Opening waltz
Who told you the main theme of the series was the Ground Theme? When every single Mario game here and when they appeared as Super Mario Advance for Game Boy uses for its opening curtain the Underwater waltz, which was actually the very first composition made for the Super Mario series due to how easy it was to relate this rhythm to the movements of Mario swimming. Mario music is all about capturing the action, even more than just the environments and this one sat that precedent.
OK, maybe they just picked this theme as title screen only because it was the most mellow of the original soundtrack and it fitted the sense of opening with its more relaxed 3/4 meter as opposed to the action packed main theme which is about jumping; it is also the one that can induce more nostalgia. This tradition was actually kickstarted with the original release of Super Mario Bros. 2, which uses a honky-tonk saloon version of the track. We get various arrangements of this theme for each Mario game included in this package, arranged by Soyo Oka, a protege of Koji Kondo who worked briefly at Nintendo and did the first Mario Kart; so she was already familiar with the Mario spirit. Even so, Super Mario Bros. already had sort of an opening written by Koji Kondo which many don’t know about since it only appears in the arcade Vs. Super Mario Bros as the name registration cue:
Arranging the motifs of the Ground Theme, this works as a wacky opening for Super Mario Bros. That arcade game also originated the full Ending Theme for the first time.
Musical Analysis
Soyo keeps using the cutesy instruments and sounds straight from a fair, as if they could be coming from a carousel or a calliope. This waltz is a dance between the trumpets and the xylophones answering to complete the full melody. The pahs from the oom-pah rhythm are dynamic, sometimes using triplets and sometimes eight notes.
We will see if we can compare the original NES soundtrack with the SNES rearrangements and see how Soyo evolved the tracks in real time. The proper water level theme will be analyzed when we arrive to it.
If you wanna read detailed analysis about the main theme of Mario alongside the history of the character check out these essays at the website:
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