This is a post nominally about the origins of Waluigi. Alas, it will not offer any new answers about where this wonderful weirdo comes from. In the course of trying to find any, however, it will arrive at some conclusions about how bad information moves through a fandom when people don’t vet sources properly.

“That sounds really dull, Drew,” you might say. I get it, but just go with me on this one.

Dedicated wikis are both the lifeblood and bane of video game studies. Often, I’ll be researching some specific topic that will inevitably lead back to a wiki, and before I can even decide if it’s one of the good wikis, I will read a sentence that imparts a piece of information that flies in the face of everything I thought I knew about the subject matter in question. It’s usually bullshit, of course — sometimes put there maliciously but usually not, with some well-meaning contributor adding in a “fact” that they never bothered to look into and, for all I know, that they might not know how to research in any meaningful way. So then I’ll attempt to find out where this claim came from and whether it’s at all worth writing about. I can usually suss out the truth quickly enough, but sometimes it’s harder, either because there’s very little to research or because this claim has been copied and pasted so many times online that it’s everywhere, making evidence to the contrary hard to find.

“Drew, you’re losing me. Talk about Waluigi and his gangly arms and legs already,” I can hear you saying. Trust me, this is going somewhere.

For reasons I can’t quite remember, I ended up on the Super Mario Wiki page for Maple, a character who has made a single video game appearance in the 1999 Mario Golf released for the Nintendo 64. This is the first Super Mario sports title developed by Camelot, and back in the day, the roster of playable characters in these games was padded out with a bunch of normie humans. (I think 2005’s Mario Tennis: Power Tour was the last to do this.) For the most part, these characters seem like they’ve never been to the Mushroom Kingdom before.

Here, look at these randos.

More recently, Camelot has been adding in characters that actually come from the Super Mario games. The most recent — Mario Tennis Fever, released earlier this year — advertised itself as having the most playable characters ever. Only one of them was created for the game, and it was Baby Waluigi — so a weirdo, yes, but one that makes more Mushroom Kingdom sense than the characters I posted above.

These more generic human characters have their fans, for all I know, but I would guess we’ve seen the last of them, perhaps because Nintendo has gently persuaded Camelot to feature characters that are readily identifiable as coming from a Super Mario game.

Anyway, I’d not really thought of Maple in years, so I was surprised when her page mentioned that before the final release of Mario Golf, she had a different name and also had a specific connection to an established character. Allegedly she was initially supposed to be named Plum, which ended up getting assigned to the other generic human female character in the game, and she was meant to be a relative of Peach’s. What’s more, the entry continued that Azalea, another generic human female character who debuted in the Game Boy Color version of Mario Golf that same year, was meant to be a relative of Daisy’s. According to the wiki, any notion of this was removed before the final release of either game.

All of this was new to me, a guy who spends way too much time thinking about the Super Mario series and its characters — especially the minor ones that no one else cares about. On one hand, this kind of makes sense? Just looking at these characters, you can see that Maple’s design would seem to recall Peach’s somewhat. And as I mentioned in my history of Daisy, Azalea looked so much like her that Nintendo actually stole Azalea’s face when the original, “desert princess” model for Daisy was abandoned around 2002. And with her brown eyes, Plum actually makes sense as a Maple, I guess.

At the time I first encountered this information, I thought it might shed some light on how and why Waluigi was created. He debuted in 2000 in the Nintendo 64 version of Mario Tennis as a doubles partner for Wario. Early on, official Nintendo literature offered varying explanations for who Waluigi was to Wario — brother? wannabe brother? cousin? co-worker? ardent admirer? — and yeah, perhaps one day I should write a post about how messaging on Waluigi evolved to the company more or less declaring “We’re not going to get into it” in all territories, regardless of what had been said before.

Graphic compiled by The Pipe Plaza, drawing together statements about Wario and Waluigi made in this Nintendo Dream article from 2008 and comments that Waluigi’s creator, Fumihide Aoki, made on Instagram.

I assume the desire to keep the relationship ambiguous has something to do with Nintendo regarding Waluigi as somewhat less legitimate by virtue of having been created by Camelot. Sure, he’s shown up in a lot more video games than, say, Plum has, but he’s not quite on the level of characters who originated in first-party Super Mario games. In fact, his ambiguous relationship to Wario is very reminiscent of other Camelot characters — like Maple inexplicably looking like Peach or Azalea like Daisy. Could the discarded backstories of Maple and Daisy give a little insight as to what Camelot was thinking when Waluigi was unleashed upon the world?

Yes! In theory! But also no in actuality, because I don’t think the rumor about Maple and Azalea is true. The source for this assertion, cited a few different places online in addition to the Super Mario Wiki, is a 2019 interview with Jessica Chisum, the actress who voiced Plum in Mario Golf. This interview is a little weird, at least as far as something that’s being cited as a source of information, mostly because it says outright that the interviewer was unable to log into the account through which the interview was conducted, making a verbatim transcript unavailable. And then it goes into a digression about Tumblr being “perverted.”

And like, yes, Tumblr is teeming with pervs. And it’s fine to attempt to salvage the bits of an old interview that you think might have relevance for fans of a given game series. But none of this adds up to make this particular website seem like a reliable source of information worth crediting on a wiki. In fact, the very claim for which the website is being used as a citation doesn’t actually seem to come from the interview subject so much as the interviewer.

The piece is full of the interviewer remembering and then paraphrasing Chisum, so it’s not clear just reading this text whether the information about Maple, Plum and Azalea is part of this or if it’s the interviewer inserting information that Chisum never said herself. The fact that it’s used as a source in multiple locations makes me think that someone presumed the information came from Chisum, who would be a reliable source. (For example, Mercedes Rose, the actress who originally voiced Rosalina, recalled earlier this year that when she recorded her lines for Super Mario Galaxy, the character was just called Rose, with the name being finalized after the fact.) But because I couldn’t tell, I decided to find out for myself and contacted Chisum myself.

Side note: Having contacted dozens of people who worked for Nintendo in the 1980s and 1990s, you’d think I’d be used to this by now, but I still always feel weird about asking a grown-up professional creative if they want to talk about the work they did for a children’s product decades ago. In the case of this email to Jessica Chisum, it was something like this: “Hi! I know you’re a working actor who has a long list of credits, but I am specifically asking you about voice over work you did for a Mario-themed golf game thirty years ago. Do you happen to remember if one of your characters was maybe named something else? P.S., I am not a lunatic.”

My own awkwardness notwithstanding, Chisum did respond and did confirm that this info did not come from her — “I know nothing about that, sorry” — which means it had to come from someone on the editorial side of this interview. And because I couldn’t ask them where they got the info, I had to look around myself. All roads led back to a Tumblr post (safe for work, non-perverted, BTW) from 2012 that at first glance seemed potentially promising.

On second glance, however, you might notice that this was not the Tumblr page for Did You Know Gaming so much as a parody site, Did Yuo Know Gaming, with that misspelling being fairly easy to overlook. This account posts hoaxes, but the framing of these on Tumblr and elsewhere made it pretty easy to mistake this Mario Golf one for a real post. And to the credit of the hoaxer and whoever else might have fallen for this one, the thing being alleged in this post doesn’t seem all that outlandish — and more than that, it seems specific enough that it could be true, if that makes sense. It’s not an obvious parody so much as a believable false thing.

But no, as near as I could find, it does not seem to be true that any early version of Camelot’s Japanese website for these games says much of anything of interest about these characters. The Wayback Machine offers snapshots of the website as far back as October 11, 1999, and the website for Mario Golf 64, as it’s termed, doesn’t offer profiles for any of the characters, Maple included. The website for the Game Boy Color version does offer character profiles, but Azalea’s makes no mention of Daisy.

Given that the interviewer apparently spent enough time on Tumblr to decide it was full of pervs, I feel it’s likely that they got this information from the parody account posting on that site and just assumed it was coming from the real deal. Consequently, I think it’s not true that Maple, Plum or Azalea were ever meant to be related to any Super Mario characters. They’re as separate and “real world”-ish as the rest of the Camelot originals. And although the aesthetic similarities might seem like a tip-off that there’s a connection, I think the artist tasked with designing new characters in the Yoichi Kotabe style ended up echoing Peach in Maple and Daisy in Azalea just because that seemed like an easy way to make these characters fit in. There are, after all, only so many humans in the Super Mario canon to draw inspiration from.

If you’re wondering about the origins of the idea that Maple and Plum switched names, I am too. That is conspicuously absent from the text of the hoax post. I asked the person who wrote this response post where they got the idea that Maple was originally named Plum, and they pointed to the same Jessica Chisum interview, so I assume that part of the rumor had to come along as some other point. It might be true, for all I know, but any searching online I did only took me back to results that credit the interview as the source of this information. If you have an answer, let me know.

As close as Chisum comes in the original interview to mentioning anything like that is speculating that some of the lines she recorded for one character might have gotten used for another.

In the end, there would seem to be some parallel processes in how Camelot created these originals who kinda sorta seem like existent, familiar Super Mario characters and how it created Waluigi, for whom looking derivative is a defining characteristic. And I guess that anybody who knows a thing or two about these games believed the story because it just made a lot of sense based on what we’ve speculated about Waluigi for years.

Despite what I’m saying in this post, the Super Mario Wiki is one of the good ones, generally speaking. It has a lot of good information, but because it’s often lacking in proper sources and citation, anything you come across that’s new to you should probably be investigated before you run with it. I’m maybe more concerned with the notion that multiple people read that Jessica Chisum interview and did see a red flag or two, credibility-wise. That is not a knock against the piece — it is what it is, and it’s presented as an imperfect record of an interview — so much as it is a reminder than even very online people invested in the reading and writing of text about a given fandom can still forget their critical thinking skills when it comes to a shiny new piece of information.

Obviously, this is a matter that’s bigger than Waluigi and bigger than any one fandom and bigger than the field of video game history. But it’s worth noting when the goings on on the Super Mario Wiki serve as a microcosm for the critical reading crisis that is crippling our basic ability to communicate and understand ideas. Of course, the people who needed to read this piece most probably ducked out a few paragraphs in, when they realized it wasn’t really about Waluigi.

Waah.

Miscellaneous Notes

I should probably point out that I’m not pretending that I haven’t pushed my own share of bad info from time to time. I did, after all, accidentally start a rumor about the dog from Duck Hunt being named Mr. Peepers. The important thing is that realizing I’d fucked up helped to me more careful with what information I circulate.

Wikipedia’s guide to reliable sources is actually a worthwhile read, if you’ve never looked into it. Of course, the people who are in most need of reading it probably won’t.

Regarding the matter of who recorded for what back in the day, I would ask Kate Fleming, who voiced Azalea in Mario Golf and Daisy in Mario Tennis, but she died in 2006 — rather tragically in a flood, I should point out. Her death led her partner to advocate for domestic partnership legislation in Washington state.

Of the three normie human characters I focused on in this post, Plum is arguably the most famous because she got a trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee.

But that doesn’t mean she’s the only character of note from that Nintendo 64 version of Mario Golf. Another one of the normie players, Kid, is notable for two reasons. For one, he was apparently voiced by a young Penn Badgley, who’d go on to star on Gossip Girl and You, not that you’d be able to tell at all by these samples, because as a thirteen-year-old he had a voice like a flute.

The other interesting thing about Kid is that he’s one of the few black characters in the Super Mario series. This is not especially apparent in the western version of his artwork. In the Japanese version, however, his lips are drawn differently, and it’s maybe not surprising to see why the localized version changed this.