mrs. Golfer Lady looks even more like the Pauline we know today, to the point that her sporty outfit in Mario Tennis Aces looks like a throwback to Vs. Ladies Golf. (She’s playable in Mario Golf: Super Rush as well, but they give her an entirely new outfit: black yoga pants and a red beret. A real missed opportunity, if you ask me.)

But that’s it for Nintendo’s effort to make Pauline a thing. She’d sit out of games more or less for a decade, until the release of the Game Boy Donkey Kong in 1994. And while I will discuss this as the necessary step that finalized who Pauline would be and how she would look, there’s one more aspect to her to cover first.

Voices Carry

Released in 2017, Super Mario Odyssey gave Pauline a grand return to the spotlight that’s arguably the most memorable moment in the game. She is now the mayor of New Donk City, a very New York-looking metropolis that hearkens back to the idea that Mario is from Brooklyn, and she rewards Mario with a city festival when he chases off Bowser. As part of the celebration, she sings the main theme of the game, “Jump Up, Super Star!” It’s been well-documented online how the composition of the song echoes various bits of the original Donkey Kong soundtrack, and that at one point her choreography mimics her “running in place” animation from the game as well.

Singing has been a big part of her character ever since, and indeed it seems to be a major part of her role in Donkey Kong Bananza. But all of this is actually just a continuation of something that existed as part of her character almost from the beginning.

It would have been part of Donkey Kong if technology had allowed, in fact. At one point, the original arcade version of Donkey Kong was going to give Pauline two different voice samples: one of her saying “nice!” every time Mario jumped over a barrel and the other one of her yelling “help!” in the intro sequence. (Both these clips come from The Cutting Room Floor.)

According to a 2016 Wired magazine interview with Miyamoto because it didn’t sound good enough. They even tested it on an English-speaker who thought Pauline was yelling “kelp!” (A 2014 Red Bull Music Academy interview with Hirokazu Tanaka identifies this person specifically as the daughter of Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, and I’m curious to know if it was Yōko, who also happened to the wife of Minoru Arakawa.) But even if Pauline’s voice was cut from the final version of the game, the notion that she was a singer remained part of her character.

For example, a cancelled Famicom game would have had Pauline as the singer of a band. Donkey Kong no Ongaku Asobi (Donkey Kong's Music Play) was at one point expected to hit shelves in December 1983. Had it done so, it would have used Mario, Pauline, Donkey Kong and D.K. Jr. to teach kids about music. In one mode, “Music Quiz,” players would have controlled Mario and hammered keys on a piano keyboard to answer questions. Notably, it featured a two-player mode, and Pauline was the character controlled by player two.

The other mode, “Donkey Band,” was apparently a karaoke-style game that showed Pauline as the frontwoman of a band that included Mario on piano, D.K. Jr. on drums and Donkey Kong on guitar. Seeing this, it’s easy to see Mayor Pauline as the singer of the band in Super Mario Odyssey as a realization of this almost thirty years after the fact.

According to former Hudson Soft employee Ichirou Sakurada, the title was canceled for a few reasons, including gameplay issues and also that it used songs by pop singer Seiko Matsuda that Nintendo no longer had the rights to use.

Curiously, western depictions of Pauline also portrayed her as a singer, despite the fact no one outside Nintendo much less outside Japan would have had awareness of her having any connection to music. The same coloring books that marked one of the first times she was ever referred to by name also have her as the vocalist for a band.

I would chalk this up to another harmonious coincidence, though I should point out that there are quite a few examples of badass rocker chicks being the love interest in 1980s media. Both 1984’s Streets of Fire and 1986’s Howard the Duck feature love interests who are the frontwomen for a band. Sonic the Hedgehog himself was almost paired with his own red-dressed love interest — a human named Madonna, no less — but I’m not clear if she was also supposed to be a singer, seeing as how Sonic was already the singer of his own band. Perhaps the most famous example of this trend is Jessica Rabbit in 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

At the time, we just loved a chanteuse paired with a male character you wouldn’t expect to end up with a beautiful woman. I wonder if English-language materials promoting Donkey Kong referred to Mario as “Little Mario” in an effort to accentuate the disparity between him and the rather statuesque Pauline.

All of this adds up to Pauline being very much defined by music. It’s music, for example, that is her visual motif in her Mario Kart appearances, not, say, mayoral decrees. But since her introduction into the various Super Mario spinoffs in which she’s a playable character, the icon she’s been assigned has been a heart with a coquettish smiling face on it. This always struck me as wrong, to be honest, and not only because it reminds me of a certain scene from the end of Twin Peaks: The Return that you shouldn’t spoil if you haven’t watched yet. No, given that this has been her theme from the start, it really should have been a musical note, especially because those already have a place in the Super Mario series iconography.

For what it’s worth, Pauline would finally have her voice heard in the Super Game Boy version of the 1994 Donkey Kong, and it does sound more clearly like “help” than “kelp.”

But that game is an important milestone for Pauline for a few reasons, and not just because it finalized her look once and for all.

Two of Hearts

Only in 1994 did Pauline get a makeover that would last. In official art for the 1994 Game Boy title Donkey Kong, the current, brunette Pauline was drawn for the first time by longtime Super Mario illustrator Yoichi Kotabe. I assume her hair color changed yet again happened to better align her with Miyamoto’s original sketches for her back in the day, but it didn’t hurt that this made her stand apart more from Peach, who had become the resident blonde in the Super Mario games.

This new version of Pauline — including the gold earrings and the purple eyeshadow — would remain part of her look in the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series, Super Mario Odyssey and the current era that has her joining the rest of the spinoff crew.

The more interesting shift happened on the Japanese side of things, however, because while I’ve been referring to our girl by both Pauline and Lady, there’s a perspective in Japan that these are not the same character. You have Lady as the female character who appeared in all the games leading up to Donkey Kong ’94, and then you have the introduction of Pauline (ポリーン or Porīn), a new character, from this point forward. That Mario character encyclopedia I mentioned earlier gives two separate but side-by-side entries for Lady and Pauline.

I’d have to ask Japanese fans of Mario lore to tell me how this split is regarded today. On one hand, it does explain why a character who’d usually been blond is suddenly and permanently brunette from this point forward, I guess. But if that’s the case, it doesn’t explain what the hell happened to Lady or why Pauline would continue to have such a strong association with Donkey Kong. I guess we will find out in the not-too-distant future how Donkey Kong Bananza explains the presence of a tweenage Pauline around all the Kongs. Maybe it’s rewriting history to say that now, officially, it *was* Pauline that D.K. took to the top of the construction side, not Lady. Regardless, I struggle to think of another example of such a weird continuity rift wherein a character was ever suggested to be two different people but only for one language group. Nintendo didn’t attempt anything so bold when it changed the princess’s western name from Toadstool to Peach. It’s not like they ever said, “No, that first princess was someone else. Don’t think about it.” And when it came to dropping Foreman Spike’s Japanese name, ブラッキー (Burakkī or “Blackie”), and standardizing his western name across all territories, Nintendo just did it with a social media post.

Maybe Donkey Kong ’94 was supposed to represent a sort of resetting of the continuity, as it had the girl being taken to the top of the construction site being named Pauline in all localizations. If that’s true, it was a reset that was short-lived, as five months after this game’s release, Nintendo released Donkey Kong Country, and its 3D-modeled version of D.K. became his default mode until his recent redesign. Pauline never had a place in the Donkey Kong Country series, but I wouldn’t necessarily say that Donkey Kong ’94 didn’t leave a mark on the series, as it did feature an urban area with skyscrapers that Nintendo would eventually revisit as New Donk City in Super Mario Odyssey.

Now that Pauline has finally returned to the spotlight, does that mean that us history-focused video game nerds have to start rooting for Nintendo to bring back Lady? I do wonder.

I think Pauline never fully faded away for the same reason that her comeback has been such a success; in a video game series where all the other human females are princesses — or in Rosalina’s case, not technically a princess even if they dress exactly like one? — it’s nice to have an alternative. It seems like every new female character that gets added to the Super Mario games is always Nintendo’s attempt to respond to the fact that at the core of Princess Peach’s character is something that reads as a little cutesy poo, for lack of a better word. And Pauline is definitely not that. Maybe it’s a result of the era she was created in, but to me she looks and dresses more like someone Jack Tripper would hit on in Three’s Company, maybe on a date where they played a little Donkey Kong in a bar.

I like that there is a place for a female character like that in a family-friendly franchise. And what’s more, I like that despite how often we think of Peach as being the ur-femme in the Super Mario games, she’s not. She came along later. Pauline was first, and now she’s back.

Miscellaneous Notes

I don’t know how much more there is to say, but in doing this piece I was reminded of how many alternate names Mario had before his got finalized: Mr. Video, Ossan, Jumpman and finally “Little Mario.” Are there any I’m missing?

Having planned this piece for a long time and knowing I was going to talk about Pauline’s connection with music, I had a note about how the original Donkey Kong’s “How high can you get?” jingle sounds remarkably like this Italian pop song, “Quando Quando Quando.” Specifically, it sounds like the first sung line of the song, which in the English version by Engelbert Humperdink is “Tell me when will you be mine?”

But here’s the thing: This is not a connection I ever made. I learned about “Quando Quando Quando” by someone else connecting it to Donkey Kong, and now I can find who did that. As per my post about the Zelda fairy fountain music, I’m not sure if this is an intentional soundalike so much as a coincidence, but weirdly in trying to find whatever put this idea in my head, I only ended finding people pointing out that it sounds a lot like the Koopa Beach music from the original Mario Kart. It does, I have to admit.

I couldn’t fit it into the piece, but I do wonder if another aspect of Pauline’s longtime association with music shows up in the second level of the Popeye arcade game. In the first level, Popeye is attempting to catch hearts that Olive Oyl is throwing from the top level of the stage, but in the second one, she’s playing a little harp and tossing musical notes.

It’s probably nothing, but it is interesting thinking about Nintendo making a video game version of Olive Oyl after they’d already made their own video game version of her in Pauline after they initially didn’t get the okay to make the Popeye game. When they finally got the go-ahead the following year, they were to an extent making Olive Oyl in Pauline’s image, since she’d occupied the damsel in distress role in Donkey Kong.

Somewhere between Peach, Pauline and Mario Kart is the 1969 Hanna-Barbera cartoon The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. It’s got the early 1900s of the Perils of Pauline serials, but the title character is a lot more like Peach in terms of demeanor and color scheme. I really thought about a way to work this into the piece and came up with nothing.

Though I have to say that even Mario Kart World ever spawned an animated series like this or like Wacky Races, the show this one spun off from, I wouldn’t be upset.

Finally, I’ve got an odd Donkey Kong mystery that I can’t make heads or tails of involving Donkey Kong Jr. and a mysterious woman in a green dress that definitely is not Pauline. This matter first came to my attention via the Supper Mario Broth blog, which alleges that an alternate version of the side panel art for the Donkey Kong Jr. arcade machine has a woman sitting on the wooden sign that bears the game’s name. (The regular cabinet art for the game features a different post for D.K. Sr., a different coloration for D.K. Jr., a bigger version of that yellow bird and a different sign with a different font.)

I can’t find a larger or higher-res version of this art, which makes me suspect it’s not real, but here’s the clincher: The version of the art you see above actually comes from the June 2002 issue of Nintendo Power.

To me, this just makes me wonder how the Nintendo Power staff got ahold of this art and if the fact that they had access to it makes it more likely that it’s genuine.

If that weren’t weird enough, Supper Mario Broth also points out that the girl in the green dress looks remarkably like the human disguise used by the Wendy O. Koopa stand-in, Kootie Pie, in “The Beauty of Kootie,” an episode of The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3, the follow-up series to The Super Mario Bros. Super Show.

There for sure is a resemblance. I have no explanation for any of this.

Deep histories of Mario characters, previously:

Pauline: A History of Nintendo’s First Leading Lady