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Inside The Score – Super Mario All-Stars – Game Select

Mario Musak

Up next is the also original cue written for the waiting room of Super Mario All-Stars, the first big package of the greatest hits of the plumber all remade with new graphics and music. If you also happened to have the one with Super Mario World included it was perhaps one of the best deals ever made. Just pure quality and fun. Where did those deals go?

As with all the original cues that enhance the experience like brand new battle cues and bonus cues, composer Soyo Oka of Mario Kart fame had the difficult task of capturing the original spirit of Mario music and sit comfortably between well known tunes with menu themes. This one is a simple piece resembling those pleasant muzak tunes heard in elevators, waiting rooms and phone calls. It allows you to decide which game to play or calm your nerves before picking The Lost Levels. “Your call is very important to us” This one could have sounded in the Nintendo Eshop or Wii shop—maybe it did!

Musical Analysis

It is just a rearrangement with a different coda of the B Section of the Super Mario Bros. theme by Koji Kondo. You can check a full analysis of that theme here:

Inside The Score – The Super Mario Bros Theme

Or the history behind the Mario character:

How Do We Even Get to Someone Like Mario?

The sounds are cutesy but the harmony has a slight twist; the original B Section has a vamp between the I and the IV chord. This one has jazzier harmony; you see, the toy xylophones are playing some minor chords but the clavinet pretty much decides the chord with the root note that changes these standard minor and major chords into seventh chords.

Cmaj7 – Dm7 – Cmaj7 – F

It then goes into a different coda that is not the expected Mario cadence [bVI – bVII – I] from the original. Instead, it is just the one of the intro from the main theme which starts with a D7 to G, a second dominant to the dominant of the C Ionian/Major profile. That harmony movement serves as the coda here before the loop.

The instruments continue on the lane established by Super Mario World for Mario music on the Super Nintendo, which combined instruments in non-standard ensembles that could only occur in video game music. Soyo just seems to not have received the memo that she did not need to use the percussion like a noise channel anymore since here she uses a snare sample to play both a hi-hat and snare pattern; maybe it is a remnant of the NES days which are the games displayed here, a triangle wave being also a lead instrument after all. For some reason the voices of the xylophones shift places from time to time.

The music box sample—actually called Fantasia—is the perfect sonority for a guy so obsessed with coins like Mario. It is also the sound used on the arpeggio that plays whenever you select a game.

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