So I have this weird fascination with the theme music from the original Super Mario Bros. I’m not really sure why. It’s deeply ingrained in my psyche and every time I hear it, it takes me back to earlier days. I remember vividly Christmas day of 1989 when my brother and I finally received our own Nintendo. We thought there were no more presents left and my mom said there was one more for my dad. When he opened it, it was a shiny new Nintendo. We went stark-raving nuts.

I use it as a ring tone so that even when annoying people are calling me, I don’t feel too bad.

Over the years, I’ve found (and lost) some interesting video and audio files of people playing the theme song. I used to have an mp3 of some Japanese orchestra playing it that was one of my favorites. I haven’t seen that file in a long time. I was watching some of my favorite versions on YouTube for old-times sake and though it might be nice to share them.

This first one is certainly not my favorite, but it is rather interesting. Me showing you this video should not imply that I, in any way, endorse men playing the flute or having mustaches… except for Magnum, P.I… or men who wear them in an ironic way to make fun of men who wear them seriously.

Drummers can be kind of weird. But not this guy. He knows what rocks, and that’s the Super Mario Bros. theme song.

I don’t know what kind of messed up bass guitar this is, but if you can play the SMB theme song on it, it must be OK.

This guy realized that one guitar can’t possibly contain the greatness of the SMB theme song and played it on two. Too bad for him it would take at least 100 guitars to truly do it justice.

I found a couple dozen more videos of people playing the song on various instruments such as tubas, accordions, etc., but they were almost all terrible, and I will not disrespect the greatest video game of all time by even acknowledging their existence.

Watching these SMB videos gave me a serious itch to play so I downloaded ZSNES and loaded up Super Mario All-Stars. I wanted to see if I could still do the classic world 3-1 extra lives trick. It took about 45 minutes to finally get it right. When I was 13, I could practically do it with my eyes closed. To make matters worse, the first time I did it, I realized that I had the audio turned off on my video capture software. That’s fine, it just means I got to play some more. Since I did it a few times, I discovered that the highest number of lives you can have is 128. I probably already knew that at some point in my life. I vaguely remember a problem with the original NES version crashing if you had too many lives. Behold…

Update… Kari found a video of an orchestra playing the SMB theme. It’s great.